The Alaska Airlines credit cards have updated new cardmember offers—and all of them are marketed as “limited-time” offers. But some of the new offers are worse than the previous ones. Read more in my commentary below.
Here are the current offers on Alaska Airlines credit cards:
Atmos™ Rewards Ascent Visa Signature® Credit Card welcome offer
Welcome offer: Get 70,000 bonus points and a $99 Companion Fare (plus taxes and fees from $23) with this offer. To qualify, spend $2,500 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 after spending $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: Get 70,000 bonus points and a $99 Companion Fare (plus taxes and fees from $23) after you 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.
My take: This is why you don’t trust the marketing
Aaron Hurd
Executive Editor of Cards and Points
The current crop of Alaska Airlines bonuses is a good case study in why you shouldn’t rely strictly on the marketing headlines.
Before I get to that, in my view, the best current bonus is the Atmos™ Rewards Ascent Visa Signature® Credit Card, which actually increased compared to the previous bonus.
Here’s my issue with Alaska’s marketing on these bonuses: All three cards’ bonuses are marketed as being “limited-time” offers. Generally, in the credit card space, this would imply that the offers are better than the previous offers. But this is not the case.
The Summit card earns 20,000 fewer points than its previous offer and the business card offers 10,000 fewer points. Further, both cards are now offering what seems to be the standard bonus.
That said, I’m only including the Ascent card on my highlight list of best offers and that’s the only card that I’ll flag as a limited-time offer in my newsletter and on this site.
Frankly, I think that marketing a card’s regular offer as a limited-time offer, while true in the sense that the offer will change at some point, is deceptive.
