When Alaska Airlines announced their new distance-based award charts back in November, they teased that there would be regular discounts not just on Alaska Airlines travel but also on airline partner travel as well.

Now that we’re a couple of weeks into the roll out of these new charts, the Mileage Plan program has its first award sale promising “savings of up to 50% on award redemptions to select international destinations with us and our global partners.”

• Redeem in April
• Travel September through November
• Limited to economy and premium economy (and business class without lie flat seats is considered premium economy)

		Discounted		Regular Price
Destination		Coach		Coach		% Off
Papeete (Tahiti)		20000		30000		33%
Nadi, Fiji		20000		37500		47%
Nassau, Bahamas		15000		17500		14%
Zanzibar, Tanzania		30000		42500		29%
Male, Maldives		30000		42500		29%
Bali, Indonesia		30000		42500		29%

Evening cocktail at Park Hyatt Maldives

Fiji and the Bahamas offer economy redemption discounts only, since the relevant means of getting there won’t involve a premium economy product.

Discounted pricing for premium economy is as follows:

• Tahiti: 30,000
• Zanzibar: 40,000
• Maldives: 40,000
• Bali: 40,000

Main pool at Conrad Bora Bora

Discounts are limited to travel to and from the U.S. only. We can expect to see new promotional offers quarterly, and they’ll continue to ‘theme’ the offers. This one is ‘exotic sunny beach escapes.’

Now, something struck me about the pricing here. They were promoting coach offers, which had a maximum discount of 47% off of standard redemption cost (Fiji), but were actually trumpeting up to 50% savings, so I asked for a bit of an explanation. In fact, I was told, that “some discounts are higher (even more than 50%) given that we are also putting some enhanced inventory on sale to ensure adequate availability.” So awards you might pay substantially more for to get additional availability may be offered at the promotional pricing.

Unfortunately from my perspective this focuses only on coach and premium economy. And that appears to be what they’re sticking with for future offers, too. Alaska explains it as follows,

The plan is to focus on coach & premium economy, mostly because there is a lot more inventory available in these classes and we want to make these offers broad so we don’t run out of award inventory and limit frustration if customers can’t book desired flights.

I certainly get the concern, but the possibility of getting truly outsized value is something that I think members will be excited about as well.