Australians Ineligible for Bonus Alaska Miles with Purchases?

For many years, the Alaska Airlines Mileage Plan program has sold miles, with regular promotions offering generous bonuses and discounts.

Alaska Airlines Mileage Plan miles are both valuable and useful. Award tickets typically require fewer miles than with other programs, there are no carrier charges when redeeming on most airlines, and you can easily book most award flights online.

Plus, you can use Alaska miles to fly with any Oneworld airline, as well as many niche carriers like Starlux, Condor, Air Tahiti Nui and Korean Air.

There aren’t that many ways to earn Alaska miles in Australia, so the promotions where Mileage Plan offers a bonus or discount when you buy miles can be quite lucrative. I’ve personally bought in the past and redeemed the miles on airlines such as Qatar Airways and Icelandair – saving me hundreds of dollars compared to buying full-priced tickets.

Alaska Airlines “buy miles” promotions now targeted by country?

It’s not new that some Alaska Airlines’ “buy miles” promotions are targeted. For example, in the past, Mileage Plan has sometimes offered different amounts of bonus miles to different members. They do also have a history of only offering bonuses to members who already had a Mileage Plan account before a particular promotion started.

Unfortunately, since the start of this year, we’ve noticed that Australian residents appear to be excluded from accessing all of the bonus mile promotions which are available to US and Canadian residents.

Members with an address in other countries outside of North America, such as the UK and New Zealand, also appear to be ineligible for Mileage Plan’s most recent bonus point offers. This includes a particularly generous 70% bonus offer in June.

Australians can still buy Alaska Airlines miles at full price. But the value of this is a lot more marginal, and less likely to be worthwhile.

Is this is deliberate policy?

It’s not yet clear whether this is a deliberate policy, or just a coincidence. So, Australian Frequent Flyer reached out to Alaska Airlines several weeks ago to ask. We did not receive a response.

At the risk of sounding like a certain American blogger who has also recommended buying Alaska Airlines miles a lot in the past, let’s mark this as “developing” for now…

Let us know on the Australian Frequent Flyer forum if you’ve been able to access Mileage Plan’s recent “buy miles” promos, including the current offer of up to 60% bonus miles on purchases that’s available if you live in the USA!

If you’re not seeing any of the recent offers, I wonder if changing the address on your Mileage Plan account to a US address might help. That said, there may be other implications of doing so, and I don’t necessarily recommend that approach.

Other ways to acquire Alaska Airlines miles in Australia

Other than buying them, there are a few ways to earn Alaska Airlines Mileage Plan miles in Australia. These include:

• Crediting Oneworld and other partner airline flights to Mileage Plan
• Booking hotels through Alaska Vacations
• Car rentals
• Transferring points from hotel loyalty programs including Marriott Bonvoy

Don’t forget that you can transfer American Express Membership Rewards points into Marriott Bonvoy. From there, you could convert your Marriott Bonvoy points into Alaska Airlines miles.

Unfortunately, it’s no longer possible to convert Membership Rewards points into HawaiianMiles. HawaiianMiles can convert 1:1 to Alaska Airlines miles.