Fly around the U.S. for 4k points

Good morning and happy Friday from beautiful Osaka, Japan! 🇯🇵

I’m excited for a weekend of temple hopping and weird street food, but we’ve got some important travel tips to cover first:

• ✈️ Alaska Airlines Sweet Spots

• 🏨 Convert hotel points to airline miles (with a bonus)

• 🔄 Current Transfer Bonuses

✈️ Alaska Airlines Sweet Spots

We’ve been raving pretty hard about the recent merger between Alaska and Hawaiian…

Earlier this week, I told you how cool it was that we can now effectively transfer MR Points to Hawaiian Airlines and then to Alaska.

But why the heck is that so exciting…? What is so special about Alaska Airlines…?

Well, I’ll tell ya.

Alaska, while far from the biggest airline in the U.S., has two things going for it:

1. It is a member of the Oneworld alliance, so you can use Alaska miles to book flights all around the world.

2. They recently revamped their loyalty program to include tons of new sweet spots, regular award sales, and more.

In short, it’s just a great program. And the main drawback to it has been the inability to transfer points.

Now that we CAN transfer points, let’s refresh on some of the exciting ways you can use Alaska miles.

The first sweet spot to be aware of is using Alaska to book domestic flights in the U.S. on American Airlines.

That’s right folks, you can use ALASKA miles to book AMERICAN flights… and at better rates, too.

To illustrate this, let’s look at one of the sexiest things in the travel industry: a well-thought-out, valuable, simple award chart. 🤤

Here is Alaska’s chart for flights in the U.S. (a.k.a. on American Airlines):

As you can see, short flights in the U.S. sell for as few as 4,500 Alaska miles one way.

If you want to fly American Airlines from Philadelphia to Atlanta, American itself would charge you at least 6,500 miles, but often much more (and there’s no way to transfer points to American anyway).

Alaska, on the other hand, only charges 4,500 miles for the same flight.

So, even if this is the only way you use Alaska miles, it’s valuable (this is where today’s subject line comes from, by the way 😉).

But Alaska miles can be much, MUCH more powerful…

Since Alaska is a Oneworld member, you can use those miles to fly premium international airline products, including Qsuites.

In fact, you could spend as few as 15,000 Alaska miles if you wanted to fly a shorter Qsuites route like Doha to Mumbai, which falls into the smallest distance band on Alaska’s international chart for flights in Asia:

That’s cheaper than what any other program charges for the same route, including Qatar itself.

But even if you want to use your miles in some less niche ways, there are plenty of other cool options.

One of the best features of Alaska’s program is the ability to add a free stopover on any award ticket.

So you could theoretically use Alaska miles to fly from Los Angeles to Auckland, New Zealand WITH a free stopover in Fiji, all for just 37,500 miles.

Actually, it’s not even theoretical… it’s literally bookable on their website on many, many dates. 👇

That is a STELLAR deal, folks…

That means that by applying for a card that earns MR Points, you could very easily and quickly rack up enough miles to fly this route round-trip and visit two otherwise distant and expensive countries.

Finally, I referred earlier to the fact that Alaska now has regular award sales.

These “Global Getaway” sales come once every quarter and are a fantastic way to use your Alaska miles for high value.

The last sale included some sweet spots, such as flying from the U.S. to Oman for just 25,000 Alaska miles.

The next sale should launch in about a month, so now is the perfect time to start racking up some MR Points to transfer over when the right time comes.

So here’s the bottom line:

Alaska has always been a great program, but it has been difficult to earn miles with.

That only real caveat to the program is now gone, so I highly recommend you start paying attention to it.

🏨 Convert hotel points to airline miles (with a bonus)

If you weren’t aware, you can turn hotel points into airline miles. It’s always been a thing, but we don’t really talk about it… because it’s usually a terrible idea.

But once in a while, there’s a unique opportunity to actually get some good value by doing this.

Right now, there is such an opportunity when converting Marriott Bonvoy Points to United miles.

Here’s how this relationship works on a normal day:

You can always convert Marriott points to airline miles at a 3:1 ratio. That means transferring 60,000 points will give you 20,000 miles.

Yeah, not great…

With United, however, you’ll get an extra 10,000 miles for every 60,000 points you convert.

So with United, you’ll always get a 2:1 ratio when converting a certain number of miles (60,000 points turns into 30,000 miles).

Right now, however, United will offer you up to a 30% bonus on top of that.

I know this is too much arithmetic for a Friday, but stick with me… 🤓

After registering for the offer, you’ll earn 30% more miles as long as the transfer results in you earning at least 40,000 United miles.

So, if you convert 90,000 Marriott points, you’ll end up with a grand total of 52,000 United miles, which is actually quite solid…

As someone who has a stockpile of Marriott points, I find this quite appealing.

Even though you can transfer UR Points at a 1:1 ratio to United, those points are much better spent with partners like Hyatt instead.

This deal is good through October 31st and allows you to earn up to 25,000 bonus points total.

So if you have a surplus of hotel points and want to cash them out for airline miles, this is a pretty solid time to do so.

That’s all for this week, my friends!

I feel like this week was pretty packed with updates in the points and miles world, so I hope you learned a thing or two and enjoyed our content.

Have a great weekend, and I’ll see you again next week.

Love,

34.6937° N, 135.5023° E