Alaska Airlines and Bank of America continue to adjust the welcome offers on its Atmos credit cards following the refresh of the Alaska Airlines card portfolio. Most recently, the welcome offer on the Alaska Ascent swapped traded out a 30% discount coupon for 10,000 more miles—probably a fair trade.
Here are the current offers on Alaska Airlines credit cards:
Atmos™ Rewards Ascent Visa Signature® Credit Card welcome offer
Welcome offer: Earn 70,000 bonus points and a $99 Companion Fare (plus taxes and fees from $23). To qualify, spend $3,000 or more on purchases within the first 90 days of opening your account.
This bonus is awarded as Atmos bonus points.
Annual fee: $95
Atmos™ Rewards Summit Visa Infinite® Credit Card welcome offer
Welcome offer: Earn 80,000 bonus points and a 25,000-point Global Companion Award with this offer. To qualify, spend $4,000 or more on purchases within the first 90 days of opening your account.
This bonus is awarded as Atmos bonus points.
Annual fee: $395
Atmos™ Rewards Visa Signature® Business Card welcome offer
Welcome offer: Earn 70,000 bonus points and a $99 Companion Fare (plus taxes and fees from $23) with this offer. To qualify, make $4,000 or more in purchases within the first 90 days of opening your account.
This bonus is awarded as Atmos bonus points.
Annual fee: $70 for the company and $25 per card
My take: Good bonuses, highly valuable miles
First off it’s worth a mention that I think the person heading up Alaska’s loyalty programs, Brett Catlin, is one of the smartest executives in loyalty at the moment. Alaska is an incredibly useful program that delivers on value for its members, perhaps better than any other U.S. domestic program. I might write more on this later.
If you’ve figured out how to use the global companion award to great effect, then the bonus on the Alaska Ascent card has the most opportunity for potential value. But for most people, the bonuses on either the business or the Ascent cards will be the better picks.
These offers are marketed as “limited time” offers, but a quirk of Bank of America is that most of their regular offers seem to be flagged as “limited time.” Generally, these bonuses are slightly better than the regular bonuses on other miles cards from other airlines.
