Bank of Hawaii offers a debit card whereby you will earn 1 Hawaiian Airline miles per $2 spent. Originally, you could only earn points via “credit” but come April 1, 2015, you will earn Hawaiian Airline miles as long as you use the card.
Earn 1 HawaiianMile for every $2 spent on qualified purchases* that you sign or select “Credit” for
Effective April 1, 2015, HawaiianMiles can be earned on qualified purchases using the “Debit” or “Credit” function*
The limit to the card is earning 2,500 HA miles per month and they charge you $3 monthly fee. Therefore, the maxes per year would be 30,000 HA miles for $36 on $60,000 in spend.
EDIT: I completely missed this, thanks to mileswhip below on his comment. Also effective April 1, 2015, the monthly miles earned per month is capped at 1,000 miles. So this method isn’t very lucrative unless you can get a handful of accounts and max it out and pool the miles together.
Suppose you are a husband and wife, children may or may not be included, team up and everyone has this checking account, and you add the $89 per year annual fee credit card into your portfolio, you could pool all of your miles together into one account.
ShareMiles[2] allows you to receive HawaiianMiles from family and friends online
Hawaiian Airlines World Elite MasterCard cardholders can receive HawaiianMiles from friends and family online at HawaiianAirlines.com. Click here for full Terms and Conditions.
Now you could transfer all of your points to Hilton like Drew @ Travel Is Free or actually redeem them on any of their travel partners. If neither of those options interest you how about exchanging your points on Points.com? You will take a haircut on the points:
Out of all the partners that you can exchange to, I would choose Virgin America.
Now there’s a scathing report from Kyle who writes as the trip Sherpa on Upgrd. I agree with some of his beef with Bank of Hawaii like their branch hours and trying to reach someone on the phone. I still haven’t been able to connect with someone to open an account and this has been several days. By the way, they don’t have weekend hours either.
Kyle also writes being locked out of mobile deposits the first three billing cycles, but I don’t see why pushing money from one account to Bank of Hawaii wouldn’t work like Bluebird to BoH. I will report back as soon as I can reach someone to open an account.
doesn’t this render it useless?
Customers may earn up to a maximum of 2,500 miles per HawaiianMiles Account per month regardless of the number of check cards
Effective April 1, 2015, the maximum will be changed to 1,000 miles per HawaiianMiles Account per month regardless of the number of check cards
Thanks! Wow I missed the 1,000 miles a month limit. You’re right it renders it useless.
I was thinking wife + kids open their own accounts with the card then pool into one account because of the benefit from the credit card.
Will update the post to reflect the new limit when I have a chance tonight, thanks for catching my over sight
Not a problem, happy to help. I had initially hoped I misread something on their site in hopes of actually making this a useful new way to earn miles. Sadly it is kind of dead and not worth the fees.