Recap Week ending 7/5/26

Nothing too crazy to highlight this week, which is good! Hope you are enjoying your summer so far and staying cool.

Now let’s get into it!

Last week, I talked about the Air France/KLM Flying Blue loyalty program becoming less valuable. Well, it’s a race to the bottom and Avianca’s Lifemiles program continues to head in a similar direction. Similar to Air France/KLM, the Avianca program was one of the better programs to use to get outsized value as you could book Star Alliance business class saver awards for 55-63k each way. Coupled with the program often selling points at ~1.3 cents per point or less, you could really snag some great value from the program.

The tradeoff was a somewhat hefty (~$200) fee for changing or cancelling your flight in addition to dealing with potentially poor customer service if things went wrong with your award flight. However, Lifemiles has been steadily increasing the cost of their awards in the last year as well. Thrifty Traveler noted some devaluations, including business class awards across the Atlantic are more costly (going to 69-81k each way). My observation is Star Alliance airlines want partners to fall in line with more standardized pricing.

Lifemiles+ subscription helped alleviate some pain. If you are were an avid Lifemiles user due to their pretty good redemption rates, you may have had the Lifemiles+ Subscription, which provided a 10% discount on booking awards (even partner awards!) and free changes and cancellations. It cost $50 or more per month depending on the subscription level, and you would get some Avianca miles deposited into your account every month as well, kind of acting like a rebate.

But now, that free change/cancel benefit is gone. Frequent Miler flags that Lifemiles+ subscriptions if purchased after June 26 will no longer include free changes & cancellations. If you already have the Basic tier or higher, you will be able to keep the free changes & cancellations benefit for another 12 months. See below for current benefits.

So is Lifemiles still worthwhile? As with all things in points & miles, the answer is “it depends”. If you are certain you are going to fly the award, you can still book that JFK-ZRH route for ~55k points each way. A pretty nice sweet spot that still exists.

Although it seems to be doom & gloom across many loyalty programs with devaluations, I think we are seeing a new era of points being usable for more unique experiences outside of just the familiar flights and hotel redemptions. Marriott has been a leader in the experiential redemption space in my opinion and these new options further solidify my view. This includes Marriott’s 1-Point Drop Moments, where you redeem just 1 Marriott point for experiential events.

The one to watch for opens up on July 8. It provides VIP access to the Madrid Formula 1 race, a behind-the-scenes with the Mercedes-AMG PETRONAS F1 team, and a hotel stay in September. It’s a first-come, first-served redemption, so some really really fast clicking + luck will be needed. You can view the redemption and terms on the Marriott Bonvoy Moments site here along with other 1 point drops and experiences that you can bid or redeem for. I’ve won a few experiences myself and will probably try for this one as well. Good luck!

Also, be aware that you can only redeem for a Marriott 1 Point Drop once every calendar year.

When new things come into our award travel life, you better take advantage of them. Some last for only a few days (Paze) and others present more longer-term opportunities (like Bilt). Sometimes, these things entirely shut down too (Mesa Card).

Rove is one to use and to keep an eye on. In case you aren’t aware, Rove is a shopping & travel booking platform where you earn points instead of cash back. These points are transferable to 18 different partners with the addition of Frontier Airlines this week. Frontier doesn’t excite me, but being able to transfer 1:1 to Air Canada, Cathay Pacific, Finnair, JAL, Lufthansa, Turkish Airlines, and Virgin Atlantic does. Especially since Rove has had “Bilt-like” transfer bonuses including previously having a 50% bonus to JAL and to Turkish.

If you don’t have Rove yet, use my affiliate to get a jumpstart on points earning with a free 1,500 miles (need 2,000 miles to transfer out though). The public offer is only 500 miles so that’s why I will keep spamming it! You can also learn more about Rove from my blog post here including what Rove is, how to earn miles, and some best ways to use them.

Frontier Airlines is a new Rove transfer partner

The Rove platform continues to legitimize itself and just added Frontier Airlines as a transfer partner and also has a 25% bonus to the airline through the end of July. Now you probably won’t get outsized value using points on Frontier, but there are some use cases where you can get 2cpp or more even before the 25% transfer bonus. Look at my below example for a PHL (Philly)→MCO (Orlando) flight on October 16, 2026. You could redeem only 5k Frontier points to get a $129 ticket (although you can only bring yourself and have to pay extra for any bags outside a personal bag).

Lufthansa has been refurbishing their A380s and their business class product is going from a 2-2-2 layout to a modern 1-2-1 layout. There’s a lot of availability throughout the late summer, October through parts of November, and January-April 2027 on multiple US routes serviced by the A380. Other routes feature the A350 with 1-2-1 layouts including the new and convoluted Allegris product.