There are a significant number of readers with Star Alliance Gold status and a lot of miles in the TAP Air Portugal Miles & Go program since they were selling miles for $0.0087 apiece as part of their mileage subscription program and matching status earlier this year.
Usually when an airline discounts award redemptpions they do it only for their own flights. Partner flights cost them real money. The only regular exception to this is Avianca LifeMiles, which regularly runs discounts on partner awards, even in business and first class, but only on specific routes.
TAP’s Miles & Go is running a mileage bonus (rather than a discount) on all Star Alliance partner flights. They will award “Club TAP” mileage subscription members with a 10,000 mile bonus for booking a one-way award on Star Alliance and other airline partners.
- Book by October 13
- Travel by March 31, 2021
- Bonus can take a month to post – you have to have the miles in your account now to make a booking, and you’ll get the 10,000 miles back later
- One bonus per account
- Bonus miles valid for 23 months
- Changes to routing or cancellation and redeposit forfeit the bonus
Now TAP’s mileage chart is reasonable for US-Europe business class normally (80,000 miles) considering how inexpensively they’ve sold miles. Taking 10,000 miles off is nice as well. However their cheapest awards aren’t cheap enough to make this an opportunity to travel almost free.
If you aren’t a Club TAP member currently you can sign up and be eligible for the redemption bonus, it effectively adds a 10,000 signup bonus to the program.
As long as it’s something you can book online. I tried call the reservation center three times, during normal business hours. Each time, 15 minutes on hold, then disconnected. I e-mailed a complaint to TAP, with the reply a month (!) later that TAP doesn’t accept call center complaints by e-mail. Now there’s a real-life Catch 22.