Buy Hawaiian Airlines Gift Card With 10% Bonus

Hawaiian Airlines has just launched a promotion on purchasing gift cards, as flagged by Frequent Miler. While this isn’t the highest value promotion we’ve ever seen, I’m sure some Hawaiian Airlines frequent flyers will find this to be worthwhile.

Hawaiian Airlines’ gift card promotion

Through Friday, May 10, 2024, Hawaiian Airlines is offering a bonus when you buy a gift card:

• Buy a $100 Hawaiian Airlines gift card, receive a $10 bonus card
• Buy a $200 Hawaiian Airlines gift card, receive a $20 bonus card
• Buy a $300 Hawaiian Airlines gift card, receive a $30 bonus card

As you’d expect, there are some terms to be aware of:

• You must buy the gift cards with promotion code MOM24
• Hawaiian Airlines gift cards don’t expire
• You can earn one bonus gift card per customer and per household, so you can’t take advantage of this multiple times
• The bonus gift card will be sent to the same email address used for the purchase
• Gift cards are only redeemable at hawaiianairlines.com for ticket purchases, Extra Comfort and Preferred seats, mileage award redemption fees, and purchasing miles
• Gift cards can’t be redeemed for vacation packages, bag fees, ticket change fees, first class upgrade fees, merchandise, and inflight purchases

Is this gift card promo worth it?

If you fly Hawaiian Airlines with any frequency, then this could represent a good deal. You’re essentially getting a 10% bonus on a gift card purchase, with the cap being the fairly low gift card amounts you can buy with this offer.

There is just one catch to buying Hawaiian Airlines gift cards — the Hawaiian Airlines gift card purchase as such won’t code as a travel purchase for the purposes of your credit card spending, since the transaction is processed by a third party. What are the implications of that if you’re maximizing rewards?

• If it did code as a Hawaiian Airlines airfare purchase (which it doesn’t), you could earn credit card rewards as you usually would for airfare purchases, so there would be no opportunity cost to funding your Hawaiian Airlines travel this way; you could earn up to 5x points on airfare purchases
• Since it doesn’t code as an airfare purchase, you’d be better off using a card that’s lucrative for everyday spending, and there’s quite an opportunity cost there

If you’re anything like me, you’d ordinarily earn 5x points for an airfare purchase, while you’re only earning 2x points for everyday spending. So the opportunity cost here is 3x points per dollar spent. I value transferable points at 1.7 cents each, so that’s like an opportunity cost of 5.1%. That makes the value of this promotion pretty marginal, assuming you’re in a similar boat.

Bottom line

Hawaiian Airlines is offering up to a 10% bonus when you purchase a gift card with promotion code MOM24. This can score you up to a $30 bonus card — so it’s not the biggest value offer ever, but still has the potential to be quite a good deal.

Do you plan on taking advantage of Hawaiian Airlines’ gift card promo?