Frontier’s free miles made me look (and get the whole family involved)

I’m a sucker for free miles.

Yesterday, Tim reported about an offer from Frontier Airlines to get 5,000 free miles just by showing that you have a balance of 5,000 miles/points or more with another airline loyalty program. Since my family of four completed JetBlue’s 25 for 25 challenge last year, I figured that this was a perfect opportunity for our family to try Frontier’s program on for size. I dragged a couple of family members along for a quick dip into Frontier Miles.

A simple promotion offering free miles

In a cool little promotion that I imagine won’t last long, Frontier is currently (at the time of writing) offering to give you the opportunity to take your unused miles with another airline and “turn them in” for Frontier miles. That seemingly suggests that they’re offering the opportunity to convert your existing miles into Frontier miles. Obviously, that isn’t possible — you can’t “transfer” miles from one airline to another (except in a handful of circumstances where several airlines share a loyalty program or currency, as is the case with the Avios programs). Frontier has no mechanism by which to take your miles from any other airline. In this case, they are effectively offering to “match” the miles you have in another program, up to 5,000 miles.

This isn’t the first time that Frontier has offered a mileage match. Last year, Frontier offered the opportunity to match your entire mileage balance from another airline program, with the “catch” being that you had to earn at least as many Frontier miles, and then Frontier would match it by doubling your balance, up to 1 million miles. That sounded awesome on the surface, but, in practice, it was limited by the number of Frontier miles you could expect to earn during the relevant time period. If you “matched” to an airline with 100,000 miles, you’d have been on the hook to figure out how to earn 100,000 Frontier miles, or you would have gotten no match at all.

This match is far simpler: just show your mileage balance from another airline in a screenshot, and Frontier is offering to match it mile-for-mile up to 5,000 miles, with no requirement to do anything further. Note that Frontier says to allow up to 5 days for the miles to post. Again, you’ll find full details in Tim’s post.

Frontier claimed that they were giving away 70,000,000 miles with this promotion. As of the stroke of midnight, they had already given away more than 20,000,000 miles if their counter is to be believed.

Surely many (most?) readers of this site could pick up 5,000 free miles with this promotion. Is it worth it?

The value of Frontier miles varies

Frontier doesn’t partner with foreign airlines or major alliances, so your best use of miles is to fly on Frontier. As such, I’ve never spent much time looking at Frontier’s program or miles, apart from reporting on some of their promotions.

However, this promotion made me look. Kudos to their marketing creativity for that.

Frontier has several different fare bundles, as follows:

The free 5,000 miles will probably only buy a Basic fare in most cases.

One example route I checked was a random Tuesday next month from Denver to New York-JFK. Cash prices were pretty reasonable, ranging from $44 for an overnight flight to $115 for some connecting itineraries shown here.

I’ll assume comparison against the undiscounted regular fare, rather than assuming the user has subscribed to Frontier’s Discount Den for $99.99 ($59.99 annual membership + $40 initiation fee in the first year).

Here’s a table comparing the above for just the Basic fare. As you can see, value ranges from under 1 cent per point to more than 2 cents per point, depending on the fare bundle you book.

Basic Bundle

The story changes a bit with other fare classes:

Economy Bundle

Premium Bundle

Business Bundle

As you can see, Frontier miles just in this one example vary from being worth less than a cent to well over 2c per point.

Unfortunately, the value was weakest when cash prices were cheapest. Further, the availability of 5K tickets varies. Sometimes, you’ll find many days with availability — like this week between Chicago-Midway and Dallas.

However, just because tickets are available for 5K miles doesn’t mean they are a good deal. For instance, here’s a look at cash prices on Saturday, March 7th. As you can see, the first flight is only $23 at standard pricing, and the spread between Discount Den and Standard pricing starts to widen on other fares.

Here’s a look at award pricing. Just the first couple of itineraries here are available at 5K miles.

That first flight, at 5,000 miles + $6 instead of $23, is yielding just 0.34c per point. Ouch.

The situation continued to vary from there, with some dates and itineraries that feature 5K pricing yielding OK value, and others offering very low value per mile. Higher fare classes tended to yield better value per mile (and those fares are more realistic for me, as I typically want at least some of the features of those bundles). The truth is that Frontier rarely meets my needs (they don’t serve my home airport), and I’m not terribly likely to book a Basic bundle.

With that being the case, was it worth registering for this promotion? I think it could be.

It was easy for me to get the whole family involved

As noted at the top, my wife, two sons, and I all completed the JetBlue 25 for 25 promotion, so we all easily had in excess of 5,000 miles to show for the match. The four of us expect to receive a combined total of 20,000 Frontier miles.

Further, I realized that my in-laws had each earned some miles during the course of our travels. My father-in-law had earned some miles last year on our Air France award flight to Europe. We had booked our tickets on Air France via Virgin Atlantic, but there was a schedule change that caused a misconnect. Once Virgin Atlantic and Air France got that sorted out, we got reaccommodated in a revenue fare bucket. I had thought to help him create and attach a Delta SkyMiles number, and he ended up earning more than 7,000 miles. I took a screenshot of that and helped him match here to get 5,000 free Frontier miles. Similarly, my mother-in-law had earned just enough Southwest points to match for another 5,000 free miles. That’s now a total of six of us who are each expecting 5,000 miles.

I should add that if not for the miles we already had, I still could have easily helped the whole family qualify. Since I have a Hawaiian Airlines Atmos credit card, I have the ability to transfer Atmos points to any other Atmos member for free (and I can also receive Atmos points from another member without a transfer fee). I could have easily sent 5,000 Atmos points to each family member for this promo.

Without even needing to do that, the six of us expect to collectively end up with 30,000 Frontier miles with very low effort.

Frontier offers family pooling with up to 8 friends and family members

Soon after seeing the promotion, I Googled whether Frontier allows family pooling.

From there, I didn’t even waste the time to click through and read more; I decided it was certainly worth the few minutes and clicks of the mouse to create Frontier Miles accounts for the entire family and submit the associated screenshots.

It wasn’t until later that I dug into the details as to how Frontier Family Pooling works.

Frontier indeed makes it possible to pool miles with up to 8 people (I love programs that do this). Frontier clearly notes that you can pool with people like friends and coworkers; you aren’t limited to pooling with immediate family. That’s great, but it wasn’t until after I submitted for our miles that I bothered to click through and scroll down to the part about “How to unlock” Family pooling.

As it turns out, you need either Frontier Silver elite status or the Frontier credit card to unlock the ability to create a points pool. We don’t have either of those things right now, so pooling our miles isn’t yet an option for us.

That said, I wasn’t terribly disappointed since the hurdle here is relatively small. I could easily make us eligible to pool by simply getting the credit card, or maybe Frontier will offer another status match. Either of those seems easy enough (though Frontier isn’t currently offering an elite status match).

Am I going to run out and get the Frontier credit card just so we can pool these miles? No, I’m not. I probably won’t get the Frontier card. However, if we find ourselves considering the Frontier card, we will have 30,000 more reasons to get it. The intro offer on that card at the time of writing includes 50,000 bonus miles after spending $1,000 in the first 90 days. By signing up six of us for this matching promotion, I’ve essentially made that welcome offer worth 80K miles for any of us, should one of us want to apply. And, as demonstrated above, that greater quantity of miles could certainly be useful for some of the more premium bundles, including those that include what are now known as “Up Front” seats. I see those seats being sold as business class on Google Flights in the next couple of months (and Frontier has announced the intention to sell domestic first class, with a seat that looks ready to rival Spirit’s Big Front Seat). I figure that it probably wouldn’t be hard to get $200-$300 in value out of the 30,000 miles once pooled.

I can’t resist this type of promotion

I love it when airlines come up with creative ways to get people engaged. As soon as I heard about the SAS Millionaire promotion, I felt compelled to do it. The same happened with JetBlue’s 25 for 25. This matching promotion from Frontier is far smaller than those airline promotions, but I love that it demonstrates a creative play to get people engaged with the program. Even though Frontier doesn’t serve my home airport, and I’m not likely to use 5,000 miles to book a Basic Economy fare on Frontier, I couldn’t pass up free miles. That was particularly true because of the theoretical ability to pool those miles down the road. I don’t pretend that I am highly likely to get the Frontier card and pool them (mostly because they don’t serve my home airport), but I’m glad to have it as an option, and now I’m going to have these free Frontier miles in mind, which will likely lead to me looking for opportunities to use them. Yesterday morning, I didn’t wake up with any intention to check mileage rates on Frontier flights, but this promotion certainly made me look, which is exactly what it was intended to do. Soon, we’ll have some miles and that may position us to strike while the iron is hot, which is what this hobby is all about.

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