Lifemiles “Improvements” for 2024

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Feb 12, 2008
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Among all the localised stuff that we may not be able to use, I note what seems to be a genuine improvement! It’s refreshing to see that they didn’t wheel out the laboured and misleading term Enhancement from Simpler & Fairer (TM).

Family Pooling: Link the accounts of 7 family members and transfer miles between these accounts free of charge to redeem air tickets faster. To begin by end of February. This sounds similar to BA’s Household account feature and could be a nice get out of jail card for those with more than one account, or with a small number of orphaned miles, or if simply wishing to clean out and exit the LM program.


I read the other listed improvements further and discovered what I thought was a huge loophole for cheap and easy Elite status qualification. The marketing literature states in bold “All miles count toward your progress”. The breakdown in the table claims Miles purchases and miles transfers are at 1 qualifying mile for each 2 miles earned (2:1). So depending on how you interpret it, this could be purchases made using miles, or miles purchased via the Buy/Gift/share feature. Crucially, the promo landing page has a table with an example which itemises the Club LM subscription as eligible at 2:1 elite qualifying miles.

I got a bit excited with the prospect of cheap *A Gold status (on top of the LM miles) despite this loophole presenting as waaaay too good to be true. Sure enough after a brief search online, it seems others had the same thought and got caught out during their testing (New Avianca Lifemiles Mileage Sale With Up To 150% Bonus Through April 26, 2023) - scroll down in article for relevant commentary.

If this was an Australian Loyalty program we’d be all over them with the ACCC and Consumer Affairs supporting us. But somehow I don’t think any of us here have the time or patience to try and enforce this published mistake with LifeMiles‘ “customer service”.
 
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