How to manufacture 2 first class flights to Hawaii

One of my good friends is getting married in Hawaii next year, and instead of buying them items off their registry, I decided to use my miles & points expertise to buy them 2 first class tickets to Hawaii as their wedding gift.  I checked Alaska’s web site and sure enough, it costs 40K Alaska miles per person ONE WAY in first class (20K in coach btw).  They weren’t sure if they were going to stay longer for their honeymoon, so I figured I’d bother with the return later.  So after racking my brain for a week (and really, it wasn’t just me – they were still trying to find a venue), I decided to pull the trigger last night.  So as I clicked through to my cart, I saw this:

Now most people would just click on NEXT after seeing that screen, but I paused on that screen for a while.  Why?  Because for an extra 30K miles per person, they could fly FIRST CLASS all the way to South Africa!  So man, this was A LOT of Alaska miles to burn.  Then I did the math.  If you divide $1172 / 80,000 miles, you get a value of 1.46c per point.  That’s a pretty horrible value.  Why?  Because my Barclays Arrival card gets 2.2c per point for every dollar spent.  Let me break this down further.

For me to manufacture 80,000 Alaska points, I would probably use USBuxx cards.  It costs $5 for every $1000 load.  And the Alaska Visa card only gets me 1 point per $1, so a $1,000 load would net me 1,000 Alaska miles.  So I would need 80 loads x $5 = $400.  Fair enough.  Instead of paying $1172, I’d just pay $400 for them.  Pretty good deal.

Let’s try the math with the Barclays Arrival card.  Remember, this card gets me 2.2 points to be used on travel for every $1 spent.  That means for the same $5 load, instead of getting 1,000 points, I’d get 2,200 Arrival points.  And with Arrival points, you pay the cash price and redeem points against the cash price you paid.  So, I would pay the $1172 and then redeem 117,200 points to credit back the $1172.  So 117,200 / 2200 = ~53 loads.  So 53 loads x $5 = $265.  AHA!  That’s cheaper than the Alaska deal and better yet, they’ll also earn 2,600 Alaska miles + 50% bonus for first class = 3,900 miles.

Now let me caveat this by saying that the USBuxx cards are no longer open to new applicants, but existing users can use this method.  Or for you new guys, use the NW Buxx that I talked about here.  Either method this will take me 6-12 months to manufacture these points, but since I don’t have any other paid trips coming up, I’m okay with this.  Also remember, I got 40K points on signup, so I really only need to manufacture about 70K points worth.  For their return, I think I’ll book them a stopover from this post if they know where they want to go after their wedding.

The important thing to remember here is that if you are not getting 2 cents of value for your redemption, you are better off paying the CASH price, and then applying Barclay Arrival points towards the cash price or just use the Citi Double Cash Back card that gives 2% for your manufactured spend.