Tag: American Airlines

How to restore lost AAdvantage miles

The other day I wrote about my unfortunate discovery that both my AAdvantage mileage accounts had zeroed out due to inactivity. I also wrote to AAdvantage customer service and received an interesting response which I’ll share for web searchers who might be looking for this information.

First, I received this email:

Because qualifying activity extends the expiration date of all active
miles in the account, there may be an easy way of restoring your expired
miles. If you had an eligible mileage-earning transaction prior to May
26, 2014 (the date the miles expired from your account) and no older
than 12 months, then let’s get that transaction credited. When these
miles are credited to your account, your expired miles will
automatically be restored on the same day! For more information on how
miles are earned, please visit us at www.aa.com/earn. You can also
request missing mileage credit from the ‘Request Air Mileage Credit’ or
the ‘Request Non-Air Mileage Credit’ links from this page.

If you did not have any qualifying activity, we have a couple of paid
alternatives. Let me know if you’re interested, and I’ll be pleased to
furnish details.

Hmm. Unless there’s some coded wink-wink message, the only way I’d restore my miles is if I had done some qualifying activity, it had not been recorded, and I’d failed to report it. Highly unlikely. So I inquired about the paid options and got this:

To get you involved again, we have designed a Re-engagement Challenge – a set of activities created to introduce you to the program and to restore all or part of your expired miles, based on your participation.

First, register for the Re-engagement Challenge with AAdvantage Customer Service and pay the $30 registration charge.

Once you’re registered, you have 6 months from your registration date to complete the requirements listed below:

1.     Subscribe to the AAdvantage eSummary™ and AAdvantage Promotions email and remain opted-in to these two subscriptions for the duration of your Re-engagement Challenge
In conjunction with your registration, you are also subscribed to receive these email messages if you haven’t been receiving them already. These helpful subscriptions send you information on how you can earn more miles and provide a monthly summary of your activity and current mileage expiration date.

2.   Complete the following mileage earning activity within six months of your registration to restore the desired amount of miles: (for under 50,000 points, which is my level)

Earn 5,000 partner base miles*
OR
Earn miles for 1 round trip flight**

In many markets, a round trip is available for a couple hundred dollars or less. So for a fairly small investment you could earn back as many as 50,000 miles, which are supposedly worth $900. Fair enough. American is also getting you back into the traces with the behavior they expect from an AAdvantage member.

In closing, you may recall I had two accounts–one which zeroed out a few days prior, and the other last October. I wrote customer service separately about each of them. The long-expired account received no response.

Thanks, AAdvantage, now goodbye!

AAdvantage unsubscribe screen
AAdvantage finally asks me for my email prefs… as I’m about to unsubscribe.

I just unsubscribed from both my AAdvantage email accounts, mine and my teenager’s. I was getting several emails a week and it was pointless to read them since AA does not serve my local airport. But, they’re about to as a result of the USAir merger so I’ve made a point of making an occasional qualifying purchase to keep our combined 50,000+ miles intact.

Or, so I thought. I actually read one of these emails this morning, and discovered the miles in both accounts had zeroed out. (AAdvantage does not bother with real-time reporting, so it showed 24,372 miles in my kid’s account while a couple lines below showing an expiration date a few days ago.) D’oh!

Why in the world, if American wants me as a customer, would they not send me a special announcement that the miles were about to expire and some information on how to preserve them?

AAdvantage Customer Service screen
Thanks, AAdvantage, now goodbye.

And why in the world would they continue to flood my inbox with emails when I hardly ever open any of them? A best practice followed by many marketers today is to warn customers they’ll stop receiving emails unless they take some action. But AAdvantage is the original mileage reward program and their policies have likely been around as long as people have been receiving emails. Which is probably also why I get so many emails from them; I can’t remember them ever asking me if I would like to specify preferences, until I unsubscribed today.

So, AAdvantage has done its job, which is to pry loose some miles fair and square. But American Airlines has lost a couple of potential customers who fly frequently and could have been on its ALB routes very soon. I fail to see how that’s a good thing.

P.S. Don’t know if they are still doing this as I am no longer an active member, but United’s Mileage Plus had a promotion they would send to people with expiring miles, asking if they wanted to convert the miles to various subscription offers. I’m sure they earned some nice revenue from this partnership at the same time they kept members up to date on their accounts. Another example why AAdvantage’s assumption of primogeniture–I’m right because I was here first–is actually obsolete and clueless.

It’s all about positioning, isn’t it?

Today’s Wall Street Journal had a nice anecdote from a gathering of retired American Airline employees. A flight attendant remembered a flight where there were 125 Kosher meals on board and only 50 people said they’d ordered Kosher meals. With a normal meal service, they’d run out of options and everybody in the back of the plane would get a Kosher meal whether they ordered it or not.

Solution: the crew announced that American was testing a special menu and the first 50 people to press their call buttons would get to try it. The meals sold out quickly. The Kosher labels were stripped of and what might have been a “I didn’t ask for that” complaint turned into an anticipated treat. All because of the right positioning.

I’m old enough to remember the days of meal service on airplanes, how about you? I also remember the frequent flyer’s trick of always ordering a special meal (Kosher was good, as was the fruit plate, but I always went for the seafood plate if available) on the premise that if it was custom-prepared it would be better (not always true).

Do you have a favorite recollection from the “golden age of flying”? Let’s get together at DMA 2013 next week in Chicago and compare notes. I’m leading a panel on Wednesday the 16th at 10 am with Dawn Wolfe of Autodesk and Philip Reynolds of Palio+Ignite. It’s all about positioning, what else? Come see us!

The new American is arriving

I love the new commercial announcing the US Airways/American Air merger. It’s stirring, and poignant, and on-message. Who would have thought that a corporate merger could make your heart swell with pride? They did it with an emotional tug at the appeal of new beginnings… an empty airport becomes filled with promise and we remember that flying used to be romantic and exciting. Here’s the script, as narrated by John Hamm:

It’s time to make a change.
It’s time to become better versions of ourselves.
To be greater than you expected.
And more than you had hoped for.
So starting now, we begin a new chapter.
One written in passion, and skill, ambition, and sweat.
One where two companies take the best of themselves to create something better.
And when all is said and done, we will not only have become a bigger airline
But also something so much greater.
So let’s introduce ourselves to the world…
Not again, but for the very first time.
The new American is arriving.

What’s even better is that the spot was completed on February 12 (per the slate at the beginning), the day before the merger was announced, so it would seem to have been produced in record time. How did they do it? Perhaps it was in the can in anticipation of the event (which had been publicly discussed for several weeks), but I like to think they (McCann Worldwide) quickly threw it together using footage from the recent “Change is in the Air” campaign which debuted last month.

That campaign, by the way, fails for me in the same way this new spot succeeds. All the people stopping what they’re doing to look into the skies seems manipulative and unlikely, and also brings unfortunate echoes of 9/11, especially the peek at the tail of the plane disappearing over the top of the building. The evolution from that campaign to this one is to be applauded. I also like the fact I’ll finally be able to use my AAdvantage miles, since US Airways but not American flies to my local airport. Well done.