Lifemiles 130% sale and discounted Star Alliance awards now available

Lifemiles has announced both a sale and a discount on selected Star Alliance redemptions. Here’s the details:

Bonus Lifemiles sale of up to 130%

From now till 1 June 2018 2pm Singapore time, Lifemiles is having a sale on purchased miles with up to a 130% bonus. Here’s how your cost per mile changes depending on which bonus you get

• 105%-1.61 US cents per mile
• 120%-1.5 US cents per mile
• 130%-1.43 US cents per mile

We’ve seen bigger sales in the past, although depending on your situation and how urgently you need the miles you may decide to pull the trigger earlier.

Discounted Star Alliance redemptions between certain city pairs

Lifemiles is also offering up to 48% off award redemptions on Star Alliance partner awards between certain city pairs. You’ll need to redeem your flights between 4 May and 15 June 2018, but the travel period can be any period that you can find in the Lifemiles search engine. Tickets redeemed under this promotion can be changed and cancelled under the usual Lifemiles fee structure.

Here’s the list of discounted routes published on the site, in PDF format. The discounts are not necessarily reversible. That is, if you see X–>Y on offer, don’t assume Y–> X is available at the same price unless this table explicitly says so.

I’ve taken the liberty of converting the PDF into Excel and adding airport codes for easy searching. I’m guessing you guys will be most interested in the possibilities to and from Singapore, so I’ve filtered them out here.

Flights to and from Narita, Taipei, Seoul, Los Angeles and Chicago are on sale, and although the discounts aren’t as high as 48% (there’s only actually one city pairing that’s on 48% sale, economy class from HND to PVG), I still fancy a few of them.

The highlight for me has got to be flights to Narita, however. 29,000 miles one-way for Business Class at a price of 1.375 US cents makes this US$399, or US$800 in total. Yes, you could do better with the Alaska Mileageplan/JAL trick, but at least in this case you won’t have to find your own way back from KUL/BKK.

I’m seeing the discounted rates already loading and reflecting on Lifemiles.com. Here’s SIN-LAX for example, for 67,000 miles instead of the usual 78,000 in business class. You’ll be flying on United’s non-stop UA38 flight. 15h 40 min of non-stop United? Where do I sign up?

Conclusion

The usual best practices apply here- you should only be buying miles if you have an intended use in mind. It’s also good to confirm the award space you’re seeing on Lifemiles.com is not phantom by double checking it against what you see on United.com or Aeroplan.

Lifemiles purchases code as airfare, so you’ll earn 4 mpd with your DBS Woman’s World Card (first S$2,000 each month) or 3 mpd with your DBS Altitude cards (first S$5,000 each month).