50,000 Miles Good for Lufthansa, United First Class Plus 2 Lounge Passes

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Premier Miles & More World MasterCard®

  • Earn 20,000 award miles after your first purchase
  • Earn an additional 30,000 award miles when you spend $5,000 on purchases in the first 90 days
  • $89 annual fee

Some readers are going to see this as a niche product, but it’s a great signup offer and two and a half times as big as the usual offer.

It’s from Barclaycard and there are some real gem opportunities for the miles.

There are really two ways to leverage this card.

United domestic first class awards are just 35,000 miles roundtrip

What’s more, the program offers one-way awards at half the roundtrip price. So that’s some cheap first class. When you meet your minimum spend on the card for the full 50,000 mile bonus, you’ll have 55,000 miles in the Miles & More program. That’s more than enough for a roundtrip domestic first class ticket on United, plus a one-way first class award.

Domestic (within one country) award is just 35,000 miles roundtrip for business class. United publishes their domestic forward cabin inventory as “I” or business class, even though they call the product first class.

The Miles & More program adds fuel surcharges onto awards, but there are no fuel surcharges for domestic US award tickets.

The Aspirational First Class Awards You Can’t Get With United Miles

Lufthansa doesn’t offer much first class space to their their partners in advance — Miles & More offers better premium cabin award space to their own members. You can actually book Lufthansa First Class awards more than a couple of weeks out if you’re using these points.

So if you want access to the legendary First Class Terminal in Frankfurt and don’t want to book your tickets in the days prior to departure, Miles & More miles are the best way to get there.

The award chart isn’t cheap at all but it’s the way to get there, and there really isn’t a ton of competition for those seats since US frequent fliers are essentially shut out from competing for them through United.

Lounge Passes

A new benefit is that the card comes with Lufthansa Business Lounge vouchers.

  • You get (2) one-time use Lufthansa Business Lounge Vouchers upon the first purchase.

  • Each year thereafter, you get 2 more when “the account remains open and in good standing for at least 45 days after payment of the annual fee.”

Lufthansa’s Business Class lounges are their base-level lounges. Senator lounges are open to Lufthansa Senator members and partner first class passengers (and Lufthansa first class passengers where Senator lounges are the top lounges). Of course, neither lounge type is the First Class Terminal!

Not as Good as the Starwood American Express

For spend on an ongoing basis, the Starwood Preferred Guest® Credit Card from American Express is a better play. It earns Lufthansa’s Miles & More miles faster because of the transfer bonuses — for every 20,000 Starwood points you transfer to Miles & More you receive 5000 bonus points. That’s effectively earning 1.25 points per dollar on your spend, compared to one point per dollar for most of your spend with this card.

But Premier Miles & More World MasterCard® 50,000 point signup bonus is a great start to the aspirational trip or to cash in for domestic premium cabin travel.

(HT: Million Mile Secrets)

About Gary Leff

Gary Leff is one of the foremost experts in the field of miles, points, and frequent business travel - a topic he has covered since 2002. Co-founder of frequent flyer community InsideFlyer.com, emcee of the Freddie Awards, and named one of the "World's Top Travel Experts" by Conde' Nast Traveler (2010-Present) Gary has been a guest on most major news media, profiled in several top print publications, and published broadly on the topic of consumer loyalty. More About Gary »

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Editorial note: any opinions, analyses, reviews or recommendations expressed in this article are those of the author’s alone, and have not been reviewed, approved or otherwise endorsed by any card issuer. Comments made in response to this post are not provided or commissioned nor have they been reviewed, approved, or otherwise endorsed by any bank. It is not the responsibility of advertisers Citibank, Chase, American Express, Barclays, Capital One or any other advertiser to ensure that questions are answered, either. Terms and limitations apply to all offers.

Comments

  1. I still have the old card. Is this a new card from barclays ? What are the rules from barclays regarding multiple accounts /
    thanks
    JR

  2. I do not believe this is a different card, Barclaycard has not been generous in recent times opening more than one of the same card at the same time.

  3. Do any transferable points currencies transfer to M&M? If so, it would help leverage this offer into a LH F redemption since 50k miles alone is not enough.

  4. Gary, do you know if Amex will let you have another Starwood product, at the same time you have another one open, and still get the bonus??

  5. Can you use these points for *A partners like SQ? If so, might be a good selling point to add to this post.

  6. @trey
    Hawaii is its own region, awards to Hawaii from mainland are 40,000 round trip or 20,000 one way. Less than United’s 22,500 one way.
    Very pleasant US Lufthansa customer service located in the bay area.

  7. The Iowa restriction (and sometimes Wisconsin) is common in the US banking industry. Opinions vary, but include that there are state restrictions on the amount a bank can charge for interest rates, late fees and the like.

  8. I had this card 2 years ago. Am I still eligible for the 50K bonus? The landing page indicates that it is available to new cardmembers only.

  9. @Kerri – you can have both a personal and a business Starwood card. You cannot get a second bonus for a Starwood personal card, for instance, if you already have (or had) a personal Starwood card.

Comments are closed.