US Airways 100% Buy Miles Promo Ends Today
Update: Some offers mentioned below are no longer available. View the current offers here.
Update: Some US Airways Dividend members have received an email saying the 100% bonus has been extended a week until December 7, 2012. However, the terms on the airline's Buy Miles page still note today (November 30) as the end date, so if you got that email and want to take a little more time to consider a purchase, be sure to keep it as proof.
Just a last-minute reminder that US Airways' lucrative 100% Buy Miles bonus promo ends today, November 30, 2012.
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 you can't sign up today and get the bonus, unfortunately.
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.
You can check out this post from the beginning of the month outlining the promo and how to use it to your benefit, but just to summarize: With this promo, you're essentially buying miles at the cost of 1.88 cents each - that's just over half price since you still have to pay a 7.5% tax on purchases and a $30 processing charge per transaction. So if you bought the whole 50,000 miles to get the maximum bonus and end up with 100,000 miles altogether, you'd be shelling out $1,881.25.
That's no small amount of money, but with some savvy strategizing, you can redeem those miles for some amazing business and first class awards thanks to a few sweet spots in US Airways' Star Alliance partner award chart. For instance, those miles could save you thousands of dollars if you redeemed them for tickets to Europe or North Asia in business class, and you'd just be 10,000 miles shy of a business class roundtrip ticket from North America to the South Pacific via Asia.
It could also be worth it just purchase a few thousand miles to get you up to the redemption level that you need for a particular award you have in mind as long as you are getting more value out of those miles than you're paying for them.
As always, do the math for yourself before deciding to take advantage of this promotion, but this is probably the last great US Airways offer of the year, and I don't know how many more we're going to see.