Cheap Business and First Class Deals With US Airways 100% Buy Miles Promo

Nov. 26, 2012

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4 min read

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Update: Some offers mentioned below are no longer available. View the current offers here.

Would you pay ~$2,200 to fly roundtrip business class to Australia or $1,800 for roundtrip business class to Tokyo or $1,000 for roundtrip first class United (on a 3 cabin plane) JFK-Los Angeles or San Francisco? If so, you might want to consider taking advantage of US Airways buy miles promotions, which essentially allows you to get those trips for around those prices.

There’s no need to register, since this isn’t a targeted promotion, and you’ll receive the bonus automatically on the Buy Miles page. However, there are a few rules:

1. You must be a Dividend Miles member for at least 12 days, so sign up now if you are not and want to take advantage (sign-up here for a free account).
2. This promotion limits mileage purchases to 50,000 miles – 100,000 miles with the bonus.
3. For each purchase there is a processing fee of $30 and a 7.5% tax recovery charge, and GST/HST will be charged to Canadian residents.
4. These transactions are processed by points.com so it won’t count towards airfare multiplier categories like the 3 points per $1 on the Premier Rewards Gold or 2 points per $1 on the Sapphire Preferred, or for reimbursements through the Amex Platinum $200 rebate.

While buying miles tends to be an iffy value proposition, with this promo, you basically end up getting miles for a cost of about 1.88 cents each. While that's still not jaw-droppingly amazing, it can end up saving you a huge amount of money if you plan on redeeming those miles for some ultra-premium Star Alliance awards like first class to Europe aboard a carrier like Lufthansa - or even in US Airways' Envoy Class - or business class on Singapore Airlines. So for instance you could take an ANA flight in business class from North America to Tokyo for just 90,000 miles roundtrip - which would cost you $1,693 with this promo - instead of paying $5,000-$6,000 dollars.

Or remember one of my favorite US Airways redemptions: 110,000 miles for roundtrip business class from North America to the South Pacific (which includes Australia or New Zealand), into which you can build a stopover in Asia. So you could take Singapore Airlines to Singapore, hang out there for a few days, then continue on to Australia, and head back the same way, all for 110,000 miles - that would cost the $1,881 you would need to purchase 100,000 miles from this promo, plus 10,000 miles you have sitting around in your Dividend Miles account - all for an itinerary that could easily reach $10,000 or more.

As always, I suggest having a specific award itinerary or goal in mind that you will use these miles for, and to do the math to see if it makes sense for you. When searching for awards, I recommend using united.com, or the ANA search tool, which have the most accurate Star Alliance award availability.

US Airways is a Star Alliance member and has a generous award chart with a few sweet spots like those business class redemptions between North America and North Asia or the South Pacific, so if you are hoping to redeem premium class awards on expensive routes with low taxes, then you could definitely pull a lot of value from this promotion. Crunch the numbers before deciding to jump on this promotion, but in my opinion, this is a pretty great US Airways mileage offer, and I don’t know how many more like we’re going to see anytime soon. See this post for more details and ideas for putting those bonus miles to use.