American Airlines Improves Million Miler Program

American Airlines is adding two additional lifetime thresholds to its AAdvantage Million Miler program, making what has been an uncompetitive program more competitive, even as it still lags such benefits on United Airlines and Delta Air Lines.

American Airlines Adds Two New Tiers To Million Miler Program

As I see it, the Million Miler programs at American, Delta, and United are the last thing that truly awards long-term loyalty instead of loyalty on a transactional basis. Lifetime miles earned, a least today, are based on so-called “butt in seat” miles (miles actually flown) versus miles accrued. That means you need to fly a million miles in order to qualify for Million Mile status.

It wasn’t always this way…and this is why I suspect American Airlines has dragged its feet so long on making its Million Mile program more competitive. I’ll discuss that further below, but let’s first look a the program changes announced this week.

Effective March 1, 2025, AA will add two additional Million Miles tiers:

Lifetime AAdvantage Gold status – one million miles
Platinum status –  two million miles
Platinum Pro – four million miles (new tier) 
Executive Platinum – five million miles (new tier)

Why The Program Still Lags Delta And United

Let’s be clear: this is still not competitive with either Delta or United. As a reminder, United offers lifetime status to you and a companion at these thresholds:

lifetime MileagePlus Gold status – one million miles
Platinum – two million miles
Premier 1K – three million miles
Global Services – four million miles

The companion status carries over for whatever status you have earned, not just your Million Mile status (so if you are like me and have 1K status and are also a Million Miler, my companion shares my 1K status).

Delta’s program is not as generous, but it has recently improved its own SkyMiles Million Mile lifetime program:

lifetime SkyMiles Gold status – one million miles
Platinum status – two million miles
Diamond status – three million miles
Delta 360 status – five million miles

But it’s not surprising why American Airlines’ program is not as generous: it counted all AAdvantage miles earned toward Million Mile status until 2011. So a person who never flew AA but put millions of dollars of spending on AA co-branded credit card earned Million Mile status…and now stands to gain up to lifetime Executive Platinum status.

It isn’t clear how many AAdvantage members this change will impact.

CONCLUSION

American Airlines has nicely improved its AAdvntage Million Mile program with a four million and five million mile threshold.

Yes, the program is not as generous as Delta or United, but it is now a lot more generous than before…and that is something to celebrate. I am quite pleased not because I will ever come close to achieving such lifetime milestones on American Airlines, but because every time a carrier improves its Million Mile program, it makes it less likely others will devalue it.

Will you be positively impacted by the change to AA’s Million Miler program?

image: American Airlines