US Airways cuts minimum miles for each trip

Posted by: Dean Foust on February 20

Maybe I’m old….nah, that can’t be it…but I remember when airlines would credit you for a minimum 1,000 frequent flier miles on each leg of a flight you took, and if you used your American Express card (at least on Delta), you could get triple miles. So make a couple of long connections and you’d walk away with 6,000 miles credit — and you only needed 20,000 miles to get the free ticket (!).

Over time, carriers made it harder to redeem those tickets by limiting the number of seats it reserved on each flight for frequent fliers (and, if you recall, Delta announced last December that it would no longer reserve seats for frequent-flier redemptions on all flights). And now it appears the first big assault on the miles you can earn from each flight has started. According to a posting on the Upgrade: Travel Better blog, US Airways is no longer granting a minimum 500 miles for each flight. Now, you’ll get the actual number of miles you fly. Meaning that if you take US Airways’ shuttle from New York to Boston, you’ll be credited for…a whopping 142 miles. Meaning that, by my math, you’d have to make that flight 175 times to qualify for a free ticket.

The policy change has left the natives restless over at FlyerTalk.com, such as the poster who grouses that “I’ve put up with a lot of their ‘continuing efforts to provide valuable benefits to … frequent flyers,’ but this could well be the nail in the coffin for me if this sticks.”

My view is you can’t have it both ways…

Airlines barely make money in good times and lose a ton of money in bad times. Sorry, you can't enjoy a dirt-cheap ticket -- a ticket that in some instances, is less than what you'd spend on gas if you were driving -- and expect a free ticket every few months. Yeah, I miss the good old days, but on the other hand, when I joined BusinessWeek in 1987, I never bought a ticket out of Atlanta for less than $400. Flying to Memphis was routinely $700, and one ticket to Houston on short notice was $1,000. And that was 21 years ago. Factoring in 21 years of inflation, and those routes should cost anywhere from $800 to $2,000 today. But they don't. Case in point: I'm flying to New York next week for $229 round trip.

Will the move stick? Seems other airlines could stick with their current plans and see if they pick up any passengers from US Airways. But I have a hunch they'll quietly follow through with similar cuts of their own.