As I first wrote about a few days ago, the LifeMiles program is offering a special 150% bonus on purchased miles for readers of OMAAT. Not only is 150% the biggest bonus I ever recall seeing on purchased LifeMiles, but there’s also no minimum of how many miles you have to buy to get the best deal. You can purchase anywhere between 1,000 and 200,000 miles pre-bonus and receive the 150% bonus (in the past you typically needed to purchase 101,000+ miles to achieve the lowest cost).
With this promotion, you can buy LifeMiles for just 1.32 cents each.
One of the other cool things about LifeMiles is that they process the purchase of miles directly, and as a result purchasing LifeMiles qualifies as airfare spend. That’s great, since plenty of credit cards give 2-5x points per dollar spent on airfare, which can help you maximize the points you earn.
My single favorite card to use for airfare purchases is American Express Platinum Card®, as it offers 5x points (on up to $500,000 in flight purchases per calendar year and then 1x when booked directly with the airline or through Amex Travel). The catch is that for whatever reason LifeMiles’ website often has issues with processing American Express cards. They don’t seem to have an issue with Visa cards, so you can always use something like the Chase Sapphire Reserve® Card and earn 4x points, and that should work just fine.
However, there’s a trick to using an Amex card to pay for LifeMiles purchases. If the LifeMiles website won’t accept your Amex card as payment, you should be able to phone up the LifeMiles call center, and they can process your transaction by phone. It seems like there’s no issue with having Amex cards accepted by phone. Their number is 1-800-284-2622.
The reason this is significant is because I value Amex Membership Rewards points at ~1.7 cents each, so to me earning 5x points per dollar spent is the equivalent of a further 8.5% return. That’s like getting a discount of 11.22 cents per purchased mile, and really it brings down the cost per purchased mile to ~1.21 cents, which is insanely good.
As a reminder, today is the last day to register for this offer.
You have to wait 24 hours from the time you register until you buy miles through the offer to get the better bonus. You should see the better bonus reflected on the purchase page once you’re eligible.
Membership is free and takes no more information than commenting as a guest. Earn status points for good contributions, and see fewer ads as your status grows.