Alaska adds Philippine Airlines as earn and redeem partner

Yesterday, Alaska Airlines announced that it has added Philippine Airlines as its 32nd air partner. Alaskaair.com will soon start selling nonstop flights from Honolulu and the West Coast to Manila, and the ability to earn and redeem Mileage Plan miles on Philippine Airlines flights will follow shortly as well.

This could be a very useful addition to Alaska’s partner network, as Philippine flies nonstop to Manila from Honolulu, Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York, as well as from Toronto and Vancouver in Canada.

The News

• Philippine Airlines has become Alaska Airlines’ 32nd air travel partner
  • Mileage Plan members will soon be able to both earn and redeem their Alaska miles on Philippine flights.

Quick Thoughts

I’m excited to see this partnership happen, for variety of reasons.

First, it’s great to see that Alaska is continuing to expand it’s partner network outside of the oneworld Alliance. One of the fun things about Mileage Plan pre-oneworld was that it had an eclectic mix of partners that created some very unique redemption opportunities around the world. There was some question as to whether that would continue now that it’s a oneworld partner and is merging with Hawaiian, but it looks like one-off partnerships are still on the Mileage Plan menu.

As far as I’m concerned, there can never be too many nonstop options from the US to Asia, and Philippine not only has some attractive routes from the US, but also some well-placed regional options as well:

We would expect that Alaska will slide Philippine into its existing Asia chart, which is competitive with other airlines like United and Aeroplan:

Every West Coast airport with the exception of Los Angeles falls into the 5000-7000 mile range, meaning business class will start at 75K one-way, with economy half that. What could be more enticing for many folks is that 85K would get you to the Philippines and beyond to a large swath of its connecting routes throughout Southeast and East Asia…with a free stopover in Manila at no extra cost. I can taste the Adobo already.

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