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Alaska Airlines Mileage Plan has made an update to its website.

Cathay Pacific and LATAM to be bookable online

Almost everybody hates having to wait on hold in order to speak to an agent in order to book award travel on a partner airline. So the fact that Cathay Pacific and LATAM will soon be bookable online is good news (unless you think that online booking = easier for other people to book the award space you might want someday).

This is especially relevant if you like to take advantage of Alaska Mileage Plan’s free stopover rules.  😉

Simplified Award Chart?

This is the scary part…

Is Mileage Plan simply changing how the award chart is shown? Right now, it is admittedly quite a mess…  I can’t possibly squeeze all of the US <–> Europe options into a single screenshot.

So, perhaps Mileage Plan is intending to present its award pricing – in chart form – as ranges instead of fixed amounts.

It would be much worse if Mileage Plan implemented a standard region-to-region award chart. This would inevitably mean the death of many sweetspots, such as Cathay Pacific First Class flights to/from Hong Kong.

Bottom Line

Of course it could be even worse – Alaska could have gone the route of United and Delta and made award charts disappear entirely.

But we will have to wait and see whether Alaska is just cleaning up how it presents award pricing on the website, or whether a wider devaluation is being implemented. Fingers crossed…