The US Airways Share Promo has been run quite a few times. In fact, it has been run more often in the last year than it has for several years before. To be honest, I was somewhat surprised that they continued to run it after the merger with American Airlines had gone forward. I did not think that there was anyway that the new management team would want that many US Airway miles being minted at such a low cost when it opened up the AA network to award bookings with those miles. I was wrong! However, something had to change eventually…
The US Airways Share Promo is one where you are able to share miles with another US Airways account and the recipient account would earn a 100% bonus on the miles transferred (or a tiered amount but at the highest transfer point – 50,000 miles – it would be 100% bonus). After counting the taxes and fees, the cost per mile (because you were basically buying the bonus miles) was down to 1.1 cent each. That is really a great price, especially when there were so many great awards available in business class! You could essentially buy a business class award to Europe for $1,134 with the bonus the way it used to be structured.
The US Airways promo is structured differently. For one, it costs more to buy these miles than it did before. The new cost is 1.5 cents per mile plus the 7.5% tax and $30 processing fee per transaction. Obviously, to get the most out of this would require you to transfer the full 50,000 miles. This is where the second part comes into play.
The other new aspect of this share promo is that the 100% bonus is split between giver and receiver. So, if you share 50,000 miles from your account to the account of a friend, you will receive 25,000 miles back as a bonus and they will receive the 50,000 + 25,000 miles as a bonus for a total of 75,000 miles. This makes it harder if you are transferring for the purpose of getting in on big redemptions because you will have only 75,000 miles in the account instead of the 100,000 miles you would under the old share promo. Not only that, but instead of only spending $567 for the extra 50,000 before, it will now require $836 for the extra 50,000 (which is split between two accounts).
Is It Worth It?
I would have argued that even with if they offered the old share promo it would still not have been a great deal unless the buyer was able to move on a redemption quickly. The reason for that is the last time US Airways ran a promo like this, they changed the sweetest spots on their award calendar mid-promo – the 90,000 miles in business class to North Asia via Europe. They did that without warning or notice (which they are fully entitled to do but still stinks). Without knowing what other award type changes may be made, I would be very hesitant to buy miles without a plan to quickly redeem them.
With that being said, I think this current promo and the price of the miles presents little to no value for most people. For some, the price of 1.67 cents per mile still might be a good deal for premium redemptions, but with the way the bonus is structured, it certainly is more limiting. However, should you want to go ahead with this promo, here is the link. Here are the details about the promo:
- The promo runs through June 30
- The account must have been active for at least 12 days to be eligible to receive a bonus
- The limit on bonus miles received through this promo is 50,000 miles (that means you could transfer your miles to a friend and they could transfer that same amount back and you both would have the max of bonus miles received).
Will you be buying or are your buying days over for US Airways?
