I’m a big fan of Alaska Airlines, and in particular their Mileage Plan frequent flyer program. On the passenger experience front, the airline has above average employees and doesn’t have basic economy fares. Their frequent flyer program is arguably the best in the US, and they have a nice variety of partner airlines that make it easy to earn status without actually flying Alaska that much. Their miles are extremely valuable, which is why I like to credit miles to them, even if I don’t actually fly Alaska that often.
Last year I had top tier Alaska MVP Gold 75K status, though as of this year I dropped down to MVP status. It’s a bummer, though I don’t fly Alaska enough to care that much. I don’t value the additional upgrades on Alaska much, but rather my favorite MVP Gold 75K benefit was earning a 125% mileage bonus on tickets (rather than the 50% mileage bonus offered to MVP members).
The good news is that I already have enough travel booked for 2018 to qualify for MVP Gold, based on the Emirates first class ticket I’ve already flown, and the Emirates first class ticket I have in a few months.
Alaska just sent me a very interesting targeted offer. Specifically, Alaska is offering me MVP Gold 75K status if I fly 20,000 miles with Alaska and Virgin America between January 18 and April 15, 2018.
The terms associated with this offer are as follows:
Terms & Conditions: Only Mileage Plan™ members who receive this offer directly from Alaska Airlines via email are qualified to participate. Qualified members who fly 20,000 miles between January 18, 2018, and April 15, 2018, will be granted Mileage Plan MVP® Gold 75K status through December 31, 2018. Registration is required prior to your first qualifying flight. Mileage for all segments accrued toward this promotion must be earned on eligible flights operated by Alaska Airlines (flight numbers 1-999, 2000-2999, 3450-3499), or on flights operated by Virgin America and marketed by Alaska Airlines or Virgin America (flight numbers 0001 – 1999), and credited to your Mileage Plan account by May 15, 2018. Award or free travel is not valid for this offer. Class of Service or Elite Bonuses do not count toward qualification for the promotion. MVP® Gold 75K status will take effect 10-14 days after your last qualifying flight and will be valid through December 31, 2018. Please allow six to eight weeks to receive your new card. Offer is subject to change and all terms and conditions of the Mileage Plan program apply.
At first thought I’m extremely tempted. This is an easy way to earn MVP Gold 75K status with just 20,000 flown miles, rather than the usual requirement of 75,000 miles (or 90,000 miles if you fly on partner airlines). They’re basically asking you to fly about a quarter of the requirement over the course of a quarter of the year.
However, only flights on Alaska and Virgin America qualify, and class of service bonuses don’t qualify either. It’s one thing if I could fly paid first class and earn those 20,000 miles faster, but I actually have to fly 20,000 “butt in seat” miles on Alaska.
As much as I love Alaska, that’s a lot of flying to do on their planes. 😉
It’s also not clear if completing this offer will earn the 50,000 bonus miles that you usually get when qualifying for MVP Gold 75K status. You get this if you qualify the hard way, but not if you status match, so my guess is that those who complete this offer wouldn’t earn the 50,000 bonus miles (though this is different than a status match).
This is a very generous offer, and I’m sort of tempted. But I also don’t think I actually want to fly 20,000 miles on Alaska as an MVP member. What I love about the Alaska Mileage Plan program is the ability to travel on other world class airlines and earn valuable miles, rather than actually flying Alaska (as much as I respect the airline)
It’s still an interesting offer that I figured was worth sharing.
Has anyone else received an Alaska status fast track offer? Do you plan on taking advantage of it? Am I crazy for not taking advantage of it?
Hit my 20k miles by April 15 and my status changed to 75k today + 50,000 bonus miles!!!!!
Be sure to call if you have any questions. They let me register after the fact, and said they'd add my flight from ANC-LAX-HAV from Jan 10 if I need them. Told me to call after I make 10k miles, and they'd have a manager manually add them. Or it would be automatic if I fly 10k miles during the promotion (outside of my Jan 10 flight). However, I was really calling since I was...
Be sure to call if you have any questions. They let me register after the fact, and said they'd add my flight from ANC-LAX-HAV from Jan 10 if I need them. Told me to call after I make 10k miles, and they'd have a manager manually add them. Or it would be automatic if I fly 10k miles during the promotion (outside of my Jan 10 flight). However, I was really calling since I was super close to MVP Gold (38k!) and wanted to know if my Jan trip (8k miles!) could add on and push me up there. They said they'd register me for this promotion instead, but I haven't received the official email (it's been a week) so not sure if they followed through. I have an ANC-HNL trip planned so that would push me into >10k anyway; I'll just call after and see what they ended up deciding.
@Seattle Todd ---> That's good to know; thanks for the info!
@Jason -- Of course. It wasn't urgent, and since I had other things to do after receiving the email, I didn't drop everything to call them. When reading the post from @jjmpdx, I simply acknowledged I was wondering the same thing. If someone else had already talked to Alaska and could share the news, great -- no need for all of us to call them! :-)
Anyway, i called them and they confirmed that the...
@Jason -- Of course. It wasn't urgent, and since I had other things to do after receiving the email, I didn't drop everything to call them. When reading the post from @jjmpdx, I simply acknowledged I was wondering the same thing. If someone else had already talked to Alaska and could share the news, great -- no need for all of us to call them! :-)
Anyway, i called them and they confirmed that the miles do indeed "double count" -- they count towards the promotion and also the normal process of qualifying in 2018 for 2019 status.
I did the status match to 75K with them from Delta last year. I had already booked quite a few flights on DL so I did about 30K on DL and just over 60K on AS. I did not get the offer but have sent an email to see why. Would be a nice perk to get back to 75K now rather than wait until summer when I will most likely qualify.
I dropped from 75K to Gold and got that offer. 20K on VX/AS metal would be tough if you lived in a VX/AS hub city.... otherwise forget it. I’m kind of done with MP with all of the partners gone. I made the conscious decision not to push for 75K—the last straw was the partnership changes with AA.
Never thought I’d be saying this but all my planned domestic travel so far this year...
I dropped from 75K to Gold and got that offer. 20K on VX/AS metal would be tough if you lived in a VX/AS hub city.... otherwise forget it. I’m kind of done with MP with all of the partners gone. I made the conscious decision not to push for 75K—the last straw was the partnership changes with AA.
Never thought I’d be saying this but all my planned domestic travel so far this year is on Southwest. Not a Southwest fan but they just seem to be the least offensive way of traveling with the Basic Economy virus spreading.
@jjmpdx @SeattleTodd ---> Wouldn't the easiest way to get an answer be to call the Mileage Plan telephone number? The dedicated Mileage Plan number is 800.654.5669, and the lines are open from 8:00 am - 6:00 pm (PT), Monday-Friday, and 8:00 am - 5:00 pm (PT), on Saturdays....
I want to know the same thing as @jjmpdx -- do the miles flown as part of the challenge for 2018 status still apply as they normally would towards earning status for 2019? I imagine so, but the terms and conditions don't say anything about this.
Does anyone know the official answer? Thanks!
I dropped from gold to nothing this year and received the 10K offer for Gold. The timing irked me as i just returned on Tuesday from a RT SFO-MCO on Virgin that would have covered more than half of the requirement. If the offer included that trip I'd be far more amenable than having to make two more trips to get there. I do like the flexibility of gold status and have a hawaii trip coming up where it would be very handy. But not sure if I'll do it.
I was offered the 10k Miles offer for MVP Gold. (I was Gold last year, but only qualified for MVP this year.) Seems like a no-brainer to me. I *assume* that the 10k miles flown for the challenge will count toward my qualifying for 2019...
To begin with, let me quickly say that I have NOT received such an offer. I was MVP Gold in 2017, based upon my Elevate Gold status and AS honoring VX's elites with either MVP (if Elevate Silver) or MVP Gold (if Elevate Gold). For 2018, I am also MVP Gold based, again, upon my qualifying as an Elite Gold on VX with 33 flight segments in 2017.
That said, AS will permit you to...
To begin with, let me quickly say that I have NOT received such an offer. I was MVP Gold in 2017, based upon my Elevate Gold status and AS honoring VX's elites with either MVP (if Elevate Silver) or MVP Gold (if Elevate Gold). For 2018, I am also MVP Gold based, again, upon my qualifying as an Elite Gold on VX with 33 flight segments in 2017.
That said, AS will permit you to qualify on either segments or mileage (or a higher number of miles if flown on partner airlines. To retain my MVP Gold status with AS, I shall have to fly -- not 30 segments as with Virgin America, but 60 segments on AS. That averages five round-trips per month, and being retired, that simply won't happen. Indeed I'll be lucky (no pun intended) if I can still do 30 . . . after all, I'm no longer flying up to SEA to visit one of my kids in college (she's graduated), and I've already had to call off two r/t this year due to illness (either my wife's or my own). So that's four segments I've lost right there.
Tough times ahead . . . perhaps in 2019, they'll offer me some sort of "fast track" . . .
I had some health issues and didn't fly as much last year, so only made Gold, but was 75k for 2 years before. I would love an offer. If they are sending so many of these out, maybe I will have to call in and just ask for an offer if I don't get one.
I was Gold in '17 and only requal'd at MVP. Waiting to see if I get anything. Frankly, with a recent move to ~10 min from OAK and with my wife earning the WN Companion Pass, any offer would be a tough decision because clearly a lot of our flying will be on WN this year.
Don't you live for mileage runs? So why not?
Just got the same offer. I was 75k last year but only qualified as Gold for this year. 20,000 for me is pretty easy in 3 months so i'm all in on it.
All employees in my company got a fast-track MVP offer. The requirement is to fly 2 round trips (no minimum mileage requirement) by the end of March 2018. Better yet, after qualifying you get to keep the 20K elite miles and apply them towards gold status for the rest of the year. Everyone who found out about this has been jumping all over it for the last week given how generous it is.
I was MVP last year and lost it this year. Just got an offer to qualify for MVP with 5000 flown by 4/15.
I got an offer for MVP (I didn't re-qualify last year but was MVP in 2017) for the same time period for 5,000 miles. Its unfortunate that CoS bonuses don't count but figured 5K was doable so registered.
i think you should look at as a challenge to see if you can do 20k miles for less than xx dollars. Or, in a certain number of segments, or something like that. Also, you seem to not be super impressed with the airline - inflight? what have you got against flying on alaska?
@ Ben -- Can you please investigate the 50,000 mile question? That would be the deal-breaker for me on this one. I'm already booked to fly 6,254 AS/VX miles between the promo dates, and for 50,000 I might consider flying the other 13,746 miles (although I doubt it).
Andy,
Alaska does fly to Hawaii and the East Coast, both of which are equivalent to shorter trans-oceanic flights.
And Nome, Alaska is a heck of a long way too if you really want to push it :-)
For an airline that doesn't fly across either ocean, 20k is pretty tough to achieve. The fastest you could get there would be something like 2 rt BOS-HNL. Otherwise that's over 4 rt transcons. That'd be a difficult feat unless you really are a frequent coast-to-coast business traveler.
This seems to be more of a “reasonable” offer than a “very generous” one.
I got a similar offer but for 10k miles. I'm based in NY so this basically means two roundtrips to CA which is hard to justify just for status..I fly mostly on points tickets so the status is nice but not particularly important for me. Was just debating this morning if I could justify making this work.
I got a similar offer for MVP Gold, only have to fly 10k miles. It's worth noting that it's only through 12/31, not the same as if you qualified the regular way this year. You don't get it for 2019.
Question, what do you expect to be able to fly one R/T on EK and get 75K status on AS? Their reasoning is obvious" fly us paying a certain amount of revenue" then after that we will continue revenue stream from you on the 75K status. Like the old EF Hutton ad " you have to earn it".
It's a good program if your loyal and fly AS as I do.
Just saying ~
I just received complimentary MVP status, and am not exactly sure why.