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?
The Spirit Airlines Free Spirit Travel More Mastercard is now offering 60,000 miles and a $100 Companion Voucher after spending $1,000 in the first 90 days. That offer can be surprisingly good in terms of value toward paid tickets, possibly yielding several round trip tickets.
The Offer & Key Card Details
| Card Offer and Details |
|---|
60K Points + $100 Voucher ⓘ Non-Affiliate 60K points plus $100 companion voucher after $1K spend in 90 days (enter any random five-digit number as "employee code")$0 introductory annual fee for the first year, then $79 Information about this card has been collected independently by Frequent Miler. The issuer did not provide the details, nor is it responsible for their accuracy. Earning rate: 3X Spirit ✦ 2X dining & grocery ✦ 1X everywhere else Card Info: Mastercard World Elite issued by BOA. This card has no foreign currency conversion fees. Big spend bonus: ✦ $100 Companion Flight Voucher EACH anniversary after making at least $5,000 in purchases within the prior year Earn ✦ 1 SQP (towards elite status) for each $10 of spend Noteworthy perks: Waived redemption fees ✦ Points Pooling ✦ 25% in-flight food & beverage rebate ✦ No points expiration ✦ No foreign transaction fees ✦ Zone 2 priority boarding |
Quick Thoughts
We’ve seen some monster credit card offers over the past two years, including plenty of transferable currency cards offering bonuses that can be far more valuable than the intro bonus on this card.
However, the best use of most transferable currencies is for international premium cabin travel. By contrast, if your goal is primarily to travel on domestic leisure routes between airports served by Spirit, you could potentially do pretty well with Free Spirit points.
For instance, let’s say you want to fly from New York to Miami. Here is a random week in June, with award prices starting at 2,500 miles $5.60 one-way.
Awards are of course variable with cash prices, with cash prices on this route starting at $37.79 one-way on my chosen week.
As you can see, Free Spirit points tend to be worth north of a penny per point (be sure to subtract the $5.60 you’ll pay in tax on an award flight from the cash rate if you’re doing the cents-per-point math). Also keep in mind that unless you intend to join the Saver$ Club, the cash price in the right-hand column should be your comparison point on the cash prices (but the award prices shown don’t require joining the club!).
In other words, at 2,500 points + $5.60 one-way, the cheapest award runs around 1.5c per point ($42.79 – $5.60 = $37.19 / 2,500 points). The other flights shown above yield 1.25 to 1.3 cents per point. Note that you won’t pay a redemption fee as a cardholder (otherwise those without status or the credit card are charged a fee for redemptions within 28 days of departure).
In some cases, I was surprised to find quite a few seats at reasonable prices. For instance, I found a flight from Los Angeles to Seattle with five seats at 10K points per passenger.
The value is variable, but in my spot checks on a number of routes I didn’t find a value below 1.2c per point. If you think you’ll get an average of just 1.2c per point, the bonus could buy you around $720 in flights. If you value the companion voucher and/or focus on cherry-picking higher-value redemptions and Spirit works for you, that’s certainly not bad.
One of my favorite perks of the card is that it enables you to create a points pool. That means you’ll be able to create a pool for your friends and family to put points together for you to redeem. That can make it much easier for a family to take advantage of the program given that combining the points earned by all of the family members should make it pretty easy to put together the points for a free flight.
If you’ll be flying Spirit quite a bit, note that this card earns 1 SQP for every $10 spent. That means you could theoretically generate top-tier Free Spirit Gold status with enough credit card spend. Gold benefits include a free checked bag and carry-on, free seat selection at booking (even exit rows, though not the Big Front Seat), free in-flight snack and beverage, and more. You might be able to leverage that into status with other airlines — I was able to leverage Free Spirit Gold status into Delta Gold with a status match challenge last year. Then, recently, I matched Delta Gold to ANA Platinum status, which is good for Star Alliance Gold. I wouldn’t necessarily recommend spending at Spirit if your main plan is to try to match elsewhere, but it’s interesting to me nonetheless.
Overall, I wouldn’t recommend this card over transferable currency cards as I prefer being able to transfer points to many different airline partners. Furthermore, if you want to travel internationally to places like Europe or Asia, you just can’t do that with Free Spirit points. But for the target market that flies Spirit regularly, this offer can be pretty decent.
Want to learn more about miles and points? Subscribe to email updates or check out our podcast on your favorite podcast platform.
Hey Nick, great article and breakdown. I was told by a Spirit flight attendant that I could use the $100 companion voucher to pay for the mastercard annual renewal fee. I don’t see any option to do this, however. Are you aware of anything along these lines and how that might work? Thanks!
No, that doesn’t make any sense at all. The Companion Voucher is essentially a Spirit Airlines coupon. You can’t use a Spirit Airlines coupon to pay your Bank of America credit card bill.