As rewards for their regular customers, foreign and domestic airlines often offer various bonus programs, the so-called "free miles" and special customer cards. Which carriers have developed these options and how can you use them?
Co-branded airline bonus cards
Without going into the details of the mechanism for accumulating bonus miles, we can confidently say that the most popular and convenient way to accumulate such miles is by joint co-branding cards of airlines with a bank, retail chain or popular service provider.
A striking example of such co-branding is the joint cards of Aeroflot with Sberbank of Russia, as well as Citibank, Alfa-Bank, Russian Standard, Uralsib and Gazprombank. In appearance, these are ordinary bank cards Visa or Master Card, which can be used to pay in the usual way for various goods and services. At the same time, for each dollar spent from the card, 1 bonus mile is usually credited, for which, as a result, it will be possible to buy tickets “at the rate” of the air carrier.
Austrian Airlines issues bonus cards jointly with Raiffeisen Bank, and domestic TCS issued credit cards jointly with Sky Express, the only low-cost airline on the Russian market today.
Many other aircraft feed-bank pairs are also launching similar offers on the market. For example, the Russian carrier Transaero issues joint bonus cards with the same Russian Standard, Otkrytie, Rosbank, Rus-Bank and SMP-Bank. Siberian Airlines, better known as S7, offers miles for purchases with Alfa-Bank and UniCredit Bank cards.
Special bonus cards for airline customers
In addition to co-branded bank cards, most Russian and foreign air carriers today offer separate special customer cards, on which bonus miles are accrued for each flight, as well as for booking hotels or renting vehicles through the airline's service.
In Russia, the most popular bonus cards are S7 Priority, Aeroflot Bonus, Transaero Privilege and Wings of Ural Airlines.
You can usually get such a card completely free of charge immediately after the first flight. To do this, you just need to fill out a special application on the carrier's website or call the customer service center to order a bonus card and thus become a member of the bonus program.
Each airline has its own loyalty program and its own bonus miles accrual system. However, when a certain number of miles has been accumulated, a passenger can pay for a ticket with exactly such cards on which the owner's name or his ID number is written.
