Triangle Trip

With the pending merger between Alaska Airlines and Virgin America, Alaska will be merging its Mileage Plan with Virgin America’s Elevate Frequent Flyer programs. Virgin America’s Elevate Points will be converted to Alaska Mileage Plan miles at a rate of 1.3 Mileage Plan miles per 1 Elevate point. Unlike previous airline frequent flyer program conversions where it’s 1:1, the Virgin to Alaska miles conversion will net you 30% more miles. Everyone should try to earn more Virgin Elevate Points before the merger of the two frequent flyer programs.

Given Alaska’s generosity, we also recommend you move your hotel points to Virgin America’s Elevate points. For example, transferring your Starwood (SPG) Starpoints to Virgin America Elevate points is 1 Starpoint for 1 Elevate Point. If you transferred 20,000 SPG Starpoints, SPG would give you another 5,000 points for the transfer. After transferring the SPG Starpoints to Virgin Elevate Points and the Alaska Virgin frequent flyer merger, you can net up to 63% bonus in Alaska miles. We highly recommend you execute the above strategy before the Alaska and Virgin America programs merge on January 9, 2017.

Here are two related articles you may also find interesting:

If you are not an Alaska Airlines frequent flyer or do not want to maintain too many airline accounts, did you know that you can bank your airline miles with SkyTeam and OneWorld partners!? Click here to find out.

Here’s an article on why we think hotel points are more valuable than airline miles.

No airline miles are useless. Airline miles, next to SPG points, are a very valuable currency even though they are being devalued daily. You should set a notification in your calendar to alert you to check your frequent flyer miles every year. If you have not done so, check your old frequent flyer programs and look for a great deal. I just found one on American Airlines which also allows you to book one way trips unlike other airlines.

Alternatively, here are just a few easy ways to keep your miles from expiring:

1.  Use your miles to redeem for a magazine subscription – which I’ve been doing for the past several years.
2.  Tie your frequent flyer account to the Rewards Network mileage dining program. Here’s the link.
3.  Or you could do what I did below:

My friends and I decided to sign up for the Paris Marathon occurring in April 2015.  And more recently, I got the expiring American Airlines miles e-mail notice.  I only had 20,000 so odd miles from 5 or 6 years ago that I never touched and almost forgot about.  Little did I expect I could purchase a San Francisco (SFO) to Paris (either airport) flight for 20K miles one-way.  With all the devaluation going on at airlines, this was a pleasant surprise.  I booked an USAirways flight (AA partner)  for 20k with one stop in Charlotte and minimal fees.  Note that British Airways (another OneWorld partner) requires you to pay an excessive stopover in London for $300+.

If your USAir miles somehow expired, refer to our previous post to get re-activated.