[Morning after addendum (seriously the last thing I’ll write about this, I promise): Upon further examination, I learned that both The Points Guy and Mommy Points wrote about the 45 miles per dollar deal yesterday, which also applied to American and United. (Alaska is by far the strongest program of the three in my opinion, which is why I didn’t bother to mention the other two yesterday.) I’d argue that both of those blogs buried the lede pretty significantly, though, given that both posts were about the 500/1000 mile spending bonuses, and a chance to buy miles on the (very) cheap is far more exciting to me than a measly 500 or 1000 point bonus. Still, it’s not like I was the sole voice in the wilderness or anything, so PERHAPS I gave myself a little bit too much credit yesterday. No joke, I even had a fucking dream about people getting mad at me for my vainglorious blog posts about some goddamn magazines. You know you’re a churner when…]
To recap, Alaska Mileage Plan shopping is offering 45 miles per dollar on purchases from Magazines.com today. None of the usual suspect blogs have written about this yet (at least the last time I checked), which is seeming weirder and weirder as the day goes on. Here’s why: in this post, Lucky writes about how the 40% promotion on Alaska miles that they offered earlier this year is typically as good as you’ll see (though he does recommend against purchasing speculatively at this rate). At a 40% bonus, you received miles for around 2.11 cents each – but you had to buy at least 30,000 miles to get the full 40% bonus. I passed when this came around, because I didn’t want to invest $600+ in Alaska miles with no use in mind. (Yes, I pretty much do whatever Lucky says, and I’m not ashamed to admit that.)
Now, earlier today I wrote about the Magazines.com promotion as offering miles for 2.2 cents each, plus free magazines. Looking back at Alaska’s historical mileage purchase bonuses, that’s almost as good as “as good as it gets,” but you can get in on the deal for a much smaller initial investment – meaning that if you have enough time to wait for the miles to post, it’s a fantastic way to top up an account for cheap. However, I realized this evening that it gets even better. Alaska is also offering 1000 bonus miles for spending $300 through the shopping portal over the next couple of weeks. That means that if you spent $300 at Magazines.com, you’d get 14,500 miles when all is said and done, which comes out to less than 2.1 cents per mile – even better than the 40% bonus promotion with less than half the required investment. (In fairness, if you were to spend the same $633 that you would have had to spend to get the 40% bonus, you’d end up paying 2.14 cents per acquired mile through Magazines.com, which isn’t quite as good, although we’re really splitting hairs now.)
Also, and I swear to god I don’t have a relationship with Magazines.com (who is a religious company, so I’m certain they’d take offense to much of what’s on my blog anyway), their selection is actually pretty good! Rather than subscribing to a bunch of shit that I’ll barely read, I was able to find Airways Magazine (a pretty decent publication for avgeeks), Eye (one of the best design magazines in the world), and Elephant, which is new to me but looks really cool. Those are all neat magazines that I was thinking of subscribing to anyway, so this promotion really worked out well for me.
Windbag Miles 