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Earn 8,500 bonus miles with Cathay Pacific’s Mini Goal offer
Cathay Pacific launched an interesting offer for additional bonus miles if you make any qualifying earning transaction in the next few months. There are many ways to trigger the bonus, including flying and transfer from Cathay’s partners.
You can check your tailored Mini Goal offer here. Somehow I’m redirected to a page in Chinese after signing in, but it’s definitely not targeted at the Chinese market only. My account address is in the UK and I can sign up successfully.
My offer is as follows:
- Have one qualifying earning activity to get 500 bonus miles
- Earn 2,000 miles to get 1,000 bonus miles
- Earn 5,000 miles to get 2,500 bonus miles
The maximum bonus I could earn is 4,000 miles. Another popular version of the offer is:
- Have two qualifying earning activities to get 500 bonus miles
- Earn 5,000 miles to get 2,000 bonus miles
- Earn 12,000 miles to get 6,000 bonus miles
Where the bonus could total to 8,500 miles.
Besides flying, miles transferred from Cathay’s partners also count, including for example Marriott Bonvoy and American Express Membership Rewards. Depends which offer you get, you can transfer 5,000 Amex points into 9,000 Cathay miles, or 12,000 Amex points into 20,500 Cathay miles.
You have until January 31st to accomplish the task and the bonus miles will be deposited by March 31st.
Search reward flights with ChatGPT & Seats.aero
If you haven never heard of Seats.aero, they are an online search engine for award flight availability, kind of like Seatspy except that they have data of many frequent flyer programs, including United MileagePlus, AAdvantage, Delta Skymiles, Air Canada Aeroplan and Virgin Atlantic Flying Club etc.
Most importantly Seats.aero is free as long as your search date is within the next two months. However they don’t have the best UI – you need to switch between programs, and the Excel-inspired interface is a pain when you need to search for multiple dates and cities.
Good news is, Seats.aero has now developed a plugin that is available on ChatGPT’s plugin store. Note that you must pay $24 per month for ChatGPT Plus to use that feature, although the plugin itself is free.
GPT’s backend has full access to Seats.aero’s data, and you can query using natural language.
- You can name a city, country or region
- You can specify a date or a date range
- You can specify the airline or alliance
- You can narrow down the search results by adding restrictions
It appears that you can’t specify the frequent flyer program though (e.g. Aeroplan). Here are some examples:
It is a very powerful feature that makes finding reward flight availability much easier. ChatGPT Plus doesn’t have a free trial so you must pay the $24 though, which is not cheap unless you use it regularly.
SLH gift card 20% bonus sale
SLH (Small Luxury Hotels of the World) is running a pre-Christmas sale on gift cards, which is worth considering if you plan to stay at their hotels.
The offer page is here. You won’t see any promotional message but the bonus is shown on the purchase page. You earn a 20% bonus for any face value purchased until December 18.
- Gift card is valid at all SLH hotels
- Can be redeemed online by entering the gift card number at special requests when booking, or at the hotel front desk
- Can be redeemed against hotel accommodation or accompanying food & drinks purchase
- Valid for 12 months
SLH has more than 500 hotels worldwide, some London properties including:
- DUKES London
- The Academy
- The LaLiT
- The Franklin
- Flemings Mayfair
- St James’s Hotel and Club
Many of the SLH hotels can be booked via Hyatt with cash or points, and some of them are part of the Amex FHR program too. It’s unclear whether such bookings are eligible for gift card redemption though, and I suggest you clarify with the hotel first.
Ritz Carlton Reserve hotels are now Marriott Bonvoy participating
Despite sharing the Ritz Carlton name, Ritz Carlton Reserve hotels haven’t been participating in the Bonvoy program which means you couldn’t earn / use Marriott points or enjoy elite benefits – until today.
Effective immediately, Marriott members enjoy the following benefits when staying at any Ritz Carlton Reserve hotels (read more here):
Elite members have the tier bonus per usual. Gold elites and above also earn up to 1,000 welcome points. There’s no room upgrade or complimentary breakfast offered as expected.
So far there’s very little difference for being an Ambassador elite over Titanium, but now they’ll have the prestige of $150 resort credit per stay at Ritz Carlton Reserve hotels, which is one step towards the right direction.
You can also redeem Marriott points for free nights, which ranges from 80,000 to 240,000 points.
There are only five Ritz Carlton Reserve hotels at the moment:
- Bali, Indonesia
- Phulay Bay, Thailand
- Los Cabos, Mexico
- Higashiyama, Japan
- Dorado Beach, Puerto Rico
But more properties (e.g. Jiuzhaigou in China) are in the pipeline.
