Alaska Mileage Plan starting to sell mixed partner award flights (but mind the price)

For years, Alaska Mileage Plan members have had a major limitation when trying to book partner award flights: you could book itineraries that involved Alaska flights and segments from one partner, but not those that involve more than one partner.

For instance, if you wanted to fly from San Francisco to London via a British Airways (BA) flight from Los Angeles (SFO-LAX-London). You’d only be able to select itineraries where the SFO – LAX leg was operated by Alaska, even if there was an open American Airlines (AA) flight available because Alaska wouldn’t allow you to book both AA and BA on the same award. You would be able to book the AA flight and the BA flight separately. That’s a big limitation for a US program with the limited route network of Alaska.

Alaska has been promising that its members would be able to book mixed-partner awards for quite some time, and it look like they’re finally starting to roll out:

It’s not all good news

It’s incredible to actually see mixed-partner awards live on the Alaska site, but there’s a bit of rain on the parade as well.

First, it looks like, currently, this is only possible on itineraries that combine American Airlines and British Airways. That’s not a huge deal, as these are probably just the first two partners to go live and others will soon follow.

However, there’s also a – hopefully temporary – gotcha in the way that these awards are pricing. Alaska has a distance-based chart, here’s pricing for flights that involve Europe (either within Europe or between the US and Europe):

LAX to Zurich (LRH) is just shy of 6,000 total flight miles, so we’d expect it to price out at 35K in economy, as it falls in the 5,001-7,000 miles band. If we fly BA from LAX-London (LHR)-ZRH that’s exactly the price we see:

If we add AA flights to the scenario but with the exact same itinerary, we’d expect to see the same 35K pricing…but we don’t:

What’s happening here is that, instead of combining the entire flight distance into one award price, as happens with the BA itinerary, Alaska is adding the price of the two individual partner awards: 35K for LAX – LHR on AA and 7.5K for LHR to ZRH on BA. So, even though you can technically get these as part of one award, the pricing is the same as if you purchased each award separately.

We’ve never heard any indication that Alaska plans to charge more for mixed-partner awards than it does for awards that involve one partner + Alaska. Hopefully, this is just a temporary glitch that’s part of the initial rollout and eventually we’ll see these both price identically according to the cumulative distance.

IF Alaska indeed plans to price these awards per segment, that would be a big blow to the program. We’ve reach out to Alaska for comment and will update this post as soon as we hear something.

Final Thoughts

Alaska is finally starting to sell mixed partner awards online through Mileage Plan. Even though it currently seems to be limited to AA and BA only, that’s a great development.

However, it’s concerning that these flights are being priced per segment as opposed to cumulative distance like all other Alaska awards. Hopefully that’s only a tech snafu as opposed to a permanent feature, but it’s something to be aware of as more mixed-partner awards come online.

(h/t: Frequent Miler Insiders)

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