Regular readers of this blog know that I’m not a fan of Continental Onepass.

The only thing it has going for it is airline partners where you occasionally have a chance to redeem miles. Alaska Airlines has generally good award availability. They’re in Skyteam, which opens up plenty of airlines, but almost across-the-board Skyteam members offer poor award chances.

Continental is in my experience terrible at making seats available at the ‘normal’ mileage requirements on most routes and best flight times, and this is especially true in premium classes of service. So when collecting Continental miles, realize that they aren’t worth as much as American miles, for instance.

(Though you can transfer Onepass miles to Amtrak, and from Amtrak to Hilton, and eventually get something for your points — though Amtrak places a limit for their non-elite members of 25,000 points transferred out of a Guest Rewards account each calendar year.)

Still, there are times it might make sense to accumulate a few Continental miles.

Back in 2000 there were some megabonuses, I vaugely recall some folks earning 100,000 or more miles on a single roundtrip flight.

And then there are offers like this one — through October 2nd when you register and get a Continental Mastercard you’ll receive 15,000 bonus miles with first purchase and double miles on all spending through the end of the year. That’s at least three full months of double miles.

So if you’re a big spender this could be worth it. After all, even when regular-priced awards aren’t available you can spend additional miles to buy your way out of capacity controls.

This is not a ‘fee waived the first year’ offer like you frequently find with American and United credit cards, but may work for some folks.