Around 10pm PST Wednesday night I logged into my American Airlines Advantage account and instead of being directly logged in, a popup notification greeted me asking me to provide American Airlines with my US Airways Dividend account number. This was the first time since the merger with US Airways that I was prompted to provide American Airlines with my US Airways Dividend account number. Linking my two accounts will help the airline merge my two accounts into one and combine miles from both accounts when the dividend miles program goes away later this year.
Although my accounts are merged, for now it’s still business as usual and both programs remain independent of each other. Regardless, linking your accounts is an important step in the combination of the two programs as the two frequent flyer programs will merge into one during the second quarter of 2015.
Once the two programs are combined, everyone who links their accounts will find that their frequent flyer miles, elite miles, elite segments, and million miller balances from both programs will be combine into their AAdvantage account and the Dividend mile program will be dissolved. Sadly by linking accounts, it does not provide you with equal status on both airlines or allows you to transfer miles between the two programs. AA/US is not being nearly as generous as NWA/Delta, AirTran/SWA or Continental/United were when they merged.
In order to combine accounts be sure that your name, email, address, and date of birth match perfectly in both accounts. Otherwise you will receive an error message. Once you combine your accounts, you will receive an automated e-email from both AA and US informing you that your accounts have been combined.
For those of you who are already AA EXP but decided to take advantage of the Chairmen Challenge to earn additional system wide upgrades, I would highly suggest that you do not combine accounts and you use different email addresses/personal information on your two accounts to keep AA from auto-merging your accounts during the second quarter. As I could see AA merging your two accounts and the SWUs being lost. Yet who knows, maybe there won’t be an issue and AA will honor all the SWUs. After all, no one knows what will truly be the result until the second quarter of 2015!
