American Airlines AAdvantage has sent out their annual emails to select members, offering them to upgrade the elite status they currently hold through January 2022.
This year the offers are limited to upselling the current status level since American Airlines has already extended all AAdvantage accounts tiers unti 2022 per their Covid-19 policy.
Members can log in at the website which is now live to see if American has an offer for them to upgrade the status.
Targeted members can purchase their desired status at prices American let’s you pay in either cash or miles, though the price in miles is rather poor value as they (AA) assign $0.01 per mile which is very very low.
You can access the promotional website here.
The formula AAdvantage seems to use here is to see if someone has already requalified for a certain status or holds this status permanent as lifetime and how many miles are required to reach the next level.
In my case I’m a Lifetime Gold member but also received a complimentary Executive Platinum upgrade from World of Hyatt earlier this year. As such I don’t qualify for any offer.
It could make sense to partake in a buy up offer if you know for sure that you’ll fly American Airlines a lot over the next year then the return of investment in terms of bonus miles and cleared upgrades would be worth it. But not for the occasional flight. Generally speaking the best value would be to buy top tier status (Executive Platinum) though I haven’t seen such an offer yet from either level.
Another thing to keep in mind is that there are much less first class seats available nowadays than previously and that means less upgrades as well.
Some airlines actively block seats in First next to occupied seats while others manage to sell more of them as passengers don’t want to sit in a crowded Economy cabin without any meaningful distancing should the flight fill up.
Conclusion
The big three programs (AAdvantage, Mileage Plus & SkyMiles) have had these campaigns in place for a couple years now and their offers range from sometimes reasonable to absolutely ridiculous.
There are a few aspects to these renewal offers that I always highlighted as deciding factors because with the implementation of minimum annual spend it could be well worthwhile to just “pay up” instead of making expensive mileage runs that are also time consuming. Depending on how much you value your time, making unnecessary trips just to extend status could be a deal breaker.
Post your offers below and readers can compare!
