If you’ve been looking for cheap business class airfare from companies based in the US, you may have come across Above9.travel. If you have come across Above9 you may be wondering is this a trustworthy company?
With the internet offering so many methods of hiding and pretending it’s become more difficult than ever to decipher if a travel company is legitimate or if they’re a scam. What adds to the complexity is the advent of mileage brokers who seem to have carved out a new category somewhere in between legitimate and scam. Above9 Travel was brought to our attention and we will do our best to review the company by presenting the facts and any causes for concern that we observed while investigating them.
If you feel like you’ve been scammed by Above9 Travel please let us know here.
Above9.travel – Who are they and where are they based?
The company claims it is based in New York, New York, however there is no physical address listed on their website. The company is in fact registered in Dublin and was first listed September 29th, 2021. It is listed with 3 shareholders and is currently in what appears to be good standing.
The Above9.Travel website was first registered in January of 2020 and the owner information has been redacted for privacy purposes at the request of the owner. What we were able to find is profiles of Above9 staff that live in areas throughout Europe with the founder living in Latvia.
Is any of the above reason to sound the alarms? We don’t believe so.
The Above9 Offering
Much like their main competitor business-class.com, Above9 offers business class and first class flights internationally. However the Above9 website focuses much more on offering a personalized experience as opposed to others like it that focus on offering the cheapest prices. At a quick glance this seems to compel a greater sense of trust from the simple fact that Above9 doesn’t come out with promises of huge discounts.
One thing that caught our attention is that Above9 claims that they are highly skilled at obtaining unpublished fares. These are fares that are purchased from consolidators and or by the airlines themselves. We’d love to hear more about how this works just as much as you and better understand how Above9 is able to find these fares on such a consistent basis that they’re able to run a business using these fares. Until then we’ll maintain our skepticism on that.
Transparency
We reviewed the Above9 Travel Terms of Use page and it appears that they have fairly well covered themselves in terms of legalities. While this kind of behavior doesn’t ordinarily promote a warm and fuzzy feeling, in an industry that is rote with fly by night websites and outright scoundrel’s we don’t view this as a negative thing at all.
Is Above9 a Mileage broker?
Mileage brokers are companies that obtain airfare using frequent flyer miles or points in away that is not sanctioned by the airline. We can’t confirm that Above9 is a mileage broker but from some of the language in their Terms of Use we definitely suspect that they are.
As you can see in the below picture of the “Exchanges, cancellations and refunds” part of their Terms of Use section.
Should you buy from Above9 Travel?
If Above9 is a mileage broker as we suspect the primary area of concern is if they stand by their product. Meaning if they are selling you a mileage ticket and they suddenly get audited by the airline resulting in the cancellation of your ticket (possibly on the day of your trip while you’re at the airport) will Above9 come through, take the loss and put you on the next available flight. If they do stand behind their product in such a way, that would at the very least mitigate the risk in using them.
The first step in identifying if they stand behind “their product” would be to find out as best as possible what their clients are saying.
What are their clients saying?
Above9 Travel is hugely excited about advertising their Trustpilot rating which as of the publishing of this article had 370 reviews and a score of 4.8. However we’ve seen all too many times that Trustpilot is a platform that can be manipulated quite easily and can’t be relied upon face value.
So we dove deep…into the darkest area of Above9’s reviews. And we found exactly what we were hoping not to…
The first one was from Tally who posted a review this past week.
Tally’s review appears to confirm all of our concerns that Above9 Travel is in fact a mileage broker. She states that the worse case scenario happened to her and not only were her tickets cancelled last minute, she states that she received no help or reimbursement from Above9.
Before going into additional examples of concerning reviews like the above, we’d like to point out the following and really emphasize this for the sake of honest and objective reporting.
Only 7 bad reviews?
We have nothing to do with Above9 and have no incentive to recommend Above9 one way or another but something that we found to be very interesting in evaluating each Above9 review is that in the course of over three years, Above9 has a total of 7 bad reviews. We want to acknowledge that these 7 are pretty horrible and incriminating but 7 negative reviews over a span of 3 years in comparison with a few hundred positive reviews in it of itself is peculiar if this is a mileage company.
We don’t have a full backlog of negative reviews that may have been taken down, however if they were taken down because Above9 reconciled with them that may earn some points for Above9.
Conclusion:
We are certainly not going to put our recommendation behind Above9 Travel because of the nature of the mileage business and mileage brokers. However we also can’t say with any level of confidence that this company is unreliable. We’ve presented you with the facts the best that we can, now it’s up to you to decide.
If you have any firsthand information with causes for concern regarding Above9 please let us know right away. If you’ve had a positive experience with Above9 we’d love to hear about your experience as well.
