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My husband is from Ecuador and still has a lot of family down there, which means that we have to journey down there every couple years. Now that we have to buy four full-price tickets (and will soon need to buy five), we figured we should try to take advantage of a credit card that will give us frequent flier miles. The first one my husband tried was Bank Of America’s Alaska Airlines Mileage Plan credit card. Our reasons for choosing this card were simple: I usually flew Alaska to visit family in Arizona, it is a partner airline of American, which can get us to Ecuador, and they offered my husband 10,000 bonus miles to sign up for the card. After a couple of years, he convinced me to sign up for the card too. I’m glad I did.

Card Levels and How to Get Them
To apply for the Alaska Airlines Mileage Plan credit card, you can go to the Alaska Airlines website (www.alaskaair.com) or to the Bank of America website (www.bankofamerica.com), since that is the bank the credit card is actually held with. The other option is to respond to a mailed solicitation from Bank of America, if you receive one. I sometimes get offers in the mail with vouchers that will give me bonus miles if I refer someone to the card.

My husband has the silver-colored Platinum card and I have the black ‘Signature’ card. There is also a blue ‘Preferred’ card. Based on the website descriptions, there’s not a whole lot of difference between the three. Currently, there is a promotion that will give you 20,000 miles to sign up for the Signature card, 5,000 for the Platinum Plus card, and 3,000 for the Preferred card. As of 8/28/08, applying online will get you a bonus 1000 miles for the Preferred card.

All three of the cards give you one mile for each dollar spent in purchases, up to five miles per dollar spent at select restaurants and hotels, and allow you to start cashing in benefits with 20,000 miles accumulated.

The Preferred card has an annual fee of $45 and a standard APR of Prime plus 9.99%. It does not allow you to accumulate more than 50,000 miles per year.

The Platinum Plus card has an annual fee of $75 and a standard APR of Prime plus 6.99%. In addition to the 1 mile/dollar spent, you can earn two miles for every dollar dollar spent with Alaska or Horizon Air lines. You also get a $50 companion fare certificate each year on your card anniversary. You are unlimited as to how many miles you can accumulate in a year.

Of the three, the Signature card looks like it offers the most. It has the same rate, annual fee, and perks as the Platinum Plus card, but also offers 24/7 concierge service, Visa Dining privileges and no preset spending limit. While those added services do not matter very much for me, for the past six months I have been receiving a promotion for zero percent APR on balance transfers and access checks until March 2009 with my Signature card, which my husband did not receive for his Platinum Plus card. This leads me to believe that this is not being offered to Platinum Plus cardholders.

Enough about the options, how well is the service on this card?
One thing I was not excited about when I signed up for this card was that it is only offered through Bank of America, and I am not very fond of them. Based on the Alaska Airlines Mileage Plan credit card, I can only consider Bank of America an okay credit card company. My opening credit limit two years ago was $10,000. What is my credit limit now? $10,000. I have never had a credit card company that didn’t increase the limit somewhat, at least once a year.

Also, at Prime plus 6.99%, the lowest rates are in the double digits, so the rate is not very good. I had a timing snafu early on and learned that if you have one late payment, your rate jumps up to about 32.99%, and will only go down after six months of on time payments, after which point it will gradually lower down to whatever the standard rate at the time is.

While this was a painful lesson for me to learn, what makes things more difficult is that my billing cycles are not very consistent. One statement will be the typical 28 or 29 day cycle, and then the next one will have a 34 day cycle. The next month it might go back down to 28. I’m pretty sure I am not the last person in the world who plans their budget around bills being due at the same time every month.

One thing about the credit card aspect of the Alaska Airlines Mileage Plan credit card that I like is that I can just go to Bank of America to make my payment. I don’t have to worry about how long it will take to get there by mail, or how long it will take for them to process the payment once it gets there; I can just take a check to the bank and get a time-stamped receipt that my payment has been made. I just have to remember that payments made on a Saturday will have a stamped receipt date of the following business day.

Can I pay over the phone or on the website?
Phone payments need to be made before 5:00 Eastern Time in order to be credited on the same day, and doing one will add a $15.00 charge to your next statement. As such, I would only recommend it if you are early enough on your due date to get it in before 5:00. Otherwise you will be charged the $15.00 express payment fee, as well as the $29.00-39.00 late fee, depending on your balance.

Online payments can be made at no extra cost, however, they will not be credited until the next day. If you want to have it credited on the same day, you still need to make it before a certain time (I think 5:00 Eastern), and it will cost you an additional fee (I think it is also $15.00).

The main reason I don’t make my payments online is that I had a bad experience trying to make a payment online with Bank of America on another credit card, and I don’t want to deal with their online account management again. This is another one of the online account systems that will not accept the same user ID and password that I try to stick with. I could not remember what it was once while logging in, and got locked out (they do not have a feature that will email you the User ID or temporary password). After many phone calls, I couldn’t get in to the account in time, so I just went to the bank to pay and called their customer service line the next week so I could get into the online account.

The rewards
As of now, you can get a flight in the continental US for as little as 20,000. This rate will go up to 25,000 later this year. The flight does not have to be in the cardholder’s name. When my husband had a family emergency a few years ago, he was able to arrange roundtrip flights between Seattle and Los Angeles for him, his cousin and his uncle, and it only cost him 60,000 miles plus basic airline taxes which were in the neighborhood of $20. This was all on 24 hour notice, not subject to blackout dates.

You can travel on one of Alaska’s ten partner airlines (including American, United, Delta and Northwest) for an extra 5,000 miles, and international flights tend to run in the 50,000 mile range. I have found it a little more difficult to arrange flights on the partner airlines, because the other airlines tend to have less availability for partners’ plans.

The actual mileage plan is managed through Alaska Airlines, so if you earn miles through other means (for example, flying on a partner airline), it can still be easily added on to your mileage account. Your Alaska mileage plan number is on the bottom of your credit card, in the event that you forget your number.

Of course, even if you have trouble accumulating enough miles to redeem, the $50 companion fare is a great incentive to get this credit card. We once saved several hundred dollars on a flight to Ecuador because we were able to buy my ticket from Seattle to Miami for only $65. The way the companion fare works, you have to pay regular price for one ticket and then $50.00 plus taxes for your companion.

In the end…
The Alaska Airlines Mileage Plan credit card is a great card for people who want to accumulate airline rewards. While the interest rate is nothing to get excited about and the credit limit is not very high, the rewards seem to work better than most other rewards credit cards. My husband has held a few different rewards credit cards over the years and has found that some give you fewer miles per dollar spent, while others only offer discounts on rates, no free travel.

In particular, I would recommend this card to people who live near a HUB for Alaska Airlines or anywhere along the west coast, as Alaska runs quite a few flights along the coast.

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