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Asiamiles Credit Card 10% – 15% Transfer Bonus
Asiamiles, the mileage programme of Cathay Pacific, has started a credit card transfer bonus promotion.
You need to register on this page first. Now through 31 January 2021, you are entitled to a bonus when transferring credit card points into Asiamiles:
- Recipients of targeted emails get a 15% bonus
- Everyone else gets a 10% bonus
The bonus miles will be deposited into your accounts within 8 – 10 weeks of the promotion’s closing date.
In the UK, the only participating bank is American Express Membership Rewards. 10% doesn’t sound a lot, however if you have the Amex ICC card it means every point is equivalent to 1.35 * 1.1 = 1.485 miles, which is a great conversion ratio and worth considering.
For the use of Asiamiles please see my intro here. Unfortunately they’ve eliminated stop-overs on one-way awards so you can no longer book two trips as a one-way flight, however Asiamiles still represents better value when redeeming long-haul premium cabins compared to Avios.
Free Emirates Silver for transferring your hotel points
Like many other airlines, Emirates has run a few different forms of promotions this year to collect funding, and the one currently running is particularly interesting.
You can access the offer here. It appears that the offer page is only shown when selected country is UAE, but according to the terms and conditions it should be available to all members globally.
Before 31 January 2021, all award miles transferred from eligible partner programmes will also earn 25% tier miles as a bonus. You can earn maximum 25,000 tier miles (requires 100K award miles transfer), which is just enough to upgrade you to Emirates Silver.
Eligible partners include certain banks in UAE, as well as Accor, Hyatt, Marriott and Shangri-la.
When flying Emirates, Silver offers the following privileges:
- Free seat selection
- Extra baggage allowance
- Priority check-in and boarding
- Business Class lounge access at Dubai
You could also earn 1 Emirates mile for every USD you spend at Marriott hotels globally through the Your World programme, and this is in addition to the Marriott points. Note that you’ll first need to link your Marriott and Emirates accounts here.
Emirates doesn’t have the best redemption chart in the world, however for redeeming Business Class or First Class tickets on their own metal the miles are not bad. I transferred 85K Amex points earlier this year for a First Class trip in February, and God knows whether I’ll be able to fly…
Aside from redeeming on flights, you could also use the miles on sports or event tickets sponsored by Emirates, which usually are great deals.
The best shot it is to transfer 240K Marriott points over and hit Emirates Silver straightaway, probably some time in January to maximise the duration of your membership. It may not be a crazy idea if you are sitting on a pile of Marriott points, and Emirates miles aren’t useless after all.
Multiply your miles earning on Lufthansa flights
Lufthansa (or more accurately, Miles & More) ceased selling award miles a few years ago, and even completely shut down partner transfers last year due to a lawsuit, although I believe it has been partially resumed since. However, there still appears to be a way to purchase miles from them, although kind of indirectly.
Miles and More has partnered with this company called Loy Logic to handle such transactions. One of the services is called Multiply Miles, which basically lets you pay for a subscription that awards you extra miles on your next Lufthansa Group flights.
You can choose from three pre-defined subscriptions, Lite, Classic and Pro:
Alternatively once logged in, you have the option of customising your own package:
At the lower end, you can pay €99 to double your miles for a month, capped at 5,000 miles; and at the top end, you can pay €2,049 to quadruple your miles for 12 months, capped at 120,000 miles.
As you can easily see, these aren’t any good rates at all, as you are paying 1.7 – 2 eurocents per mile, let alone the fact that you must fly to collect them! How Lufthansa always comes up with such odd and funny ideas really baffles me.
On the other hand, another service it provides could be quite useful – Transfer Miles. You could transfer miles between accounts at the price of 100 miles / euro, with a maximum of 50,000 miles. If you or someone you know need a small amount of miles for a redemption, it could be a cheap and fast way to solve it.
Buy Star Alliance Gold & 130K miles for €718
TAP Portugal has been running a status match promotion – and now even better, you could buy out a Star Alliance Gold card directly without any conditions!
The offer page is here. Now through 30th November, if you purchase the Club Top or Club Platinum membership, you’ll be granted TAP Portugal Silver or Gold status for six months.
They match Star Alliance Silver and Gold status respectively. Your account will be updated by 9th December.
As we know, *A Silver means next to nothing, so let’s just take a look what Club Platinum offers:
- Annual fee: €718
- *A Gold for six-months, and then TAP Silver benefits until it expires
- 36,000 welcome miles, plus 8,000 miles per month, so a total of 132,000 miles after one year
- Some exclusive benefits when you fly TAP, e.g. 25% bonus miles
*A Gold comes with business class check-in, fast track, airport lounge access (plus one guest) and additional baggage allowance etc, when you fly TAP, Lufthansa Group, United, ANA and other *A carriers. You are essentially pay seven hundred euro for these benefits and 130K miles.
You can check TAP Portugal’s redemption chart here. There’s nothing exceptional, but with 130K miles you can still get a one-way flight in business class from Europe to any part of world except Australia, subject to taxes and fees of course.
Qatar Airways launches student club – discount, extra baggage and elite status!
If you are or are going to be a student, Qatar Airways has just launched a Student Club programme which is worth joining for a range of benefits.
You can access the programme page here. To qualify for the club, you must be aged between 18 and 30, and studying for a university degree or higher. You need to provide expected graduation date upon registration.
The first benefit is fare discount – you receive a 10%-off promo code immediately after enrolment. Once you’ve completed the trip you’ll receive a second 15%-off code; and upon completion of the second trip you’ll receive a 20%-off one. You’ll only receive the discount three times and they only apply to flights taken by the member.
According to the terms, as I understand it the discount is off the full ticket price, rather than just the base fare, which is quite good.
In addition, you also receive the following benefits:
- 10kg extra baggage allowance if you don’t hold any elite status
- Complimentary Super Wi-fi onboard
- One complimentary date change per ticket – note that fare difference is still payable
Last but not least, upon graduation you’ll also receive an uplift of your Qatar Airways Privilege Club status. As long as you’ve flown at least one round-trip (revenue ticket only) per year after enrolment, when you graduate your Privilege Club status will be upgraded by one tier. If you are already Platinum, you status is extended by one year for free.
The programme looks very practical for students who travel long-haul regularly. I’d probably join if I could, however I’d prefer to credit my flights to a better loyalty programme instead, e.g. British Airways 😉.
Impressive Finnair promotion: 100% bonus on miles purchase & “free” Oneworld Sapphire status
Finnair is running a very interesting bonus promotion on miles purchase, and plus you can get free elite status with them (and Oneworld)!
You can view the offer here. Firstly, you get a bonus when making a purchase of at least 5,000 Finnair Plus points:
- 5,000 – 49,000 points: 60%
- 50,000 – 99,000 points: 80%
- 100,000 – 150,000 points: 100%
At 100%, you are buying Finnair Plus points at €64.375 per 10K points, which is roughly £58 at the current exchange rate.
The best use of Finnair points is on cabin upgrade:
- One-way intra-Europe upgrade from HEL costs 10K points (£58)
- One-way intercontinental upgrade from HEL costs 50K points (£290)
In terms of reward flights, a one-way flight from HEL to North America or Asia in business class costs 80K points (£464) plus taxes and surcharges, which is passable.
The second part of this offer is more fun though. During the promotion period, you will earn 25% of the total amount you buy as tier points. If you max out at 150,000 points, with 100% bonus on top it means you will get 75,000 tier points for free. It is more than enough to lift you to Finnair’s Silver status, which requires 30,000 tier points only.
Equivalent to BA’s Bronze, Finnair Silver comes with priority check-in and seat selection privilege. It doesn’t just stop here though – Finnair allows you to transfer award points into tier points at the ratio of 3:1, which means you could convert 15,000 of the purchased points into 5,000 tier points, and upgrade yourself to Finnair Gold (80,000 tier points).
In a word, if you are happy to pay £1740 to Finnair, you get free Oneworld Sapphire status that grants you business class lounge access (plus one guest), priority check-in and boarding, free seat selection and extra baggage allowance. In addition you are also left with an account balance of 285K Finnair points.
Similar to BA, Finnair’s status accrual is based on membership year rather than calendar year. I’m not totally sure but from the sound it if you open a new account now and take part, your Gold status is valid for the current and next membership year, which is almost two years.
Upon reaching Gold, you get to choose one of the following three elite gifts:
- Four one-way short-haul upgrade vouchers
- One one-way long-haul upgrade voucher
- One 2-4-1 award ticket voucher
Note that for Silver members, the cap on your converted tier points is 40,000, so you cannot just buy your way up to Platinum using this trick.
Best advantages for having British Airways Gold
I’ve written about BA Silver’s benefits previously, and today let’s have a look at Gold.
You could see the list of Gold benefits on BA’s page here. To achieve Gold, you need to meet the following two conditions:
- Fly four eligible segments
- Earn 1,500 tier points
An eligible segment is a BA-operated or -coded flight, or an IB-operated and -coded flight. It must be on a paid ticket, i.e. award ticket doesn’t count.
The following benefits are in my preference order, and all (except the reward ticket ones) apply to any Oneworld Emerald equivalent.
[First Class Lounge Access]
One thing that distinguishes Oneworld from the other two alliances is that many Oneworld airlines have dedicated first-class lounges and, more importantly, Emerald elites are entitled to using them.
Being BA Gold, you could use BA’s Galleries First lounge at LHR T5, which to be fair isn’t that special. However, Cathay Pacific has a pretty good First lounge at T3, and not to mention the flagship ones at its home base HKG.
[Extra Award Ticket Inventory]
Extra award ticket inventory is made available to Gold card holders. More specifically, economy class V inventory is always open for redemption for Gold elites. You’ll see a message like this when searching for Avios tickets:
This is more useful than you think. I found it much easier to find award ticket in economy class once I turned Gold!
[Free Seat Selection]
Like Silver, Gold members can select seats for free at the time of booking. And this includes extra legroom seats in economy class on long-haul flights too, which is an improvement over Silver.
You could choose seat for anyone else on your booking as well. Even with separate bookings, you could call BA’s hotline to achieve this as long as your companions are travelling on the same flight and in the same cabin. This is called To Complete Party.
[Fast Track Security & Immigration]
You enjoy fast track security at Heathrow and select airports worldwide. From my personal experience it doesn’t make a huge difference though.
Fast track immigration at Heathrow is much more useful for me, as I’m a non-EU passport holder. It tends to save me, perhaps 30 minutes on average each time.
[Gold Priority Reward]
If there’s no award ticket space at all, you can still force open redemption inventory using this privilege. The only condition is that the revenue ticket is still selling, and you must pay double the original Avios required.
It cannot be done online, and you must book at least 30 days in advance.
I’m single so never had a chance to use this benefit! However, if you have children, therefore need more tickets and are restricted in terms of when you can travel, I do see how this privilege can be useful.
[Priority Boarding]
As Gold you are always placed in Group 1 when boarding. It means you are guaranteed to be amongst the first ones on board!
As I said before, it’s great when you are flying economy on a busy flight, as boarding early means you needn’t worry about luggage storage.
[First Class Check-in]
You can always use the First Class check-in counters at the airport. At Heathrow, there is a dedicated check-in area – First Class Wing (my review here) available which is a special experience.
[Extra Baggage Allowance]
Like Silver elites, as Gold you are entitled to an additional check-in baggage as well. However, Silver’s extra allowance doesn’t apply if the original allowance is already two bags or more, whereas there’s no such limitation for Gold.
It means, flying First you could carry 4 * 32kg pieces for free!
Note that however, it’s not applicable when flying Economy Basic – you still won’t have any allowance in the case.
Is another Avios devaluation approaching?
Right after the amazing 50%-off redemption sale, it appears that BA may be doing something dodgy in the background. I’ve just noticed something weird with the Avios pricing on certain routes.
One of them is Tokyo Haneda to London Heathrow. Earlier this year Japan outlawed fuel surcharge on most flights departing from the country (or at least it is my understanding), so HND-LHR should only carries £30-ish taxes.
When I try to book an off-peak economy-class flight on BA, although the fee does look right, you can see it tries to charge me 35,000 Avios instead of 19,500.
If you click continue it gets worse. Now the fee becomes £100 (first option)?! The standard Avios pricing is still available (19,500 points), however in this case BA wants £180 from you which is crazy.
I’m not sure if it’s even legal, when carrier-impose surcharge is banned by Japan. There are also a couple of amusing facts:
- Economy class on Japan Airlines costs only 31,000 Avios + £28.9
- Pricing on other BA cabins hasn’t changed – therefore premium economy on the same flight costs 39,000 Avios + £27.1, which works out cheaper than economy class!
Similar irregularity can be found on HKG-LHR as well. Japan and Hong Kong do have one thing in common: both of them have imposed restrictions on fuel surcharges. Admittedly the latter has lifted its restriction, however most airlines haven’t really increased their surcharge yet.
So is it a way for BA to pocket extra money / Avios from the fuel surcharge loss? It’s unwise for them to only execute it on economy class though, as that’s the least attractive redemption option anyway. Whether it’s an intended experiment, or simply an IT glitch (although unlikely) I have no clue, and I hope BA can make some clarification or fix it soon!