Turkish offers an award sale that’s very….”Turkish Miles & Smiles” of them

Turkish Airlines Miles & Smiles is currently offering a sale on award tickets. When I read the details of this sale, all I could hear in my head was the opening line of Ricky Martin’s song “Cup of Life” (Do you reeeally want it!?? You really want iiiiiit!??). I have to imagine that Miles & Smiles executives have a slogan like “Make everything overly complicated” pinned to the top of a cork board in the office. While I’ve long loved Turkish for redemptions on United to Hawaii (we just got back from a trip thanks to that sweet spot!), I don’t love much about this new award sale.

The Deal

• Turkish Miles & Smiles is offering 20% back when you redeem miles for an award flight, though there are a number of key terms to note below
• Direct link to this deal

Key Terms

• Valid for bookings made between March 4 and August 31, 2024 for travel during the same window
• Applies to all bookings on Turkish Airlines-operated flights (economy class or business class)
• The rebated miles will expire on December 31, 2025
• The rebate only applies to miles used to book the member’s own ticket, not for tickets booked for other passengers

Quick Thoughts

Turkish is offering 20% back on award flights, though as alluded to in the first paragraph, that isn’t as straight forward as it sounds:

• The 20% back is a rebate, not a discount – so you’ll need to have the miles up front and then get them back after you’ve taken your flight
• The rebated miles will have a special expiration date of December 31, 2025 — so rather than being valid for 3 years (as is usually the case with Turkish miles), your rebated miles may only be valid for about a year and a half depending on when you travel
•  Only the ticket of the member redeeming the miles gets the 20% rebate. In other words, if I redeemed miles for my family of four to travel, I’d only get 20% of the miles for my ticket back. The best we could do is splitting into two PNRs and have my wife book her ticket separately so she could get the 20% rebate on her ticket (and then we’d end up with the 20% rebates split with one in her account and one in mine)

Truthfully, that all sounds about par for the course with Turkish, but that doesn’t make it more pleasant. While I’ve long argued that Turkish isn’t always as difficult as its reputation makes it out to be, but like this promotion, many aspects of using the program are more complicated than they ought to be. Given the recent increases in the cost of awards, it will be a stretch to find a situation where this deal is worth the pain points.

If you’re a solo traveler looking to travel from the US to Turkiye, then this could work out to be a decent deal. Turkish recently completely devalued its award chart, but it now charges 65K miles one-way from the US to Istanbul (you’ll pay more miles for additional segments beyond Istanbul, which quickly becomes a not-very-good deal). You’d get 13K miles back on that US to Istanbul trip via this promotion, which would be more than enough for a one-way ticket to Hawaii in economy class (which now costs 10K miles each way in economy class). That’s certainly not bad.

However, if you’re traveling with multiple passengers and/or not absolutely positive that you’ll use the rebated miles before they expire at the end of next year, the juice just doesn’t seem worth the squeeze here.

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