Problem Identified, AAdvantage Points and Members Portal.

AA has always been a difficult airline to use points. The only way to keep miles from expiring is to use them or purchase a ticket in 18 months.

Searching for flights with points in the AAdvantage portal is not consistent. The layout and interface in the portal have no correlation to the rest of the size. The design system is not consistent with the rest of the site.

  • I asked Lois and Stephanie to spend time looking for flights using a balance of 100,000 AAdvantage points.

    The exercise was for both users to find flights to satisfy their need to redeem points. I wanted to observe how they searched for desired flight routes with points while noting their outcomes and takeaways after searching.

Prompt:

With 100,000 points, where would you go? Are points worth the price of the flight?

  • With a balance of 100,000 points, Lois could not find a flight to satisfy her travel needs at the given moment. She opted to book a local flight home to Memphis with cash to keep her miles alive.

    From my observations, her frustrations were a result of:

    1. AA is not flying to her desired holiday destination.

    2. The flexible dates calendar was inoperable.

    3. The destination would not auto-save upon wanting to switch dates but keep her destination.

    She mentioned that as much as she loves to travel, the discrepancies of finding a flight with points became too strenuous. After 30 minutes of coming up with nothing to meet her needs, it made sense to buy to keep her miles alive.

  • Stephanie’s choice to buy her flight rather than use point. I watched Stephanie bounce back and forth between booking a flight with miles or buying with cash.

    Stephanie opened 6 different tabs on her browser during her assessment of points vs cash. She switched times, dates, airports, non-stops, and layovers and finalized her decision to pay cash. She told me for her route it was a better deal to pay cash and that it would be “a waste of points”.

Cash vs. Miles

Value Difference.

  • The solution I would propose has already been initiated by AA but is nowhere to be found on the AAdvantage member’s portal website. The tool is called the Awards Map and can only be found by a website browser search.

Where is this Map?!