Earlier this month we covered how you can buy 300,000 Miles & More miles with an ASMALLWORLD Prestige Membership for around C$7,500. If you don’t take all the benefits of that membership into consideration, that membership provides a per mile purchase price of 2.5 cents. There is another option to buy miles for even less than that where you can pay as little as ~2 cents per mile.
That option is Miles & More’s Bundle&Go option which has a 30% bonus in place when you buy one of the bundles by June 30, 2023.
Miles & More Bundle&G0
Launched in 2022, Miles & More’s Bundle&Go offers a way for members to purchase miles with the program just like the ASMALLWORLD membership. The Bundle&Go option is Lufthansa’s way of being able to sell miles without selling miles directly as the airline ran into issues with just selling miles on their own due to laws in Germany. (HT One Mile at a Time)
The Bundles
The bundles come in three sizes, Small, Medium and Large with the respective benefits and cost for each as follows:
Small:
10,000 miles + a one-off bonus with Hotels & Cars by Points, discounted Priority Pass membership and rivileges on your next five Avis rentals
With the June bonus you’ll receive 13,000 miles
Cost of small bundle: EUR 250, USD 270, CAD 380, SFR 250, GBP 230.
Price per mile with this option including the bonus (Excluding GST/HST): 2.92 cents C$
Medium:
50,000 miles + a one-off bonus with Hotels & Cars by Points, discounted Priority Pass membership and rivileges on your next five Avis rentals
With the June bonus you’ll receive 65,000 miles
Cost of medium bundle: EUR 1,000, USD 1,090, CAD 1,500, SFR 1,010, GBP 900.
Price per mile with this option including the bonus (Excluding GST/HST): 2.3 cents C$
Large:
100,000 miles + a one-off bonus with Hotels & Cars by Points, discounted Priority Pass membership and rivileges on your next five Avis rentals
With the June bonus you’ll receive 130,000 miles
Cost of large bundle: EUR 1,750, USD 1,920, CAD 2,630, SFR 1,760, GBP 1,580.
Price per mile with this option including the bonus (Excluding GST/HST): 2.02 cents C$
You can see that Miles & More will sell you the bundles in Canadian dollars and I do believe that GST/HST will be charged on top of that as the transactions are processed by Points.com which is based here in Canada. If we do include GST/HST and you buy the Large bundle you’ll pay around 2.12 cents per mile for provinces only collecting GST (AB, BC, SK etc.) to as much as 2.32 cents if you are in the Atlantic provinces paying 15% HST.
The terms and conditions states members can earn a maximum of 250,000 miles Miles & More miles annually with Bundle&Go. If this is anything like other airlines buy miles options that limit is before any bonuses. This means you could potentially buy two large packages and one medium. That would give you 325,000 miles for $6,760 before GST/HST ($7,098 – $7,774 all in)
Is there value in purchasing Miles & More miles
There is value in buying Miles & More for a couple of their redemption options. If neither of these options are up your alley then I would say the value isn’t there. Those two options are redeeming for business class flights with their monthly Mileage Bargain offers and redeeming for Lufthansa First Class without having to wait to book as you have to with their partner programs.
Mileage Bargains offered each and every month typically with multiple routes between Canada and Europe for only 55,000 miles round trip in business class. That means you could potentially buy two round trip business class tickets with a single large Bundle&Go package for C$2,630. You do also have to take into account the Miles & More does charge hefty surcharges – up to $1,500 for a round trip. Thus two business class flights will run in the neighbourhood of $5,600 – $6,000 total. That works out to $2,800 to $3,000 per ticket which isn’t too bad for a business class fare – that is, when there aren’t any seat sales available.
Another benefit of buying the miles via this membership is that you open up earlier access to Lufthansa First Class awards. When you use other airline programs like Aeroplan or LifeMiles those programs typically only have access to LH First about two weeks prior to the actual flight departure. When you choose to redeem Miles & More miles you can book LH First to as far out as the schedule allows, which is almost one year. FYI round trip First Class flights between North America (no Canadian cities though) and Europe run 182,000 miles so you could buy one large and one medium package to have enough miles for a round trip first class flight.
Wrapping it up
Miles & More has a couple of bonuses in place to buy their miles in June. This is significant for Canadians as these miles are hard to come by for us! You can go the route of Bundle&Go or the ASMALLWORLD membership to purchase enough miles to redeem for business class tickets on any of the Lufthansa group airlines or first class on Lufthansa. Ideally for business class you’ll redeem for a Mileage Bargain offer otherwise the value per mile will be diminished significantly. For First Class you have to take into account you’ll need to include positioning flights as LH only offers first class out of several U.S. cities.
Click here to learn more about the Bundle&Go option
Title image via Lufthansa