GET 50% BONUS ALASKA MILES

Alaska Airlines Miles are one of the most valuable airline miles out there. Right now you can get 50% bonus Alaska miles when you buy their Mileage Plan Miles from now through June 13th 2016. You can log in here to see exactly how much bonus you’ll get since sometimes these high percentage bonuses are targeted. However, this one seems to be available for everyone.

The bonus is on a tier system as follows:

10,000 – 19,000 miles = 20% bonus
20,000 – 49,000 miles = 35% bonus
50,000 – 60,000 miles = 50% bonus

 This means that when you buy 60,000 miles you will get a total of 90,000. The total cost will be $1,773.75 – That’s an AMAZING price for what you can do with these miles.

If you add an additional 10,000 miles for $295, you’ll have a total of 102,000 Alaska Airlines miles which is enough for a roundtrip in business class from the U.S to Asia.

How to maximize your purchased miles?

Before the major devaluation of Emirates redemptions that happened last month, I would’ve said your best use would be redeeming your miles for business or first class trips on Emirates to the Middle East/Africa/Asia. However, now your best use would be first class or business class trips on Cathay Pacific or Business class on Alaska’s relatively new partner Hainan Airlines.

In this post I’ll focus on Hainan airlines because it’s actually a redemption I’m looking to achieve in the very near future for travel in 2017.

Here’s a sample pricing of a non-stop roundtrip between Boston and Beijing on Hainan Airlines in economy:

Here’s the same flight in business:

And here’s how much this roundtrip would cost in Alaska miles for business class:

As you can see, you can get to Beijing and back in business class lie-flat seat on Hainan Airlines for about $2,400 when you buy Alaska miles instead of paying ~$1,800 cash for economy or ~$4,000 cash for business. This gives you a redemption value of about 4 cents/mile

Bottom Line:

This is a great deal from Alaska Airlines. As I explained above, you can get the same trip for ~$600 more in cash and fly more than 27 hours in a business class lie-flat seat instead of economy class when you book with points – I think that’s insane!! 🙂 However, I don’t generally recommend buying miles unless you have a plan to redeem them in the near future. Alaska runs these promotions a few times a year so you should wait until you have a trip coming up.

If you have any questions please tweet me @pointspointers or email me at pointspointers@gmail.com