Here is an interesting opportunity for those of you who are in the market for PremierMiles, and are based in India. While I haven’t written about it, LifeMiles has been offering a promotion with buy 1, get 1.2 miles free for those of you who are based outside of Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama, Ecuador, or the United States. This promotion is valid till May 29, 2015 for accounts opened before May 4, 2015.
The details of the promotion are on www.lifemiles.com. In essence, with this promotion, you get LifeMiles at 1.5 US Cents per mile.
But here is the double dip opportunity. Yesterday, I wrote about the Citibank PremierMiles promotion where you get 25000 bonus PremierMiles on international spend. LifeMiles are processed as airline spending by the airline, and since the purchase is made in US Dollars, you have an opportunity on hand to get bonus PremierMiles with your LifeMiles account.
So, if you decided to purchase Lifemiles worth approximately 960 USD, i.e., about 29000 Lifemiles, you could end up with 63800 LifeMiles, as well as 25000 bonus PremierMiles = INR 11250 in travel cash or 12500 bonus JP Miles. You will also earn regular 6250 Premiermiles. So, the total worth of your money is:
- Money Spent = USD 960/INR 62500
- Lifemiles: +63800
- PremierMiles: +31250 PM (INR 14062 travel cash or 15625 airmiles)
In case you are planning to take on this opportunity, you have only till May 29, 2015 to jump on it.
Do let me know in case you take part in this fabulous double dip opportunity. I personally don’t have a PremierMiles CC anymore, but I will for sure buy some Life Miles in this promotion.
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Sounds interesting, so just enrolled!
Nice share AJ. LifeMiles (LM) went through some devaluation last year, and so did they hike the cost of purchasing miles by around 15% or more. The worse part is, that its too difficult to find First flight award tickets, to bring some value out of the purchase. To illustrate If i wanted to fly a BOM-IST and back, it costs me 90000 Avianca miles in Business (Air India + Turkish). The 90000 Miles cost me close to INR 95K (assuming all dollar conversions), while you get the same business class tickets for under INR 120K in revenue. Its worth a try if you can find a first class suite in Singapore Air, or one of the more worthy Star alliance aircrafts (Thai or ANA, perhaps).
For those interested in boosting up the Premier miles conversions, this works up really great upto 25000 Miles, which is procured at a cost of 50K or slightly more, making it 0.5 premier Mile per Rupee spent (wow, like in AJ’s 2014 post). With the new premier miles devaluation ratio of 2:1 that’s effectively 0.25 converted “Air miles” for every INR spent (still wow). I did some math around it, and the spend (on Avianca miles) breaks even around 85k mile purchase costing 193K INR, at which the conversion becomes 0.1 converted “Air mile” for every INR spent, which takes us back to the golden Premier CC days. Sadly Avianca has a cap on the max Life miles purchased in a year at LM 150,000 (including any bonuses). So in this case that’s 68K LM translating to 150000 LM (2×1 + 10%), for which you still earn 11.85 of converted “Air miles”, for every INR spent on your Premier Miles CC.
Note:What i meant by converted Air miles, is the final no. of miles, you get while transferring them from Premier Miles to their FFP partners. Sorry for the confusion~!
Maybe give credit where it is due? 😉
@Superflyboy, I first made this experiment last year and wrote about this here: http://livefromalounge.boardingarea.com/2014/05/21/buy-2x-lifemiles-till-may-25-earn-1-mile-extra-for-every-5-you-buy/
What would life miles be primarily useful for, in the Indian scheme of things.
@manan in the indian context only if you travel abroad you can use lifemiles. while you can use them for air india tickets domestically, you are far better off with AI’s own program for those redemptions since they are much cheaper