This offer has been extended to December 31, 2020
To the best of my recollection this is the first time SriLankan Airlines FlySmiles has offered a bonus for buying their miles. I could be wrong as I have missed some bonuses in my tracking of them for 19+ years or forgotten that they’ve had one but the latter is rare. So please do let me know if this isn’t the first time they have offered a buy miles bonus. Now onto the bonus – if you buy SriLankan FlySmiles Miles between now and December 14 31 you can earn up to a 100% bonus. Here’s the breakdown of the bonuses:
- Buy 2,500 to 10,000 miles receive a 50% bonus
- Buy 12,500 to 27,500 miles receive a 75% bonus
- Buy 30,000 or more miles receive a 100% bonus
FlySmiles Miles have to be purchased in blocks of 2,500 miles and cost US$60 per block. With the promotion you can buy a maximum of 100,000 miles which means you would end up with 200,000 miles for an outlay of US$2,400 or only 1.2 cents per mile. That number looks good at first sight but when you look at SriLankan’s reward chart that’s where things don’t look as good. The redemption amounts for many of the reward flights are extremely high with many business class redemption options pricing out over 200,000 miles round trip. Most of us when we do buy miles aren’t buying them to fly economy class (although there can still be value in that) but are looking to redeem for business class or first class. With 200,000 FlySmiles there are lots of economy class options to redeem for on SriLankan or their airlines partners including the entire oneworld alliance but not so many business class option. You can check out their reward chart here (PDF) to see what I am talking about. For example if you are wanting to fly out of North America here’s what you are looking to redeem (Purple are redemption amounts when you call in, Blue are booked online):
With out studying the chart for hours I really only see one potential redemption where buying these miles could make sense. That is for flights to Europe as you can buy enough miles for round trip flights in business class or even one way flights in first class. You’ll see from the chart that one way flights aren’t half the price like most programs now, SriLankan still likes to price them a little higher at 55% of the round trip amount. Anyways, if you redeem online you need 79,200 miles for a one way business class ticket which means you need to buy 16 blocks of 2,500 miles for US$960. That’s not a bad price for a one way business class ticket to Europe – in normal times that is, not so much during COVID-19 times. Round trip business class is 144,000 miles on the same route would costing US$1,740. Again not bad but not great. The one way first class ticket is 118,800 miles would end up running $1,440 – now that’s probably the best value here.
There are few more options that are potential options in the chart like one way business class to Asia but overall it’s not like buying miles from Avianca’s LifeMiles with their current 200% bonus offer or when Alaska offers a 50% bonus. Ultimately I don’t think many of you may make use of this buy miles bonus but I wanted to present it to you as you never know – there may be one or more of you who will actually find value in it and try it out.
Learn more about this buy miles offer here.
