Monday morning the merger between American Airlines and US Airways is expected to close.

This much may be obvious to some, but no to others, and this site attracts many any readers of all backgrounds and experience so it seemed worthy of a mention.

While the news will report that American Airlines and US Airways have merged, for all intents and purposes that changes absolutely nothing in terms of immediate travel, and travel through the holidays.

American and US Airways continue to operate as separate airlines and there’s not even any relationship between the two yet for the flying public.

For the next month you will not even be able to earn American miles when flying US Airways (or vice versa).

So if you have reservations to fly US Airways, continue to check in with US Airways and use the US Airways website. You will be flying US Airways and the US Airways frequent flyer program and partnerships prevail.

Similarly if you’re flying American, continue to check-in with American.

Even if you’re flying between Dallas and Charlotte or Dallas and Philadelphia, there’s no special relationship yet — if you want to switch from an American flight on the route over to a US Airways flight or vice versa, it would be no different than changing airlines from one to any other.

Now, come January 7 we expect some measure of frequent flyer relationship to develop between the two — at least earning miles back and forth, probably redeeming miles as well, and possibly some measure of elite status recognition (whether just priority check-in and boarding, or some measure of upgrade reciprocity is not yet known). This will have an impact on frequent flyers.

At the end of March US Airways should leave Star Alliance and shortly thereafter join oneworld. Those changes will have meaning for how you earn and redeem miles on partners.

I would guess that the two airlines do not combine and begin flying as a single carrier until early 2015 — if I had to pin a date it would be over the first weekend of March 2015.

So we’re a long way off from seeing significant change, even though the two airlines should officially ‘merge’ on Monday.

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