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American Airlines passengers: Get double elite miles

by Grant Martin (RSS feed) on Mar 19th 2009 at 2:00PM

Now that the economy is low and demand is tapering off, airlines are doing whatever they can to encourage passengers to return to flying the friendly skies. Sure, oil has come down from it's all time high of $5000/barrel, but without passengers to fill airplanes, some equipment has to be shelved, and that's never good for profit.

What to do? Incentivize. A deluge of fare sales including dirt cheap tickets to Barcelona, Tokyo and Moscow have all hit the charts this past week, and the few of us with the travel bug have been booking tickets like madmen.

Other promotions include American Airlines recent Double Elite Qualifying Miles (EQM) bonanza. You might remember that Elite miles/points, the nifty little jobbers that get you points towards Elite status are fairly hard to come by, and those that maintain status often have to do Mileage Runs to keep up their quota. But with this promotion, passengers can earn double elite points through June 15, effectively reducing the number of miles to earn Gold, Platinum and Executive Platinum to 12.5, 25 and 50K respectively. Heck, I might even take a gander at that.

You can sign up for the DEQM promotion here using the code DBEQM. Check out American's elite info here.

Filed under: Business, Airlines, News

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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Chris Mar 19th 2009 2:30PM

"effectively reducing the number of miles to earn Gold, Platinum and Executive Platinum to 12.5, 25 and 50K respectively"

woah, woah, woah... not so fast there. I don't know about you, but there aren't many people that can rack up 50K miles in-seat in a span of less than three months (the duration of the promotion) aside from the people that were going to hit EXP anyway. This doesn't effectively reduce the qualifying mileage unless someone is planning on doing a LOT of flying between April 18th and June 15th.

What this does do, is give people like me who were on the cusp of being able to hit a certain tier by the end of the year the extra "bump" to get there. With this promotion and my regular travel schedule, if I mix in one trip to London before the year is out, I'll make EXP. Without the promotion, I'd be one of the higher mileage PLT's, possibly rewarded for my fruitless quest for EXP with some bonus luggage tags or extra stickers (which I can't use anyway).

I just hope this doesn't water down the pool even further. The flight I take to Atlanta each week already has probably 30% of the plane taken up by elites. Those special seats (exit rows, 7D on the MD-80, etc.) and upgrades are becoming harder and harder to come by, even as a PLT. I haven't been upgraded once in the past 3 months even though I put in the request twice a week.