Star Alliance member Avianca’s LifeMiles program is selling miles with up to a 125% bonus (so under 1.5 cents apiece) through tomorrow. You have to log in to your LifeMiels account before seeing the offer, the landing page just shows regular price.
It’s a tiered offer:
- 100% bonus: 1000 – 50,000 miles purchased
- 115% bonus: 51,000 – 100,000 miles purchased
- 125% bonus: 101,000+ miles purchased
You can buy up to 200,000 miles.
Here’s a purchase of 101,000 miles — at a cost of 1.467 cents apiece.
LifeMiles is a fantastic Star Alliance program and a 60,000 mile signup bonus will absolutely be worthwhile.
- No fuel surcharges
- Reasonable award chart
Not all connections are bookable, you’re pretty much limited to the options you see on their redemption website (which is serviceable) and telephone customer service is challenging (e-mail is better). I’m a fan of the program and have a few hundred thousand miles there myself.
This isn’t the lowest LifeMiles sells miles for. They’ll get down another 1/10th of a cent per point. But it’s a good deal nonetheless for some people.
Still I’d only buy with a specific use in mind because they do offer deals on purchased miles regularly.
Terms and conditions:
The bonus for this promotion is 2×1 + 25% additional miles. The bonus is calculated based on the miles purchased per individual transaction without taking into account the 2×1 bonus.
Promotion applies exclusively for members who have received this email directly from LifeMiles.The miles must be purchased in multiples of 1,000.
The minimum miles to purchase per transaction is 1,000 LifeMiles.
The maximum miles to purchase per transaction during this promotion to receive the bonus showed above is 200,000 LifeMiles if the Member has not purchased miles in 2017 or 200,000 LifeMiles minus the miles previously purchased by the Member in 2017.
The Member may purchase miles outside of the limits showed above but in such case the transactions will be processed but no bonuses will be granted.
The maximum amount of miles to receive by a member per calendar year outside of this promotion is 200,000 LifeMiles (including miles purchased and bonuses received). If the member surpasses the limit, through purchases made during this promotion and other purchases in 2017, taking into account the bonuses received for those purchases, he or she will not be able to purchase any more miles until the next calendar year.
Each package of 1,000 LifeMiles costs USD $33.00 without applicable taxes and USD $40.26* including applicable taxes according to correspondence country registered in the LifeMiles database**
Only form of payment through Avianca’s Call Center and LifeMiles.com: credit card or international debit card. Cash payments are only allowed at Avianca’s Information Centers. Other Conditions: The receipt of the transaction will reflect the total number of miles accrued to the member´s account, including the bonus miles and the total charge for the transaction.
WARNING – they have a new website that is very broken. They are very heavily blocking award availability, much more than ever before.
Even if you find something on their website, there is a high chance that it errors out when you go to pay. Buying miles with LM is high risk at the moment.
I echo what Tom posted. The website is the worst its ever been and good luck in finding availability that ACTUALLY doesn’t error out!
Recently used 126K LM for a r/t J award NA-Europe. Bought miles under 1.5c p/m two years ago. However for one of the flights I had to pay for a flight to get me to the gateway city. I wouldn’t bank a lot of LM miles unless you can first find the flights that satisfy your travel plans. Avianca flight award search yields limited choices to nothing most of the time. It’s OK for intra-Europe fights, but J awards cost 27K o/w at around $400 purchased LM. You can search Kayak/Expedia and find the same flights around the same price! Also, I noticed that the new LM search engine that Thai or Singapore J or Y awards are now are almost non-existent. Be careful!
I will third that comment. It is literally the worst website ever and has been for a while. Literally no availability for anything even with hours of searching and combating the errors. I bought miles last year and used some on a trip and have a good deal left over and I have not been able to find anything available since January of last year. The worst is when you finally find something searching business class but find out that every leg is actually in economy except the short haul domestic portion.
+ for all of the above cautions – don’t buy anything until you have searched and found the routing you need.
Its bad these 125% bonus has but 0% redemption value.
The problem of LIFEMILES is that, since they launched the new search tool some weeks ago, it’s IMPOSSIBLE to find any rewards, at least, from ASIANA, EVA and THAI AIRWAYS.
And I’m talking about rewards that you can find in UNITED website. So, it’s seems that LIFEMILES no more give us the chance of get rewards from ASIANA, EVA and THAI AIRWAYS.
I constantly find awards at United and Aeroplan that do not exist at LifeMiles. Until they start offering normal availability there is no reason to spend useful dollars on them. Right now I just want to get rid of my existing supply and be done with them.
Agree with commenters above re increased blocking that went into effect a couple wks ago. I have been a buyer in past promos but will no longer buy or transfer from SPG speculatively, now in spend-down mode.
However for inventory that does show as available on LM but then errors out in booking process, I have had good success emailing support with screenshots showing available flight, desired payment option, and error msg; they setup the PNR manually then you call in to book. A pain but helps with spending down accumulated LM.