Warning: discrepancy in the T&Cs of the UOB Asia Miles 20% transfer bonus

Update: UOB has clarified that there is no cap on the 20% bonus. Transfer away!

Back on 10 May, Matthew wrote about UOB’s 20% transfer bonus for UNI$ to Asia Miles conversions. This promotion is currently ongoing and will run till 9 June.

I wasn’t intending to take advantage of this promotion originally, but after the recent Asia Miles devaluation I realised there was a potential opportunity to preserve the value of my miles by transferring UNI$ over.

That’s because I calculated the magnitude of the devaluation to be about 15-20% to me, based on my preference for redeeming Business Class awards (the magnitude of the devaluation will be different for each individual depending on his/her redemption patterns; in fact if you redeem economy class only you’re looking at a revaluation thanks to the reduction in cost of one-way awards). Therefore, if I transferred my UNI$ to Asia Miles with a 20% bonus, I’d be roughly preserving their value.

I transferred the equivalent of 210,000 miles on 26 May and by 30 May the miles had shown up in my account.

Now the bonus wasn’t reflecting but as per the abbreviated T&C found at the bottom of the promotion’s landing page, bonus miles will only be credited by 30 June 2018. Fine, I thought, I’m ok to wait.

But on the Telegram Group someone pointed out a discrepancy that is going to make this a very nervous wait for me. Here’s a link to the full T&C as hosted by the UOB site. That’s shown on the left below. And here’s a link to the full T&C as hosted by Cathay Pacific. That’s shown on the right below.

You’ll notice the T&C are word for word the same, with one key exception- point 2. The UOB T&C mention nothing about a cap on the bonus 20% miles, whereas the Cathay T&C state that the maximum bonus is 20,000 per Asia Miles member!

If Cathay is right, that means I’d have maxed out the bonus with a 100,000 mile transfer and the remaining 110,000 miles I transfer get no bonus at all. Obviously, that’s not cool since this was mentioned nowhere on the UOB T&C. But on another level, I wonder what’s going on here- it’s hard to write this off as a typo when the rest of the text is word for word the same, which implies one is a copy/paste job of the other. That means someone consciously deleted the cap from the UOB T&C, or consciously added the cap to the Cathay T&C.

Like I said, no bonus has posted yet but if my posted bonus is capped I’m definitely going to raise a stink with UOB. I don’t think it’s fair for consumers who transferred their UNI$ on the basis of the T&C they read from the UOB site to get shortchanged. If you’re in my situation, I’d strongly advise you to save a copy of the current T&C that appear on the UOB site and take whatever screenshots you need to back up a dispute if/when it happens. Here’s a Dropbox link to the original set of UOB T&C in case the one on the site gets changed.

Again, I don’t want to prejudge the situation because for all I know the bonus will come through without a cap in the next few days/weeks, but it pays to be prepared. Here’s hoping UOB does “right by us” in this particular scenario.