In February I posted about the rumor that one-way awards would soon be bookable using Alaska Mileage Plan miles. Alaska has some amazing airline partners with their Mileage Plan program, though the two really restrictive policies about the program are the lack of one-ways at half the cost of a roundtrip and the inability to mix partner airlines on a single award ticket.
Anyway, a search on Alaska’s website reveals that one-way tickets are now bookable for travel on American at half the cost of a roundtrip. For example, a search for availability between New York and London reveals that one-way tickets are 20,000 miles in coach, 50,000 miles in business class, or 62,500 miles in first class.
Interestingly Delta awards now appear when doing a one-way search as well, though only at the roundtrip price. I’m hoping that’s just a glitch that needs to be fixed, given that they haven’t even made a formal announcement of one-way award tickets being allowed yet.
It’s also worth noting that American awards now appear on the search calender when booking one-way awards, which wasn’t previously the case either, so you can search availability a month at a time (though you can also do that on aa.com, as saver award availability released to the two airlines is identical).
Hopefully the functionality to book one-way awards is brought to other partner airlines as well, though I’d be willing to bet it’ll be at a snail’s pace.
Having just booked a DL/AA r/t award with Alaska miles, I can confirm that the DL segment only costs half the miles shown for the DL r/t. However, it looks like you still have to book an additional segment on AS or one of their partners in order to avoid paying the r/t price for the DL segment alone.
As nice as the new one-way partner award search is, I hope Alaska changes what I...
Having just booked a DL/AA r/t award with Alaska miles, I can confirm that the DL segment only costs half the miles shown for the DL r/t. However, it looks like you still have to book an additional segment on AS or one of their partners in order to avoid paying the r/t price for the DL segment alone.
As nice as the new one-way partner award search is, I hope Alaska changes what I consider to be a serious omission with the tool. When the search results show business or first class availability for a multi-segment flight, you can't see the class of service for each segment until you start the booking process. For example, when an Alaska award search on ORD-AMS shows availability in business class for a flight that connects through MSP, that could (and often does) mean that a business class award seat is only available for the 90-minute ORD-MSP hop, not on the nine hour MSP-AMS leg.
Until Alaska changes their partner award search page to address this shortcoming, you'll have to run a separate availability search for each possible segment in your itinerary in order to understand how many of them really have business or first class seats available. This can be a real pain, considering how many routing options are available for most city pairs, but it's still better than it was when Alaska's partner award search tool could only search for r/t availability and required specific dates.
@ umesh -- That's true if booking through SkyMiles, though not if booking through partners that allow one ways. Alaska does plan on charging half the mileage for a roundtrip on Delta, so it's just a matter of time before it happens. Flying Blue does the same, as they let you book Delta one way awards for half the roundtrip cost.
>> Delta awards now appear when doing a one-way search as well, though only at the roundtrip price. I’m hoping that’s just a glitch that needs to be fixed
Delta charges round-trip miles for one-way trips. So, this isn't something Alaska can fix.
Yup, you can book a DL/AA r/t for the combined price.
Now, all they need to do is add AF, BA, CX, EK and KL and we'll be set... ;)
I did a couple of looks in December and it looks like the DL one ways are available. A dummy r/t from PDX gave me DL on the outbound in J to BCN and American in J on the way back for a grand total of 95k.
Found o/w SFO-LHR on AMR first for 50k o/w many dates Such a deal
@ Geoff -- Whoops, 62,500 it is!
67.5k or 62.5k for first? Showing 62.5k on the screen shot...Just AA for now?
YASSSS.