Star Alliance member TAP Air Portugal sells monthly mileage packages. They also sell miles outright through their ‘Miles Store’. Right now they are offering 75,000 bonus miles for transacting with both. Join the mileage purchase club and then within 6 days make your mileage purchase.
Receive 75,000 promotional miles as a gift when you join or renew your Club membership and buy miles from the Miles Store between 11 December 2020 and 3 January 2021.
To earn 75,000 bonus miles you need to do either:
- Join or renew Club Top and buy between 12,000 and 18,000 miles from the Miles Store.
- Join or renew Club Platinum and buy between 4,000 and 18,000 miles from the Miles Store.
Purchase ‘Club Platinum for 718 euros and receive 25,000 miles and 96,000 more over 12 months, and then purchase 4000 miles from the miles store at 140 euros. You’ll earn:
- 121,000 miles for the club
- 4000 miles for the purchase
- 75,000 bonus miles
- For a total of 200,000 miles
- At a cost of 858 euros or $1,053.12, or $0.0052656 cents apiece
Normally I’d say this was worth it for the mileage purchase alone ($0.00527 per mile) but should flag that TAP’s award chart can be expensive, though not unreasonable for one way US-Europe business class (80,000 miles, plus surcharges). About half of these miles will be parceled out over the course of a year.
Many of you may have TAP Miles & Go miles from their less than 1 cent per mile sale back at the start of March. We’re seeing a lot of creativity out of Lisbon, including their September offer of 10,000 bonus miles for booking an award on a partner airline and their two mile redemption sale. For Black Friday they offered 132,000 miles and Star Alliance Gold status for $855.
@Gary what kind of value can one get from redeeming 200k TAP miles on *A partner biz class awards? Appreciate your insights into any sweet spots on NH, TK, AV, BR, etc. using these TP miles?
Last I looked, TP mile redemptions are reasonably priced only for NA to SA – Copa has pretty reliable availability but not so great a product.
I really want to make this purchase but don’t get it. I’d really appreciate any help.
Gary says that “To earn 75,000 bonus miles you need to do either:
Join or renew Club Top and buy between 12,000 and 18,000 miles from the Miles Store.
Join or renew Club Platinum and buy between 4,000 and 18,000 miles from the Miles Store.”
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Let’s take option 1. On my page Club Top is retailing for $493. Then on the buy miles page to get the 75K bonus you have to buy 20K miles (not between 12-18K), which costs a further $870 USD. Thus this option seems to be 1363 USD, rather than the $1053.12 mentioned above in the article, though if I am wrong (which 99% is the case) could someone please tell me what I am missing?
Thanks so much in advance.
This is great if you want to lose your luggage in Lisbon while paying ridiculous fuel surcharges!
Surcharges and availability for *A US-EU biz make this a dud. Unless you can get a TP, UA or LO flight, fuel surcharges will run ~$250 oneway.
For most of us who don’t have any miles in our TP accounts this will mean we would get 2 ow US-EU flights for about $1500 and 40k miles left. Not horrible but not worth speculatively buying.
It appears if you buy 4000 miles you only get 7500 miles not 75,000
This is soooo cool, buying miles at a half cent, it costs 180,000 points to fly Emirates first class to Australia via Dubai. That’s a whopping $900 for 30 hours of first class travel. Or $1800 for RT for 60 hours of first class flying. If Emirates advertised this in cash it would be sold out in an hour.
My bad on the above post, you would have to use ANA F for the 180,000. For Emirates only business class is offered, for 130,000, around $650 ow.
@Gary. We have upgraded our Amex to the Platinum card. We are planning a trip using Turkish Airlines. After we book our tickets we will
Get a bonus of 100,000 points giving us a little over 500,000 points to use for upgrades. Is there a way to buy miles and transfer our miles (pre ticket purchase) to a partner airline tht gives 1 mile for every point redeemed?
We will be visiting 2 countries (Turkey and Pakistan) and would like to have a business class upgrade on the way back (going there would be nice too lol). How do go about doing this……if it’s
Possible!!