REVIEW – Rome Cavalieri, a Waldorf Astoria Hotel [COVID-era]
August 19, 2020GUIDE – Visiting Rome during COVID
August 19, 2020What’s the deal?
From today until August 26th 2020 you can buy Alaska Airlines with a 50% bonus. Their best bonus this year.
- Buy 3,000 -29,000 miles = 40% extra bonus miles
- Buy 30,000 – 100,000 miles = 50% extra bonus miles
What does this mean? If you max out the promo buying 100,000 miles and receiving an additional 50,000 miles free you’ll pay $2,750 which is 1.83¢ per mile (roughly 1.38p).
Other factors to bear in mind:
- The cap on miles you can buy each year (before bonuses) has been lifted to 100,000
- If you buy at least 30,000 miles this time, you’ll qualify to get up to 70% bonus miles during their October promo.
Why would I want to buy Alaska Miles?
Buy a flight with money: the price is high.
Take that money, turn it into miles and buy the flight with miles: The price is low.
I spoke here about how you can book Cathay Pacific Business Class from Europe to Hong Kong for around £645 and that was with the presumption of a 40% bonus.
With a 50% bonus when buying miles, the cost comes down even further.
If you want a one way First Class ticket from Europe to Hong Kong on Cathay Pacific you can pay either:
120,000 BA Avios or 70,000 Alaska Miles. For the exact same flight.
Dining on Cathay Pacific First Class.
Better still, Alaska allows you to fly from anywhere in Asia to anywhere else in Asia for as little as 22,500 Miles in Business Class.
Last time I flew JAL Business Class from Jakarta to Tokyo it cost me 25,000 Alaska Miles on JAL.
With BA the price for the same JAL flight would be 62,000 Avios, more than twice as expensive!
I could even have flown from Jakarta to Tokyo to Hanoi all for 25,000 Alaska Miles, for 14 hours of flying in Business Class.
BA won’t even sell you that as a single Avios ticket, you’ll have to buy two separate tickets totalling 100,750 Avios. Meanwhile I’m still paying 25,000 Alaska Miles.
I even pieced together an incredible all First Class itinerary on BA from Malé to London with a free 48 day stopover followed by London to Mexico City.
80,000 Alaska Miles for two proper long haul First Class flights on BA First Class.
BA on the other hand, would insist on selling you two separate tickets totalling 200,000 Avios. Again, more than twice the miles cost… for tickets on BA’s own planes.
These are just a few of the incredible examples of value within the Alaska program. Honestly, this barely scratches the surface and things should get even better once Alaska joins Oneworld later this year!
If you want to fly around the world on a variety of amazing airlines rather than being stuck on the phone at T-355 with everyone else in the UK, desperate to use their Amex 2-4-1 voucher, then Alaska is genuinely the way forward.
How does this Buy Miles deal work?
1.First you’ll need to have a free Alaska Mileage Plan account which is at least 10 days old.
If you don’t then you can create a free Alaska Mileage Plan account here. You won’t be able to participate on this occasion but will have done everything you need to do to get involved next time!
2. If you can, provide a US address on your profile. This always seems to trigger better offers and in the past only those with United States listed on their account were eligible to buy miles at all.
3.Click on the button below to go to the Alaska Buy Miles page and enter your account details.
3. Select the amount of miles you want and hit buy.
4. Miles should appear in your account instantaneously. Although for many people their first ever transaction can take a few hours since they’ll want to run some anti-fraud checks on you.
If you have any questions about redeeming Alaska miles ask away in the comments below!