Back on December 17th we gave you a heads up about the annual Cathay Pacific Asia Miles conversion bonus from their financial partners. That offer is now live and you can register for it right away. The bonus ranges from 10% to 15% depending on the member and is for conversion from credit card partners that allow you to transfer points to Asia Miles. It is not for cards
that actually earn Asia Miles like the RBC Cathay Pacific Visa Platinum
Card.
If you get an email from Asia Miles telling you register right now you won’t have to worry about completing the form, the link in the email does it for you:
and you’ll end up with the following confirmation:
If you didn’t get the email or missed it somehow you can still register for the offer right off of the Asia Miles website here.
In Canada the Asia Miles program has three financial partners whose credit card points can be converted to Asia Miles:
This
means you can convert points from American Express Membership Rewards
(not MR Select though), HSBC Rewards and RBC Rewards (Avion cards only).
Here are the conversion rates along with the bonus for the three Canadian programs:
- American Express Membership Rewards: 1,000 points = 750 Asia Miles (up to 863 with bonus)
- HSBC Rewards: 25,000 points = 8,000 miles (up to 9,200 with bonus)
- RBC Rewards (Avion only): 1 point = 1 mile (up to 1.15 miles with bonus) Note that RBC has a minimum 10,000 point transfer
If
you aren’t very familiar with Asia Miles there are some definite
advantages to the program. From its members having greater access to
award seats on Cathay Pacific metal to a wide range of partners to
redeem on at reasonable rates for some those of those routes and more
(you can even redeem for some Air Canada flights in Canada but you are better off using Aeroplan or proprietary credit card programs for those flights)
Here is just one example of how this bonus can be utilized. A round trip award flight of Cathay Pacific between Vancouver and Hong Kong will run the following:
If you want to redeem for economy class flights on this route and you did receive the 15% bonus offer you would only have to convert 53,000 RBC Rewards points for a total of a 60,950 Asia Miles. If you wanted to redeem for the same flight via RBC’s Avion air redemption chart it would run you 100,000 RBC Rewards points! You could almost get two economy class tickets for the same amount by converting to Asia Miles. Same goes for Amex although you’d have to convert 70,000 Membership Rewards points to get just over 60,000 Asia Miles (this includes the 15% bonus) Again however if you take Amex’s Fixed Points for Travel chart you’d need to redeem 100,000 points for the same flight.
We always love to see these conversion bonuses that are open to most if
not all financial partners of airline program and this is the second
Asian program to offer such a bonus – in fact the Singapore
Airlines transfer bonus has now been extended into January! Read about the Singapore KrisFlyer offer here