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.

In response to Captain G‘s previous post about the best Visa/Mastercard (or alternative to using an American Express card), I would like to tell you that the Chase Priority Club Mastercard is the only card in my wallet. Like the Chase Sapphire Preferred card (see Terminal D‘s post), it does not have foreign transaction fees.

In addition, the Chase Priority Club Mastercard annual fee is 50% less of the Chase Sapphire Preferred credit card. The Chase Priority Club Mastercard annual fee is only $49 a year (first year is free). The $49 annual fee is still less than my old American Express Starwood Preferred card which was $65 a year. The Chase Priority Club Mastercard annual fee can be offset with these benefits:

1.  You get an annual free night at any Priority Club property after one year. The real translation is:  at any Intercontinental Hotel in the world which is normally ~$250 a night.

2.  Platinum Priority Club status. This perk is not as good as SPG Platinum but gives you small perks like free bottles water, free Internet, and the occasional room upgrade. Note that the American Express SPG card gives you Gold membership which is equivalent to Priority Club Platinum.

3.  A 10% discount on point redemptions for hotels which is a huge value (36,000 points for Intercontinental instead of 40,000). You should also check out our previous blog post on why hotel points are worth more than airline miles.

You can also check out my previous post regarding the British Airways and Asiana credit cards.

The Triangle Trip Team would like to congratulate The Coach for making SPG Lifetime Platinum, and Terminal D and Captain G for making SPG Lifetime Gold.

Here’s a link for more more information about SPG Lifetime Gold and Platinum statuses.