Extended till 31 October: Buy Alaska Mileage Plan miles at a 40% bonus

Buy miles at 2.11 US cents each up to 29 October 3 pm Singapore time.

[The sale has been extended to 31 October, 3 p.m Singapore time]

Mileage Plan is the frequent flyer program of Alaska Airlines, and a very powerful tool to get discounted business/first class flights if you know how to use it properly.

Get to your happy place.

From now till 31 October 3 pm Singapore time, you can buy Alaska Mileage Plan miles at a 40% bonus. This time round, the equation is simple

  • Buy 1,000 – 19,000 miles = No bonus
  • Buy 20,000+ miles = 40% bonus

Buy Mileage Plan miles at up to a 40% bonus here

You can max out this promotion by buying 60,000 miles with a 24,000 mile bonus, or 84,000 miles for US$1,773.75. That gives you an effective price of 2.11 US cents per mile.

You are capped at buying 60,000 base miles per transaction, but you can do as many transactions as you want.

Should I buy Mileage Plan miles at a 40% bonus?

Provided you have travel plans and aren’t buying them speculatively, a 40% bonus is the best available public sale for Mileage Plan. Sometimes, however, people may be individually targeted for 50% sales.

Mileage Plan is one of my favourite FFPs because you can…

  • Get a free stopover, even on one-way awards (which allows you to do a rather unique JAL trick…see below)
  • Get access to unique partners that you wouldn’t normally be able to access in Singapore, like Hainan Airlines, Icelandair and Fiji Airways
  • Get great value first and business class award redemptions out of Singapore with certain airlines. Have a read of some ideas below:

What do I do with them?

Mileage Plan’s key strength is the sheer variety of options you have for premium cabin redemptions.

Remember that for a mere 25,000 Mileage Plan Miles you can do a “round trip” journey from Singapore to Tokyo in business class, which works out to US$528 if you buy miles at 2.11 US cents each. There’ll be a further ~US$60 of taxes on top of that, and you’ll need to buy a one-way ticket to or from KUL, but all in you’re still looking at a sub US$600 “round trip” business class journey.

Japan Airlines B772 Business Class, the type you might get from SIN-HND

You can also redeem great value Cathay Pacific awards at 50,000/70,000 Mileage Plan miles each way for business/first class from Singapore to the USA. Or you could do Hong Kong to Europe at 42,500/70,000 miles each way for business/first class (you can’t start from Singapore if you’re flying to Europe)

Note that you cannot book Cathay Pacific awards online and will need to call up Mileage Plan customer service to get this done. You should be able to use the British Airways award search engine to check what space is available on CX business and first before calling up Mileage Plan- have a read of that tutorial here. If you’re looking to redeem CX awards, you should note that Mileage Plan sees one less First Class seat and two less Business Class seats than other partners, as Ben from OMAAT reports.

Image result for cathay pacific first class
Cathay Pacific B77W First Class

You could redeem Hainan Airlines business class awards to the USA at 50,000 Mileage Plan miles in business class (but you’d need to position yourself to Bangkok first because they don’t serve Singapore).

Image result for hainan airlines business class
Hainan Airlines Business Class

You could redeem Korean Airlines business class awards from Singapore to the USA at 120,000 miles round trip (one-ways are not allowed)

Korean Airlines B747-8 Business Class | Photo Credit: The Design Air

What card should I use?

Alaska Mileage Plan purchases are processed by Points.com in USD, so here’s the cards I’d use

  • BOC Elite Miles World Mastercard– 5.0 mpd, no cap
  • UOB Visa Signature- 4.0 mpd, min S$1K max S$2K of foreign currency spending in a statement period
  • Citibank Rewards- 4.0 mpd, $1K a month max
  • DBS Woman’s World Card- 4.0 mpd, but requires that you write in to DBS to get the bonus 7X credited (3X, or 1.2 mpd will be awarded as base points)
  • Standard Chartered Visa Infinite– 3.0 mpd, minimum S$2K spending a statement period

Other important things to note

Alaska recently revised the rules for Mileage Plan awards and charge a US$125 fee for changes or cancellations, regardless of how far away you are from departure. If you’re hoping to redeem Emirates or Qantas awards, there may be some issues seeing availability in Business Class. I personally never use Mileage Plan miles for anything other than JAL awards, however, and those work just fine.

Some people have reported issues with purchasing miles if their Mileage Plan account is new. It used to be that your account had to be at least 10 days old to buy miles, but I get irregular reports as to whether this rule is actually enforced. An email to customer service usually sorts out the problem, but if the transaction fails you won’t get charged anyway.

If you’ve found this article useful, please consider using this link to purchase which helps to support the site.

Aaron Wong
Aaron Wong
Aaron founded The Milelion to help people travel better for less and impress chiobu. He was 50% successful.

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No free luncj

A devaluation’s a coming

JW

Alaska has a real creative way of devaluations compared to other programmes. They just offer less seats available while keeping the number of miles for redemption the same.
Interesting but irritating at the same time

Juliet

what is the best way to view the direct destination to and from Hong Kong please?

mary

the program is great in theory, but despite having an account for more than five years and making many attempts to redeem, i’ve only succeeded with intra-Asia JAL and domestic AS flights … waiting for the day CX shows up on their website

Atoll

You’re not going to see it on their website as mentioned, you should try searching on BA [and Qantas’ website to be sure].

I just got tickets with CX to US for next year, after two calls to the friendly customer service team and even had a great chat with the lady about family travels.

To be clear, I only needed one call but I made an extra one before booking just to confirm availability.

Anthony

Hi Atoll, what is the number you called since we are based in Singapore ?

James

I’m currently on a trip using mileage plan on CX from HKG to AMS. Just need to do some research on seats availability and time to talk to their CSO.

Asian Miler

I don’t know why you get inferior rates, but I can get 40% for buying as little as 10k miles.

freedom

Mine is the same. 40% from 10k miles

LK Tan

Would the Citibank Rewards card give 4mpd too on points.com?

Neoh Jiun Hao

There’s a lot of award space for the JAL trick over CNY.

SIN-NRT > NRT-KUL

I’ve recently booked a “one-way” trip myself and on certain days there’s 5 business class seats available for SIN-NRT.

Anthony

Which website show the number of seats available ? I couldn’t find them. Thanks !

Keith

A 40% bonus is not the same as 40% off. The title needs to be fixed.

Jerome Png

How can I find award tix for finnair?
I see that it is 60k miles (biz class) but no cigar

freedom

It is extremely difficult to find availability on Finnair.

Try search BKK to Europe, and you may find a few.

Jerome Png

Thanks.
Indeed, it seems like CX is the better option

Felix

Any idea how long it will take for the miles to be credited into the account?

Flyingduchress

Immediate

Felix

My transaction using BOC elite miles card could not be completed.
Did anyone experience the same issue before?

Jerome Png

Just transacted. It went through.

Chris

Not sure if this is a broad or targeted extension, but I received an email this morning that the sale is extended to 30 Oct. Fyi.

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