Set an alert in your calendars for December 28 if you are someone who utilizes Cathay Pacific's Asia Miles program. On that date they will be launching a bonus for converting points from their global credit cards partners! The bonus will be 15% and from the way I understand it all of their partners are included and it eclipses the 10% bonus we saw around the same time last year. Note this is for conversion from credit card partners not for cards that actually earn Asia Miles like the RBC Cathay Pacific Visa Platinum Card. In reality though that card isn't very popular Canada where as the cards that really count that will earn this bonus are extremely popular!
In Canada the Asia Miles program has three financial partners whose credit card points can be converted to Asia Miles:
This means you can convert points from American Express Membership Rewards (not MR Select though), HSBC Rewards and RBC Rewards (Avion cards only).
Here are the conversion rates along with the bonus for the three Canadian programs:
- American Express Membership Rewards: 1,000 points = 750 Asia Miles (863 with bonus)
- HSBC Rewards: 25,000 points = 8,000 miles (9,200 with bonus)
- RBC Rewards (Avion only): 1 point = 1 mile (1.15 miles with bonus) Note that RBC has a minimum 10,000 point transfer
If you aren't very familiar with Asia Miles there are some definite advantages to the program. From its members having greater access to award seats on Cathay Pacific metal to a wide range of partners to redeem on at reasonable rates for some those of those routes and more (you can even redeem for some Air Canada flights in Canada!) In fact when the promotion officially launches later this month we'll cover some of those better redemption options.
If the promotion is appealing to you but you don't have any points to transfer there are some possibilities to get in on the transfer bonus with new credit card applications as well so long as the transfers are complete by January 31. American Express with the Gold Rewards Card and the Platinum Card will both award the welcome bonus within days of meeting minimum spend. My recommendation would the Gold Rewards Card as it will award 25,000 points when you spend $1,500 on the card whereas the Platinum Card is the same bonus but would require $2,000 in spending with a much higher annual fee.You could also look at the business versions of these cards as well.
You can also still get in on amazing HSBC World Elite Mastercard 100K welcome bonus (130K in
Quebec) although you won't have all those points by the time the
conversion bonus happens. It is possible the first 20,000 points could post in
time and as long as you can spend $1666.67 pretty quickly on the card
you would have the 25,000 points required to convert to Asia Miles as you have until January 31 to convert.
For RBC there is the targeted bonus of 20,000 points and first year free on their RBC Avion Visa Infinite Card where you'll get the first 15,000 points upon approval so if those post in time you could look at converting them.
We always love to see these conversion bonuses that are open to most if not all financial partners of airline program and this is the second Asian program this fall to offer such a bonus - in fact the Singapore Airlines transfer bonus is still on offer until December 27. Read about the Singapore KrisFlyer offer here but remember the Singapore offer only kicks in when a total of 30,000 or more KrisFlyer miles have been transferred!
There is no link to the Asia Miles conversion bonus offer at this time but it will be out on December 28 and remember it runs until January 31, 2021
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