Are the ‘buy miles’ promos with Virgin Atlantic, Avios and Miles & More any good?

We had a bit of fun yesterday with the error on avios.com that allowed you to buy 40,000 Avios points for just £399.  That loophole has now been plugged, though!

There are a few other ‘buy miles’ offers about, though.  As the year draws to a close, your favourite loyalty scheme will be looking to its bank account and wondering what it can do to bring in a few quid before the year-end accounts are drawn up.  The answer, of course, is pushing the sale of points to members.

Virgin Flying Club is offering a bonus of up to 20% when you buy miles before December 12th.  The scale is:

5,000 – 24,000 = 10% bonus

25,000 – 49,000 = 15% bonus

50,000 – 100,000 = 20% bonus

Full details are here.  Even at the 100,000 level, you are paying (adjusting for the bonus) £1,515 for 120,000, which is an unexciting 1.26p.

For comparison, if you bought 20,000 Starwood points in their current promotion, you would be effectively buying Virgin miles for 1.3p – a better deal if you only want a smaller amount.

Iberia Plus is currently offering a 30% bonus on purchases of Avios points. This deal runs until 15th December, see here for further details.

At the top end, you will be paying Euro 459 for 31,200 Avios (24,000 + 30%). That works out at 1.22p per Avios, based on £380. You would need to add a 3% foreign exchange fee to this price if your credit card has one.

This is nowhere near as good as yesterdays mistake price.  However, this is cheaper than buying Avios via avios.com at todays price, where you will pay £575 for 40,000 (1.44p).  (avios.com is currently giving a 5,000 miles bonus when you buy 35,000.)  However, you must have been an Iberia Plus member for 90 days before you can transfer Avios across to BA.

It is also a lot more expensive than picking up Avios points via a Tesco promotion, so I am not desperately excited.  Again,  if you want a smaller amount, you should compare the price of Starwood Preferred Guest points – albeit that you may need to wait a few days for those to transfer across.

Finally, Miles & More is offering a 20% bonus on all miles purchases until the end of the year.   Link here.

The price is VERY poor indeed, and you should NOT jump in.  Even with a 20% bonus, you are paying a whopping €290 for the annual cap of 14,400 miles.  That works out at 1.68p per mile. 

You would be substantially better off going down the Starwood Preferred Guest route – albeit with the caveat that the last time I sent points from Starwood to Miles & More, they took a whole month to go across.