The Strange Reason American Now Requires You to Enter Your Last Name at Login

Now that US Airways Dividend Miles is being combined into American AAdvantage, the American website login process requires you to enter your frequent flyer number and password.. and last name.

You can log into the American or US Airways sites with either your Dividend Miles or AAdvantage account number. If you were a Dividend Miles member and not an AAdvantage number you may not even know your new American Airlines frequent flyer number yet.

Here’s why they need to know your last name.

• US Airways frequent flyer numbers from before the airline’s merger with America West are 7 alphanumeric characters. (When the airline moved to a new platform post-merger they went with longer numeric accounts, and have since automatically added preceding zeroes to the earlier accounts for uniformity.)
• American’s frequent flyer account numbers are 7 alphanumeric characters.
• Therefore the same frequent flyer number can exist in both the US Airways and American systems.
• The combined program is sticking with American numbers. Customers who were members of both programs keep their AAdvantage number. Customers who were Dividend miles-only get a new AAdvantage number. Those old Dividend Miles account numbers will be retired.
• But in transition people will still use their Dividend Miles numbers to look up account information, and with some frequent flyer program partners.

It’s highly unlikely of course that two people with the same account number will also have the same password. But checking last names lets American know whether you’re trying to log into the account number as it existed on the American side, or on the US Airways side.

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