Alaska Airlines Devalues Emirates Awards Without Notice!

Alaska Airlines are actively promoting 40% bonus miles when you purchase their miles. This promotion ends today. So what do they do to their most sought after award a day before the promotion ends? Alaska Airlines devalues emirates awards without notice! Some awards are now going to cost TWICE as many miles as they did just yesterday. So much for being a “LOYALTY” program!

I understand that a change was bound to happen at some point. The value to redeem first class awards on Emirates to fly from the U.S. to Asia/Europe/Africa with a free stopover in Dubai was too good to be true. But to apply the change so abruptly and doubling the price of these awards is definitely disappointing and completely disregards customers.

I just can’t imagine someone buying miles using their promotion yesterday for a redemption in the near future, only to wake up and find that now they need twice as much miles for that redemption. Or even a loyal customer who has been crediting flights to Alaska’s Mileage Plan for a long period of time in hopes to redeem those miles on Emirates.

Here’s the award chart for Emirates from North America to Asia. It will cost a whopping 180,000 for one-way in First class – Up from only 100,000 yesterday, that’s an 80% increase!!

Here’s the award chart for Emirates from North America to India/Middle East/Africa. It will cost a whopping 200,000 miles for one-way in First class between North America and Africa – Up from only 100,000 yesterday, that’s a 100% increase!!

American Airlines just went through a major devaluation – I don’t think it’s as drastic as this one – but they gave ample notice time to allow their customers to use their miles if they needed to before the devaluation happened. American Airlines is also offering a huge bonus on purchased miles. At least they are offering the bonus after the devaluation so people can buy miles for redemption that they know it’s value won’t be cut in half anytime in the near future. But for Alaska to offer the bonus before they devalue the miles is a very deceptive to say the least.

All in all, this is a very disappointing situation and I’m very curious to see how it will be handled with all the backlash Alaska Airlines is receiving on twitter and among all the big bloggers in the industry.