Round Up: Frontier Status Match, Chase Prime Visa $200 Offer, Use Emirates to Fly Condor; New Alaska Award Chart

A few items to wrap up the week:

Frontier Airlines Status Match

This Frontier Status Match isn’t brand new, but I also haven’t mentioned it outside of the Facebook group, where it’s admittedly been more popular than I thought (not being a Frontier flyer myself, I underestimated it).

For a cost of $99 to $149, you can match up to as high as top tier 100k status with Frontier. You can see some of the tier benefits above (note they are renaming all of the existing tier levels, so Elite 100K is now Diamond). 

There are two benefits to doing the match, despite the fee.

One is obviously if you fly Frontier. Given how Frontier charges for EVERYTHING on top of the plane ticket, if you fly even occasionally you will get way more value from the status, which will last to the end of 2024, than if you paid. I’ve definitely seen some people post about saving crazy amounts of money on frequent Frontier travel compared to if they’d paid a la carte. 

The other is a match to Spirit Airlines (hey, if you fly Frontier, why not Spirit?). Your 50K / Platinum or 100K / Diamond Frontier status will get you Gold with Spirit.

Apologies on the above – I ran into a cached page but it’s not currently an active match (Spirit) 

You can see all of the details on the status match page. Additionally, here are all the tier levels that match. 

Link to the status match offer.

The (Amazon) Prime Visa Has Two New Offers

If you are a very heavy Amazon and/or Whole Foods shopper, an uncapped 5% card can make some sense (though it will be impacted by your 5/24). You must have an Amazon Prime membership.

The Prime Visa is offering $200 on approval – no spend required – for new cardholders. This deal will last through December 4th.

If you already have the card, you’re not being left out of this.

From  November 17–December 28, Prime members with a Prime Visa can earn an extra 1% back (for a total of 6% back) on orders when you select No-Rush Shipping at checkout. 

Not bad.

Book Condor Awards with Emirates

I wanted to mention this new Emirates booking option yesterday but ran out of time. Sorry!

I believe it was Award Wallet that discovered the new partnership and they wrote an extensive summary, so I won’t reinvent that wheel here.

The chart is distance based which mens some sweet spots and some not so sweet spots.

A prime sweet spot is 66,000 Emirates Skywards points for a JFK or BOS – FRA (New York or Boston to Frankfurt, Germany) and if you can get on the A330-900neo (as reviewed here by OMAAT), you’d have a great flight. I would not choose to fly their older metal, however. If you aren’t on the east coast though, it gets less and less attractive with flights departing the west coast to Frankfurt clocking in at 88,000 miles. 

Note that is you have harder to come by Alaska miles, the non-stop from anywhere in the US would be 55,000 miles – at least for now.

Now 66,000 is far from the cheapest way to get to Europe (that’s 45,000 miles on a Star Alliance airline with Turkish Miles&Smiles), but it’s not at all bad for the new business class product, especially if you have some spare Emirates miles to start with (they hard expire and maybe you transferred in before they heavily devalued premium class flights to/through DXB) and because you can transfer to Emirates from all flexible points card programs. 

Here’s the distance based chart (only non-stop is allowed; two flights will be two distance based calculations added together).

Alaska is Unifying Awards in March

Alaska is getting rid of partner-specific award charts next March. Is it good? Is it bad? It can be both at the same time 😉 

Gary at View from the Wing deep dives the sweet spots.

Thoughts?

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