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Buy Alaska Miles at 2 cents per point!

June 20, 2017 By Trevor 1 Comment





I am not often an advocate of buying miles, but there are times when it makes sense to buy miles. This promotion may be a good time to at least consider whether its a good time to buy miles. 

Buy Alaska Miles at 2 cents per point

Right now Magazines.com is running a promotion where you can earn 50 miles per dollar when you shop through the Alaska MileagePlan Mall. You can also earn United miles through the MileagePlus mall, but, lets be honest, we’d all rather buy Alaska miles given some of the better options on their award chart and partners.

Buy Alaska Miles

You’ll see above that according to Cashback Monitor Alaska Mileage Plan is paying 50 miles per dollar for Magazines.com. If we dig a little bit deeper, we’ll also see that 50 miles per dollar is in fact the best that we’ve seen:

Buy Alaska Miles

Alternative options to Buy Alaska Miles

Alaska also has a targeted promotion right now where you can buy miles and get as much as 50% more:

Buy Alaska Miles

Of course the devil is in the details. You see, in order to get that 50% bonus, you have to be buying more than 50,000 miles:

Buy Alaska Miles

There is also a “Tax Recovery Fee” which can get pricey! 

The cool thing is that if you do buy 60,000 miles, you’ll get 90,000 miles and pay $0.0197 per mile which is inclusive of a $123.75 Tax Recovery Fee! Put a different way, you will pay 1.97 cents per point, a 3 hundredths of a cent savings over buying via Magazines.com. 

Wrapping Up

I would never advocate to purchase miles without having a use in mind. In fact, yesterday I just bought Alaska Miles for a very near term use in mind. All that said, sometimes there can be value in taking advantage of promotions. Just remember not to overwhelm your family or friends with magazines. You can, however, make real nice with your doctors and send some appropriate magazines to their offices. As an added bonus, you might have better reading material while you wait!

Will you be leveraging either of these opportunities to buy Alaska miles?

Filed Under: Airline Programs Tagged With: Alaska, Buy Miles, United

3 times when it makes sense to buy miles

May 9, 2017 By Trevor 2 Comments

Frequent Flyer Programs are big revenue machines for airlines, and those 40% off promotions generally aren’t a good deal, but believe it or not, there are a few cases where it makes sense to buy miles. That said, I would offer that there are fairly limited times when you should and should not buy miles.

#1 Reason to buy miles

Here’s the situation: You’ve either applied to credit cards, flown, or otherwise accrued miles for that amazing trip, like Emirates First Class, but your short miles.

when to buy miles

The Emirates Shower is just calling your name!

If this is the trip you’ve dreamed up, well, buying miles to top up your account is not a bad idea, especially because you already have a purpose, and hopefully, you’ve already identified the availability.

#2 Reason to buy miles

You have that twinkle in your eye of a trip you plan to make. You’ve started to look for award availability, and you see something that might work. You might have some of the miles, but not enough. Your trip is far enough out, that you have some flexibility, that is key. That’s when you start looking for opportunities to buy miles at a discount, since you already have a purpose. 

Examples like Alaska Air’s fairly regular up to 40% bonus:

buy miles

Also American Airlines has hopped on the bandwagon:

Note: this only makes sense when you have a trip in mind! Never buy miles speculatively!

#3 Reason to buy miles

Lets say you don’t fly often. Lets say you only fly internationally once or twice a year, and you don’t churn credit cards or manufacture spend. Maybe you’re a reseller leveraging cashback cards. So, how much would that cost? Well, if you buy AviancaTaca LifeMiles on a 1×2 promotion like this:

Lets say you do this, and effectively buy miles at a 125% bonus, you’d be paying ~1.47 cents per miles (based on One Mile at a Time’s calculations). 

When we take into account the Life Miles Star Alliance Award Chart, we can start putting some cost to the fare:

For example, if you consider a trip to North Asia from North America, at 75,000 each way in business class, your cost is: ~$2,205 plus an booking fees. 

Weekend in Taipei

You could fly in this layflat seat to Asia!

While you might say – Wow! That’s expensive! consider for a moment, the occasional flyer that may have the funds for a big annual trip, but doesn’t want to pay the alternative, lets say, what Cathay Pacific (a different alliance than Life Miles) of:

cathay pacific

To further press home the point, here is a collection of business class fares from Washington, DC to Hong Kong:

hong kong

My point here is that you can effectively buy miles and thus get business class travel–assuming award space–for just over half the price of booking an actual ticket.

You could do it for even less from the US to Japan by purchasing Virgin Atlantic miles, if you have ~10-20k miles already; you could purchase 100,000 Virgin Atlantic miles for only 1,515 GBP or ~$1966 at current rates. 

There are considerations though – for example, you won’t earn miles, and you may have award booking fees. If you need to change your trip, there are likely fees as well–but most revenue fares also have fees.

Wrapping Up

Often times I would not recommend folks buying miles, but there are at least 3 situations when that makes sense. For infrequent international travelers, I think the value proposition is a much bigger difference. When you consider the kind’ve experience that you’ll enjoy in a layflat seat vs. an economy seat, its a big difference! Of course I’m much more focused on the journey than the destination, but when you can arrive rested and refreshed to the destination, then I’d imagine it helps you more fully enjoy your entire trip. 

Have you bought miles to facilitate a trip? 

 

Filed Under: Airline Programs, Awards Tagged With: Business Class Travel, Buy Miles, editorial, Unconventional Ideas

Would you buy miles for a discounted award? Alaska Air wants to know.

July 29, 2015 By Trevor 2 Comments

Right now, Alaska Airlines is selling miles for as low as 1.97 cents per mile (Link via Travel Codex). I usually don’t think about buying miles or points, unless its just to top up for an award, but, I really like Emirates–I know, shocking for regular Tagging Miles readers.

So here I am, thinking to myself, that for roughly $2,000 I could have my next Emirates First Class flight, pending award space availability. I don’t even know where I would go – but, I’m a little bit tempted by this.

Of course, then I log in, only to find a paltry 35% bonus offer:

Alaska Buy Miles July 2015

According to this FlyerTalk thread, you have a higher probability of getting the 50% bonus if you have an Alaska Air Visa Signature. I still don’t get anything better than 35%, but, I may keep playing around with it.

Back to my previous point though: Its not always a great idea to buy miles. In fact, speculatively buying miles is downright worse than accruing Delta SkyDrachmas. However, if you’ve got a trip in mind, and see the availability, Emirates, for example, is 90k Alaska miles to the Middle East one-way, 100k to Asia, Europe, and Africa one-way. There are some other good values, like Cathay Pacific and Fiji Airways.

So, check your travel calendar, check your e-mail, or AlaskaAir’s website, and if it makes sense, jump, because this could be the cheapest you’ll find–other than, you know, Manufactured Spending or applications).

What offer did you get? 35%, 40%, 50%? Are you going to buy?

Filed Under: Airline Programs, Awards, Travel Tagged With: Alaska Air, Buy Miles, Emirates

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