American Airlines AAdvantage Redemptions Now Fully Dynamic

Late last year, it was announced that American Airlines AAdvantage would implement dynamic pricing at some point in 2023. The change has officially taken place, and the program now officially uses dynamic pricing for flights with American Airlines.

While this may sound like bad news, the reality is that it doesn’t really change the status quo very much, since the program had already implemented dynamic pricing some time ago. Furthermore, the best partner airline sweet spots in the program remain unaffected, and there’s still plenty of value to be found.

American Airlines AAdvantage “Shifts” to Dynamic Pricing

American Airlines AAdvantage is a US-based loyalty program that offers redemptions with American Airlines and other Oneworld-member airlines.

Until now, for flights with American Airlines, the program used a chart that displayed different prices for various types of awards. For example, MileSAAver awards were the cheapest, but there weren’t many seats available at this price.

Rather, you were more likely to find pricing in the AAnytime Level 1 or AAnytime Level 2 categories, which was quite a bit more than the MileSAAver awards.

Furthermore, you may have also come across Web Special awards, which cost even less than MileSAAver awards.

AAdvantage has done away with the distinction between Web Specials, MileSAAver, and AAnytime awards, and now uses a “simplified” award chart for Flight Awards. The new chart simply displays “Starting at” prices for each class of service to different areas of the world.

In other words, the new chart displays the lower end of the dynamic pricing spectrum for flights with American Airlines, but doesn’t give any guidance for upper limits. 

It’s worth noting that the prices at the lower end of the new chart have increased in some parts of the world. However, you’re still able to find awards with AA at lower than the published levels, so it doesn’t appear to have been raised across the board.

In reality, the program has already been using dynamic pricing for American Airlines flights for a while now, and this doesn’t really change anything.

Prior to this official change, it was very common to find award pricing that was either above or below the published levels, so the move to the new chart just makes the program less transparent, if anything.

For example, you can fly from Dallas to Rome for 89,000 AAdvantage miles, which…