Get 5,000 mile sign-up bonus in MilleMiglia, ‘the world’s worst programme’, worth €25 off a flight

I got myself crossed off Alitalia’s Christmas card list last year, when I ran this article asking whether their MilleMiglia scheme is actually the worst frequent flyer scheme in the world.

The driver for this post was the fact that, every three years, Alitalia closes down its loyalty scheme, wipes out your existing miles balance, and then relaunches the scheme the next day!  December 2012 was the last time this happened, and the new version of MilleMiglia is now up and running – but only to December 2015 ….

At present, Alitalia is offering 5,000 bonus miles if you sign up for MilleMiglia before tomorrow night.

The ONLY reason I mention this on Head for Points is that you can use 5,000 Alitalia miles to claim a €25 discount on a €100+ Alitalia flight.  You might therefore find this worthwhile if you were planning a break in Italy.

The 5,000 miles do not credit automatically, however.  You need some activity on your account to receive them, which would involve crediting a SkyTeam flight.  More easily, it seems that making the minimum 1,000 point Amex Membership Rewards transfer should be enough to trigger it.

There are no worthwhile flight redemptions for 5,000 miles.  Alitalia does not even allow one-way redemptions, so the cheapest option would be 20,000 miles for a European economy flight.  The €25 flight discount appears to be the only sensible way to use the bonus miles.

And an extra titbit ….

Whilst researching this article, I found that the Alitalia reward chart contains this fantastic example of Italian bureaucracy at work.  Imagine if you had to do this every time you booked an Avios reward ticket for a friend or family member:

“Whenever an Award Ticket is issued in the name of a beneficiary, i.e. a customer other than the MilleMiglia account holder, the beneficiary must be in possession of full documentation relating to the award ticket when effecting check-in operations: i.e. travel document, personal identity document, authorization written and signed by the account-holding member, photocopy of the personal identity document and MilleMiglia Card of the account-holding member.”