When booking a domestic United award using LifeMiles this past week, I noticed something odd. Well, more than one thing was odd. First, the price was a quirky 6,500 LifeMiles instead of falling right into the 7,500/10,000/12,500 prices that LifeMiles has had for U.S. domestic awards.
This wasn’t really surprising in its own right, as I knew LifeMiles had started pricing individual routes both higher and lower than what was previously offered. I welcomed this change, as I now save 1,000 LifeMiles on this particular redemption.
It was the taxes and fees that surprised me. Instead of the typical $30.60 charge for a one-way award, I was being presented with just $15.60.
That’s Right – LifeMiles Reduced Their Award Fee
It’s always irked me a bit that LifeMiles has charged a booking fee for all awards, even award on their own metal and awards booked online. No other program that I know does this. Frontier used to, and they still might. Others, like Alaska, charge an extra fee only for partner awards.
Well, I’d completely forgotten that Avianca LifeMiles had actually adjusted the award fees as well as the mileage requirements for many domestic U.S. awards. This is definitely a welcome change, as most of the awards that I book with LifeMiles are short-haul tickets that cost 7,500 miles or less. These will typically now only have an award fee of $10 instead of $25.
This might not seem like a lot of savings, and it’s a pretty small detail, but it does represent real savings when you’re looking for multiple tickets. When the kid and I flew to Arizona to kick off a week-long road trip, we paid $91.80 in taxes and fees for three award tickets to Tucson. Now, with the current fee structure, we would owe just $46.80.
But Not All Is So Wonderful
The flip side of this is the increase in miles for some routes. Where the SFO-ACV hop as seen a reduction, a ticket from Arcata to Tucson is not 10,000 miles one-way. These previously priced at 7,500 miles. Same goes for Albuquerque, although we can still fly to Denver for just 7,500 miles.
I wish LifeMiles wasn’t such a crap shoot at times. In this most recent case, the changes worked in my favor. However, they left some people worse off, not to mention I don’t like any situation where I can’t predict the price of an award. Why a flight to Tucson should cost more than one to Denver (which is actually farther) is beyond me.
How do you go about using LifeMiles for domestic travel? Do you search in United then call Avianca? The bloggers always talk about LifeMiles almost like the holy grail but their website is complete garbage even after the refresh.
Would be nice to have a general post. Crap I find even using LifeMiles for Avianca isn’t exactly easy.
Honestly, I tend to search domestic United tickets straight through Avianca. Generally, I can pull up enough inventory for short-haul trips, with one connection. A few pointers/notes:
1) Trips with more than one domestic connection don’t ever seem to populate online. One seems to be the max.
2) Some inventory isn’t loaded. I’ve found a few routes where LifeMiles shows nothing, all the time. The one that hurts the most for me is ACV-LAX. No way around this.
3) Awards you may see with United may or may not be available. In some cases, awards with a long connection (>4 hours) do not show. However, I know I booked a domestic award with a 7-hour connection in SFO, so this isn’t hard and fast.
4) If I search United first, I *don’t* log in. LifeMiles should match to X space, so you don’t want United feeding you any of their extra XN space for elites or cardholders.
The search type (Busqueda Inteligente vs United) doesn’t seem to matter in this case.
For international trips in premium cabins, I search space on Aeroplan or United, then move to Avianca to see if it pops up. I’ll make sure to switch the search type to the carrier of interest if searching nonstop. Otherwise, I just leave it on Busqueda (un)inteligente and hope for the best. Avianca often disappoints with the premium cabin options.
Now that I’ve written all this, I might just write a post about searching Avianca awards.
Thanks. This is helpful and yes a blog post would be much appreciated.