Will AA devalue now that Citi transfers to AA? | Coffee Break Ep66 | 8-5-25
Frequent Miler on the Air
Frequent Miler
4.9 • 640 Ratings
🗓️ 5 August 2025
⏱️ 21 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Citi now offers a way to transfer points 1 to 1 to American Airlines, which has many predicting an AA devaluation is on the horizon. In this podcast episode, we'll discuss this concern.
(00:44) - Why are we so excited about transfers to American Airlines?
(04:06) - A devaluation assumes a flood of AA miles, but... Citi points are not that easy to get in bulk, but even if there are many more AA miles out there, is that reason for devaluation?
(04:56) - Here's what we think...
(15:35) - But wait...did AA devalue already?
Read One Mile at a Time's post here: American AAdvantage Business Class Award Devaluation? Sort Of…:
(16:24) - More than two years ago, AA published "starting at" prices for its own flights. Mostly, though, the starting at prices stayed as they were with previous saver award pricing.
(17:15) - Now, though, "starting at" seems to be closer to American Airlines' published intentions from a few years ago...
(18:29) - BUT... mix in another carrier to get the partner award chart
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Music Credit – Beach Walk by Unicorn Heads
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is a Voyescape podcast. You can find all of our travel podcasts from around the world at |
| 0:07.1 | voyescape.com. |
| 0:11.8 | Welcome to coffee break, where we focus on a single topic related to miles and points. |
| 0:16.9 | And each coffee break is limited to 20 minutes or less for your money back. |
| 0:21.8 | On today's coffee break, will American Airlines devalue now that city points transfer one-to-one to American Airlines? |
| 0:31.9 | Yeah, so now that there's the ability to earn transferable points that transfer to American Airlines. The fear is that |
| 0:39.3 | there's this huge pot of transferable points that can now all move over to American. And, you know, |
| 0:44.4 | if you flood the market full of new American Airlines miles, is American just going to jack up |
| 0:50.6 | the price of everything in order to kind of compensate for that. |
| 0:57.0 | So let's get into that in a second. |
| 1:00.6 | But let's first start by talking about why is this exciting or interesting? |
| 1:04.6 | Why are we even worried that we're going to flood the market with American Airlines miles? |
| 1:08.0 | After all, the city has a whole bunch of different airline and hotel partners. This is just another airline partner, right? |
| 1:10.5 | Yeah, in a way, except American Airlines, I think, is special. |
| 1:16.0 | So there's a number of things that I just absolutely love about American Airlines miles as they stand today. |
| 1:23.6 | Free cancellations on all award flights, free changes to both American Airlines and partner awards. |
| 1:31.3 | There's what I call American Airlines Roulette, which you could love this or hate this, but the fact is that when you're trying to use miles for American Airlines own flights, sometimes you'll get excellent pricing. |
| 1:43.3 | Now, if you try again five minutes later, |
| 1:45.5 | you might get bad pricing. And that's why I call it roulette. But the point is that I frequently |
| 1:52.0 | find great pricing randomly on American Airlines' own flights. But where I'm really in love with |
| 1:59.3 | American Airlines Miles is their partner award pricing. |
| 2:02.2 | They, while all the other major airline programs abandoned award charts a while ago, |
... |
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