When it comes to long-haul travel, American Airlines' AAdvantage program offers the most purchasing power of the three largest U.S. carriers' rewards programs, according to analysis conducted by travel management company Executive Travel.
The TMC tapped corporate travel consulting company Zulu Solutions to analyze the cost in frequent-flyer miles to fly business class internationally on Delta, United and American. The study examined flights between six U.S. cities—Omaha, Chicago, New York, Atlanta, Dallas and Los Angeles—and several international destinations, including London, Frankfurt, Paris, Rome, Hong Kong, Beijing and Tokyo. It looked for the cheapest reward options on each carrier for a single day for flights within a week, two weeks out, three months out and six months out. "It was a broad spectrum analysis of city pairs to have an apples-to-apples comparison," Executive Travel chairman and CEO Steve Glenn said. "We did hub cities for all the airlines, so everyone has a fair chance at it."
On average, a one-way business class ticket on America cost a bit more than 95,000 miles. For United, the average cost was more than 122,000 miles, and Delta was more than double that at nearly 250,000 miles per leg, according to the analysis. "It's quite an advantage for American," Glenn said. "Delta's SkyMiles devaluation has gotten worse, and now it's reached junk bond status."
Of course, travel redemption is only one part of a rewards program, and airlines increasingly are looking for ways to provide and promote other forms of redemption. At The Beat Live conference earlier this year, Glenn asked Delta CEO Ed Bastian about reward program devaluation, and Bastian said that Delta has worked to make SkyMiles a "currency treated in line with pricing on the airline."
He also noted that Delta this year has lowered redemption levels on "an enormous number of markets" and that redemptions this year are running about 11 percent higher than last year. "Maybe people are seeing better value because we're making more opportunities available," Bastian said. "People can use it to shop and do different things with upgrades. To us, it's worth billions of dollars, so we have to make sure people continue to value it."
Delta also was the only of the U.S. Big Three to score above average in J.D. Power's 2018 Airline Loyalty Program Satisfaction Study this year, though Alaska Airlines, Southwest Airlines and JetBlue all scored higher.
Glenn, meanwhile, said he planned to continue monitoring programs' values for travel, including looking at cost per trip to assign an actual monetary value to program miles.