LifeMiles Award Sale To Asia: How To Get Max Value In Business Class

If you’ve been thinking about a trip to Asia, Avianca LifeMiles is pretty much laying out the red carpet for you with its latest award sale. Right now, you can book business class award tickets to Asia — Taipei features heavily — with big discounts. Even if you don’t have LifeMiles right now, they’re some of the easiest to earn so that won’t stand in your way.

Let’s take a look at the details and how you can take advantage of this deal!

The Details

It’s pretty simple, if you redeem your LifeMiles for award tickets on certain routes to or within Asia by June 19, you can get discounts of up to 31%. Oddly enough, there’s a route with a 1% discount. At that point, is it even worth including? Anyway, most of the deals will get you closer to 15% off the usual award price.

Keep in mind that you don’t have to travel by June 19, you just have to book your flights by then. Avianca LifeMiles will let you book flights as far out as 360 days from departure, so you can even plan a trip well into next year.

How To Earn More Avianca LifeMiles

While many of you probably already have easy access to LifeMiles, there are plenty of ways to earn them if you don’t yet. In fact, you can transfer Amex Membership Rewards points (U.S. only), Capital One miles and/or Citi ThankYou Points to your LifeMiles account. Some of our favorite cards to earn points with these programs include:

• The Platinum Card From American Express (Learn More)
• The Business Platinum Card From American Express (Learn More)
• American Express Gold (Learn More)
• American Express Business Gold (Learn More)
• Capital One Venture (Learn More)
• Capital One Spark Miles (Learn More)
• Citi Premier (Learn More)
• Citi Prestige (Learn More)

LifeMiles regularly runs promotions in which you can buy miles at a heavy discount which is an easy to way to get the necessary miles in your account quickly. Additionally, you can transfer Mariott Bonvoy points at a 3:1 ratio or earn LifeMiles directly with its co-branded credit card.

U.S. And Europe to Asia

Typically, Avianca requires 75,000 LifeMiles for a one-way business class award ticket between the U.S. or Europe and Asia. During this promo, you can get a 15% discount which brings down that rate down to 64,000 LifeMiles. As a point of comparison, Asiana Club requires 60,000 miles for the same flight but it’s much harder to earn miles with this program.

When you consider that you won’t get hit with surcharges when booking with LifeMiles no matter which Star Alliance partner you book, this is a great way to book a business class flight to Asia. Here are the eligible routes to/from the U.S.:

U.S. Routes
Chicago (ORD) to Taipei (TPE)	Los Angeles (LAX) to Shanghai (PVG)
Houston (IAH) to Taipei (TPE)	Los Angeles (LAX) to Taipei (TPE)
Los Angeles (LAX) to Hong Kong (HKG)	San Francisco (SFO) to Hong Kong (HKG)
Los Angeles (LAX) to Seoul (ICN)	Seattle (SEA) to Taipei (TPE)

To/From Europe, the options are limited to two routes:

• Amsterdam (AMS) to Taipei (TPE)
• Vienna (VIE) to Taipei (TPE)

If you’re thinking about booking a round-trip business class award ticket from the U.S. on a carrier with no or low surcharges such as EVA Air, keep in mind that you can book it for 95,000 ANA Mileage Club miles. Now, if the Star Alliance carrier you’ll be flying imposes surcharges, ANA will pass them onto you so you might prefer to save cash and use 128,000 LifeMiles for a round-trip ticket.

Great Options In Asia

Within Asia, two fun business class options stand out to me. Avianca LifeMiles usually requires 36,000 miles to fly business class one-way between Southeast Asia and Japan or South Korea. However, during this sale, you can book some great flights with a hefty discount.

To start, you can get a 14% discount between Singapore (SIN) and Tokyo Narita (NRT) which brings the one-way business class cost down to 31,000 LifeMiles for a flight listed at around 7 hours. If you were wondering where you can get the 31% discount, it’s between Bangkok (BKK) and Seoul (ICN). That brings the one-way cost of a business class ticket down to 25,000 LifeMiles.

I actually flew Thai Airways business class on its Airbus A350 from Seoul to Bangkok earlier this year and found it quite nice. That flight is listed at just under 6 hours so you’ll have plenty of time to enjoy a little champagne if that’s your thing — it’s mine.

Booking With LifeMiles

Let’s just go ahead and acknowledge that booking with LifeMiles isn’t always the easiest task. While it provides some great ways to book award tickets, you will occasionally run into issues with it not seeing the same award space that other Star Alliances partners see. You might even find that a round-trip search doesn’t show the same award space as a one-way search.

For this reason, it’s important to make sure you search for space on the LifeMiles site before you transfer points. If there’s an issue online, you can call LifeMiles but that isn’t always an easy experience either.

I share this not to dissuade you from taking advantage of this great award sale. Instead, I just want you to know of the potential issues. Personally, I haven’t run into many issues when booking for myself or when booking for others.

Final Thoughts

When you think about it, it often costs more than 64,000 miles to fly business class to Europe so getting that rate to Asia is one heck of a deal. The fact that you can fly some amazing airlines such as EVA Air and All Nippon Airways (ANA) makes it just that little bit better.

Whether you’re transferring Amex, Capital One or Citi points or just simply buying LilfeMiles, this is an easy deal for just about anyone who wants to participate. If you’re going to buy miles, just make sure you time it right so you can take advantage of a promo that will get you the most bang for your buck.