Asia Miles: Economy Flights To Get Cheap, Premium Cabins To Get Significantly More Expensive From 6/22 Onwards

Cathay Pacific’s Asia Miles program has announced significant changes to the award program, these changes will go into effect on June 22nd, 2018. All bookings before that date will remain priced the same (e.g book anything going up in price now and wait on anything decreasing in price). A summary of changes is as follows:

  • Increase in award inventory of 20%
  • All economy class flights will either remain the same price or decrease
  • Premium cabin options will mostly increase in price
  • No more price different in round trip/one way flights (previously one way flights were significantly more expensive)
  • Earning rates will be changed

Increased Award Inventory

They are stating they are increasing total award inventory by 20%. They have also added two tiers of award charts: standard & choice. Choice is more expensive than standard (I guess similar to saver awards with American Airlines). It will be interesting to see how much inventory is choice only and how much is saver only. This could actually be a decrease in total standard inventory, maybe not to begin with but down the line.

Award Changes

To make things a little bit confusing Asia Miles is moving from having 7 distance categories to having 5 distance categories. In addition in the previous award chart they had different pricing for round trip and one way flights. This makes making a direct comparison difficult, but here you can see both the new and old award charts.

New award chart (this is the standard award chart, they also have a new choice award chart that is even more expensive):

Old award chart:

A lot of economy tickets are getting cheaper, especially when you compare them to their old one way prices. For example a 10,000+ mile flight used to cost 110,000 miles round trip in economy, now it will cost 84,000 miles. In the real world savings in economy will be much more slight (e.g 750 mile flight will cost the same, a 3,000 mile flight will cost 44,0000 miles round trip instead of 45,000 miles).

In terms of premium cabins, things are getting much more expensive. Again it’s not easy to compare due to the differing tiers they have added, but 2,751-5,000 mile flight used to cost 80,000 miles in business or 120,000 miles in first. It will now cost 90,000 in business or 140,000 in first. Rates for oneworld flights are even worse as well.

Earning Rates Will Be Changed

First the good news, as long as you book before June 22nd 2018 you’ll earn the higher amount (e.g the higher of the pre and post change rate). Miles will now be calculated based on your cabin class, fare class & distance zone. Previously you earned miles based on how far you’d actually flown with a multiple for premium cabins.

Our Verdict

Most readers taking advantage of Cathay Pacific award flights were likely targeting the premium cabins, so this will be a true devaluation for most people.

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8 Comments
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Paco
Paco (@guest_598929)
May 24, 2018 22:08

One way business class from Chicago to HKG remains at 85k. How is that more expensive? What am I missing?

Ripley62
Ripley62 (@guest_598986)
May 25, 2018 06:56

Because the R/T for flights in biz class less than 10,000 goes from 145k to 170k. Eliminating the discount for redeeming a Roundtrip ticket.

J
J (@guest_598711)
May 24, 2018 12:53

You said Oneworld flights are getting more expensive – where do you have that data? There is no indication in the above chart of that. Also for those already booking one-way, the new chart is the same or slightly better for 10K+ miles.

Matt
Matt (@guest_598765)
May 24, 2018 14:24
  J

The charts shown above are the single/mixed with CX carrier charts. If you compare the old and new OW charts, band 5 upwards gets more expensive.

Mike
Mike (@guest_599368)
May 25, 2018 18:41

AFAIK they have not yet released charts for single/mixed with CX carrier tickets. The new chart only says that it applies to CX flights; any guess as to whether it also applies to single OW or OW mixed with CX is speculation at this point. I’m doubtful that it does, because Asia Miles would suddenly become a fantastic option for redeeming for Hawaii tickets from the West Coast (only 20k miles RT on AA ex-LAX or AS ex-SFO/SEA/PDX/LAX/SJC/OAK/SAN).

Trippy
Trippy (@guest_601904)
June 3, 2018 08:28

If you scroll down there are a few economy partner single airlines examples, and they are 30k -> 30k, 45k -> 50k and 90k ->94k for RT. So its going to get more expensive for round trip, but cheaper for one way.

MarcoPolo
MarcoPolo (@guest_598691)
May 24, 2018 12:18

When it rains, it pours;