Citi adds Avianca Life Miles as Thank You transfer partner

8

Frequent Miler's latest team challenge, Million Mile Madness, is happening now! Follow us as Greg, Nick, and Stephen compete to earn 1 Million SAS miles by flying 15 airlines before November 23rd. Who will complete the challenge with the most Speed, Affordability, and Style?

Follow along here!

Avianca’s LifeMiles program is a popular option for booking Star Alliance flights because they have no fuel surcharges, decent award rates, and they often sell miles cheaply. They are about to increase in popularity as Avianca Life Miles has now been added as the latest Citi Thank You transfer partner.

a white text on a white background

As seen in the picture above, Citi Thank You points transfer to Avianca Life Miles at a 1:1 ration in blocks of 1,000 miles. This is an exciting change since Life Miles gives you access to a nice award chart — though they don’t always have access to all partner award availability shown on other Star Alliance carrier sites (like United and Aeroplan). The good news is that you can easily search for availability using Avianca’s site. The award chart (see a link to the full chart here) has decent rates to much of the world from North America. I pasted this chart together, so forgive anything that doesn’t line up perfectly straight:

a close-up of a graph

You’ll notice that rates are reasonable to much of the world — with business class to North/South/Central Asia all available for less than 80K miles one-way (and first class to North Asia would only be 90K miles).

an office chair in an airplane
ANA’s First Class looks like a nice value for 90K points one-way.

You may have also noticed the absence of North America-to-North America and Europe rates. That’s because those vary a bit by region:

a table with numbers and numbers

Domestic USA flights within a single region are available from just 7,500 miles one-way. That could be a nice value as the regions are actually fairly large. For example, United States 1 extends from as far north as Maine to as far south as South Carolina. Region 2 can stretch from North Dakota to Florida. As an example, I just looked up an itinerary from Fargo to Orlando to leave on Tuesday, and it came up at 7500 miles.

a screen shot of a flight schedule

The taxes and fees on that flight come to $55:

a screenshot of a mobile application

That compares pretty favorably to booking last minute at the best cash rates:

a screenshot of a phone

And what’s even better is that Avianca will let you adjust the number of miles, allowing you a higher cash co-pay. You could pay as little as 3500 miles for that flight if you up the cash copay to $115.

a green and black logo

Keep in mind that domestic United availability isn’t great and cash prices on that route surely aren’t as expensive when you plan in advance, but this sure beats paying United both more miles and more money for the same flights.

Flights to Europe in business class aren’t quite as good a value as Aeroplan — but with no fuel surcharges, there may be times when it makes a lot more sense to redeem Life Miles.

Bottom line

This is certainly a net positive for the Citi Thank You program. I love to see transferable programs add transfer partners because it helps those programs maintain value. If one partner devalues, there are other great options ready to step in. Furthermore, a diversity of options is valuable to have in play. Some will probably argue that LifeMiles aren’t the best use of points since they can so often be purchased cheaply — but with some good opportunities to earn Thank You points at 3x, I’ll be happy to have access to another competitive award chart. We have added Avianca LifeMiles to our Citi Transfer Partners page for reference.

H/T: One Mile at a Time

Want to learn more about miles and points? Subscribe to email updates or check out our podcast on your favorite podcast platform.
Subscribe
Notify of
guest

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

8 Comments
newest
oldest most voted
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments

[…] Within-US awards are as low as 7,500 miles one-way. […]

[…] Nick wrote about Citi ThankYou adding Avianca LifeMiles as a transfer partner, he discovered an odd thing with their award pricing: they seem to price mixed cabin awards as a […]

[…] at the outset of this post, there have been plenty of big wins. And with Citi adding Turkish and Avianca as transfer partners, the flexibility of those transferable points makes the ThankYou program a bit […]

[…] generally prefer to earn miles through one of the many techniques we write about (and with LifeMiles recently being added as a Citi ThankYou transfer partner, many readers might have a decent stash of points that could be transferred), these miles are cheap […]

Bill

Where are you looking to find availability? UA’s site or Google Flights or ???
Thanks,
Bill

Stvr

How fast is the transfer?