Should You Buy Turkish Miles with a Massive Bonus?

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Turkish Airlines Miles & Smiles is offering a large bonus to members who buy miles before 2 May, 2022.

You can receive:

  • a 25% bonus when buying 5,000-24,999 miles
  • a 50% bonus when buying 25,000-49,999 miles
  • a 75% bonus when buying 50,000-99,999 miles

Does it Make Sense?

You can buy miles for 30 US dollars per 1,000 miles – i.e. 3 cents per mile.  In sterling terms, that works out to 2.3p per mile.

When you add the 75% bonus for buying 50,000+ miles, your cost would come down to 1.3p per mile.

If that sounds like a lot, it really isn’t… once you take into account the fact that you can fly in Business Class to most of the world for 90,000 miles return.  Turkish Airlines’ surcharges are reasonable – approximately £400 return for a Business Class award to Southeast Asia for example…

What I would NOT recommend, however, is attempting to use your Turkish miles on a Star Alliance partner award. Although it can be done, these are notoriously difficult to book…

Some Quirks of the Promotion

You can read the full T&Cs by clicking here. But I wanted to highlight two important factors…

  1. The bonus miles (25-75%) will be added manually before 30 May, 2022
  2. The bonus miles will EXPIRE on 31 December, 2023

Turkish Airlines Miles & Smiles operates a HARD EXPIRY policy. Use them or lose them…

These two factors would make me wary of this promotion. You should normally only buy miles when you have an imminent need for them – but here you will have to wait a month for some of your purchased miles to arrive. You would also be running a substantial risk of your bonus miles expiring before you actually get around to spending them.

As a result, this promotion really should only be considered by Turkish Airlines Miles & Smiles regulars who know what they are doing…

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