March 15, 2022|Emirates

My wife and I have an upcoming trip to Dubai.   When looking to book with points, I found something on the Emirates website called Skywards+.   Skywards+ is a membership program that comes in three different tiers.  Each tier provides different benefits.

Classic — $399 per year

20% bonus Skywards Miles

20% discount on Classic Rewards

Preferential Cash + Miles rates

2X Airport Lounge Access

Additional Checked-in Baggage weight Allowance

Advanced — $699 per year

20% bonus Skywards Miles

20% discount on upgrade rewards

20% discount on Classic Rewards

Preferential Cash + Miles Rates

5X Airport Lounge Access

Additional Checked-in baggage weight allowance

Additional Checked-in piece of baggage allowance

Premium — $999 per year

20% Bonus tier miles

20% Bonus Skywards miles

20% discount on upgrade rewards

20% discount on Classic Rewards

Preferential Cash + Miles rates

10X Airport lounge access

Additional Checked-in baggage weight allowance

Additional Checked-in piece of baggage allowance

These provide excellent benefits and may be worth your while to purchase in advance of an award booking.   Some things to be aware of:

— Points must be in your personal account linked to Skywards+.  They can not be in the pooled family account.

–The discounted Classic Rewards is a one-time discount per membership year.  However, it will apply to everyone on the travel record.

–Travel for the discounted Classic Rewards can take place outside of the membership year

–To get the discounted Classic Rewards, you must use the desktop version of Emirates.com, not the app.

–Upgrade award discounts are not eligible for gate check-in or on-board upgrades

Booking my trip

Regarding the last point.  I had an issue with the website not showing the discounted price.  The chat function on the website was excellent.  The agent asked for my number, called me, and processed the booking at the discounted rate.

I was looking for two round-trip business class tickets from New York to Dubai.  I was able to find non-stop flight award availability from JFK.  The cost was 230,000 points plus approximately $400 in taxes and fees per ticket.  So in total, the cost was 460,000 points plus approximately $800.   After reading the details of Skywards+, I purchased the Classic Plan to get the 20% Award discount.   This would amount to a 92,000 points savings.  This savings outweighed the $399 Skywards+ membership fee (cost per mile of $.004).

Additionally, if I wanted to upgrade to first class, which you can do on award tickets on Emirates, it would require an additional 54,000 points per person each way.  Had I purchased the Skywards+ Advanced plan, it would only cost 43,200 points per person each way with the 20% discount on upgrades.

So, with the Classic Plan purchased, I then needed to transfer points to Emirates.   In total, I needed 368,000 points (430,000 less the 20% discount).   I started out by transferring the 223,000 Brex points I acquired from opening a new account with $3,000 initial spend, signing up for Carta, and adding Paypal merchant services to the account.

  The transfer happened instantly.   I was sure to transfer to my individual account, not the family account.  I then transferred the remaining 145,000 from American Express.  These transferred instantly as well.  Despite reading you needed to unlink one transfer partner before using another, this was not the case and all transferred as expected.

These tickets are booked in the Flex-Plus category of Business Class tickets.  These are going for approximately $6,500 per roundtrip ticket.  Backing out the $400 in fees I had to pay, the 184,000 miles per ticket paid for $6,100 in airfare.   This is a value of 3.3 cents per mile which is decent.    Especially in light of getting the 223,000 Brex points for doing almost nothing.

If you can anticipate in advance what you may need, the Skywards+ plans are definitely worth the cost.