A perfect storm rolled in on me. Much to my surprise, Aviator Silver Companion Certificates saved the day.
A few months ago, I wrote a post titled Aviator Silver Companion Certificate: First impressions. In that post, I shared the details I’d learned about Aviator Silver Companion certificates. For those unfamiliar, the invitation-only Barclays AAdvantage Aviator Silver Mastercard offers a one-time-use companion certificate that allows the certificate holder to book a round trip domestic economy class ticket and add two companions for $99 each (plus taxes) after spending $20,000 in a cardmember year on the card and renewing for another year. I covered details about qualifying fare classes, blackout dates, and the timing with which our certificates posted in that previous “first impressions” post. In this post, I’ll share my experience using the certificates.
We had 2 Aviator Silver Companion Certificates
My wife and I each have Aviator Silver credit cards and we each completed the $20K spend on our respective cards to earn a Companion Certificate. Each companion certificate could be used one time to bring up to two companions for $99 + tax per companion. This meant that if she and I both used our companion certificates on the same flight, we could essentially book for 6 total passengers, paying the full round trip price for two passengers and $99 + tax for four passengers.
It’s worth mentioning from the beginning that we completed that spend on our Aviator Silver cards knowing that we might not be be able to use the companion certificates at all. I was motivated in large part by the chance to write about whether we ultimately used the certificates and how easy or difficult they were to use. Especially given the high number of blackout dates on the certificates, I think it is hard to assign much value to these companion certificates from a speculative standpoint. That is to say that I wouldn’t spend $20K on an Aviator Silver card expecting to get much (or any) value out of the companion certificate simply because it’s hard to know in advance whether you’ll be able to find a use that fits the parameters and how much you’ll save when you do.
However, as I also noted above, in my own case, we ran into a perfect scenario where the certificates yielded big real-world savings.
A tight travel window and expensive flight options
The gist of our situation is that we had circumstances come up where we needed to travel from Albany, NY to Chicago, IL as a group of six on specific dates for a family event next month. Our schedule for this trip was very tight in terms of both fixed dates and times at both ends of the trip, needing to fly outbound around midday and preferring the same on the return. I’m ordinarily willing to leave a day or two earlier or to take a 6am flight if necessary in order to save a few bucks, but none of that was an option in this case. Partner award availability was nonexistent.
We initially considered flights on United that would have been $587 per passenger round trip despite the return leg getting back later than we’d like. With six passengers, the total price would have been $3,492 round trip. Note that the headline price below is $512, but that was for basic economy — we’d have been booking regular economy for $582 each.
That seemed like an insane amount of money for a short domestic trip, but the flight times fit our needs and I could use United Travel Bank credit to cover a chunk of the cost. Unfortunately, we would have to pay additional fees for any checked bags since neither my wife nor I have any status or credit cards with United Airlines.
Long-time readers know that my wife and I almost exclusively fly Southwest for domestic trips. I would have expected to fly Southwest in this case, but flight timing just didn’t work out. Southwest used to have a few daily nonstops from Albany to Chicago-Midway, but their schedule has been cut down to one nonstop and the timing of that flight didn’t work. We might have been able to make a connecting Southwest itinerary work on the outbound, flying home on a separate ticket, but the cost for six passengers would still have been north of $3,000 between cash and rewards.
Saving a ton with our Aviator Silver companion certificates
American Airlines had an itinerary that fit our needs even better than United, though it was similarly expensive for the mid-day flight times that were a priority in this case. At $568 round trip per passenger, the total for the six of us would have been $3,408.
This is where our companion certificates came up huge.
As I’d previously written in my “first impressions” post, one of the positives about the Aviator Silver Companion Certificates is that they are valid for use on the vast majority of economy class fare classes (they do not work on basic economy fares, but in this case the lowest fare class available was “Main Cabin” anyway).
I had wondered how difficult it might be to find six seats in qualifying fare classes, but given that so many fare classes qualify, I’m betting it probably isn’t hard to find a flight with qualifying fare classes. In fact, I checked a few different flights on our departure and return dates and all of them had plenty of seats in qualifying fare classes. Our outbound flight was in “V” class and our return in “L” class. I simply entered 6 passengers at AA.com to verify that these classes were available for purchase for everyone in our party.
Unfortunately, you can not book travel with a companion certificate on the website. Instead, you must call American Airlines. The certificate notes that “Reservations must be made by calling American Airlines Meeting Services at 800-433-1790”. Sure enough, when you call that number, one of the menu options is to book travel with a companion certificate.
I called over the weekend and it took around 10 minutes to reach a representative. Once I reached a rep and verified my account information, she was able to locate my certificate and read the restrictions. From there, it was just a matter of feeding her the flight information.
My ticket came out to $567.97 and each companion was $137.03 with taxes, for a total of $842.03 for three passengers.
My wife also used her certificate for her and our other two passengers and paid the same exact price, making the total out of pocket cost for six passengers about $1,684 — just under $281 round trip per passenger. That was about $1,700 less than the cost to buy these specific tickets from American and well over a thousand bucks less than our next best option. Getting more than $500 in value from each certificate is far more than I expected out of these, particularly given the blackout dates.
Speaking of blackout dates, both my phone rep and my wife’s rep carefully combed over the blackout dates on the certificate before searching for flights and both sounded surprised that our dates didn’t run up against the blackout dates (which makes sense given that we were looking at a weekend and so many weekends are blacked out).
The certificate says that you need to pay with your Aviator Silver card. I expected that to be required, so I was ready with that card, but I’m not positive that it wouldn’t have worked with any card. My phone rep didn’t mention any requirement to use it and just asked for a card number when it was time to pay. My wife’s representative did specifically ask for her Mastercard number. Your mileage may vary if you want to use a different card to pay.
The certificates say that you must book travel at least 48 hours in advance and I now know that is because the reservation isn’t completed immediately. At the end of the phone call, I had a confirmation code, but the agent explained that the certificate gets applied manually by a specific team, so it takes 24-48 hours to receive the email confirming that process is complete. Sure enough, it was about 48 hours before I received the email confirming that my companion certificate had been redeemed (note that I did receive an email receipt within a few hours of booking though).
Elite benefits apply
For those curious, I want to also confirm that my American Airlines benefits did apply to the booking. I currently have American Airlines Platinum status and as such I was able to select Main Cabin Extra (exit row) seats at booking. I’m sure we’ll also get priority boarding and free checked bags by virtue of our American Airlines credit cards.
I found the Main Cabin Extra seating particularly interesting because my Platinum status is set to expire at the end of this month, but this trip won’t occur until next month. I wouldn’t have expected to be able to access the Main Cabin Extra seating for a flight that occurs after my elite status expires, but I certainly won’t complain.
Bottom line
My wife and I recently booked travel using our American Airlines AAdvantage Aviator Silver Companion certificates, which we earned by each spending $20,000 in our previous cardmember year on our Aviator Silver credit cards. It was easier than expected for us to find availability, and “thanks” to incredibly high flight prices for the dates and times we needed to travel, the certificates saved us a lot of money. I still wouldn’t recommend that the average person spend toward these certificates given the large number of blackout dates, but my situation goes to show that a domestic economy class companion certificate certainly can be huge in the right situation.
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