Oneworld CEO says “this year” for alliance-wide upgrades

Imagine being able to use your frequent flyer miles or points held with any Oneworld airline – such as Avios, Qantas Points, AAdvantage Miles or Asia Miles – to unlock upgrades to business or first class with any other Oneworld airline.

It’s already possible within the Star Alliance family, and it’s been promised – again and again – by Oneworld.

Oneworld-wide upgrades were initially due to launch in 2020, although we all know what happened that particular year.

The timetable was later reset to 2023, then 2024, and then 2025.

So should we take recently-minted Oneworld CEO Ole Orvér at his word when he says alliance-wide upgrades are back on track for the end of this year?

“It has been moving a little bit slowly,” Orvér admits to Executive Traveller, “but I’m happy to see now it’s moving quicker.”

“And we will get to it… hopefully we’ll get this done through the second half of this year.”

The first step remains for airlines to establish reciprocal, bilateral agreements between themselves, Orvér says, “before we have a consistent upgrade offering across Oneworld.”

Some airlines have already been doing this for years: Qantas and American Airlines, for example.

Qantas and American Airlines were early to establish 'two-way' points upgrades.

The end goal, Orvér says, is not only for all airlines to have this shared capability, but for alliance-wide upgrade requests to be seamless and ideally done straight from the app, “so it just works.”

Oneworld’s role will be to provide the technology platform which shuttles upgrade requests between airlines, connecting frequent flyer points with seat availability.

Oneworld has previously ruled out establishing a virtual ‘Oneworld Points’ currency, which would serve as a baseline for converting the miles or points of one member airline to another.

As a result, participating airlines will decide the ‘exchange rate’ between their respective rewards currencies.

When you consider all the complexities involved, and that Oneworld has failed to crack this nut year after year, it’s difficult to imagine these alliance-wide upgrades could be sitting under the Christmas Tree come December 2026.

But maybe in 2027, or 2028…

David Flynn travelled to Honolulu as a guest of Hawaiian Airlines and Oneworld.