Frequent Miler on the Air - Best and worst of Alaska's Atmos Rewards | Coffee Break Ep119 | 8-19-26

Episode Date: August 19, 2026

Get 15% of on Saily E-SimsThis podcast episode is sponsored by Saily. Saily is an ESIM service app created by the security experts behind NordVPN. Instead of paying absurd daily rates to your home carrier or swapping SIM cards on arrival, Saily gives you flexible prepaid data plans in over 200 destinations worldwide. Download Saily from your app store and use our code FREQUENTMILER at checkout to get 15% off your first purchase. https://saily.com/frequentmilerWith Tim based in Seattle, he's very familiar with the Alaska Atmos Rewards program. Today he's joining Greg to talk about some of the pros and cons of the program.(00:54) - Pro: Free to move points to others with an Atmos Summit card or a Hawaiian card(01:26) - Pro: Free stopover on most one-way awards.(02:14) - Pro: Award changes are free and easy(02:33) - Pro: Excellent award chart sweet spots (short-haul US, US-Oceania/Asia/South America, intra-Alaska).(04:06) - Pro: Relatively easy to acquire elite status(05:39) - Pro: Award flights booked through Alaska can earn status points based on distance flown, including partner awards(09:05) - Pro: Many partners beyond oneworld(11:20) - Pro: Various companion certificates can be very useful(15:34) - Con: Less robust route network than competitors like Delta, United, and American.(15:34) - Con: Atmos still doesn’t allow awards with multiple partners outside of American, British Airways, and Finnair (although more are expected to be added this year).(20:25) - Con: $20 Partner award booking fee unless you have Summit cardSubscribe and FollowVisit https://frequentmiler.com/subscribe/ to get updated on in-depth points and miles content like this, and don’t forget to like and follow us on social media.Music Credit – “Ocean Deep” by Annie YoderCheck out all of our other travel podcasts from around the worldThis podcast is part of the Voyascape Network, a collection of some of the world’s best travel podcasts. Explore more at Voyascape.com. For advertising or sponsorship opportunities on this show and across the network, email [e-mail] or you can find more information at Voyascape.com/advertsing.

This is a Voyescape podcast. You can find all of our travel podcasts from around the world at voyescape.com. Today's coffee break, best and worst of Alaska's Atmos rewards. Welcome to Frequent Milers Coffee Break, where we focus on a single topic related to miles and points. Each coffee break is limited to 20 minutes or less or your money back. Hi, this is Greg, and I'm joined today by Tim, who's filling in for Nick while Nick is on vacation. And since Tim, you are Seattle area-based. I figured it would be fun to talk about Alaska's Atmos program since Alaska is headquartered in Seattle.

What could be more fun than talking about Alaska at most? It's Atmos, one of the favorite things I'm going to do today. Okay, with that dad, put on the way. What we're going to do is we're going to talk about the pros and cons of the program at a high level. So we're not going to cover all of them, but some of our favorite pros and some of our, of some of our least favorite cons. And I'm going to start. One of the things I love about Atmos is that with the right credit cards, it's actually free to move points to different people. So, for example, I was able to have my wife and my son sign up for various Alaska and Hawaiian

cards. And then they were able to all move their points to my account. Because if you have either a Hawaiian card or an Alaska Atmos Summit card, you can move points for free. Yeah, that's a great ability. One of the things that I have enjoyed immensely and used frequently over the years is that Alaska has a fairly unique ability to be able to add a free stopover even on one-way awards. Now, officially, that's limited to just what would be considered like a hub city. So for instance, for British Airways, you could have a free stop over in London for Philippine Airways. You can have a free stop in Manila, something like that. However, what I've found over the years is that that actually has some sort of weird loosey-goosey interpretations.

And you can add some really cool stopovers in locations that you might not expect that you could. And along with that, not only to get free stopovers, but changes are pretty easy, aren't they, great? Yeah, I mean, that's one of my favorite aspects, too, is that award changes are free and easy to make. Cancellations, too. You get back everything except for one, one con, which we'll talk about later. And Alaska has a fun, it's not quite as fun as it used to be in some ways, because Alaska used to have, like they had like 13, 14 different award charts that governed all, actually more than that, because they had one for each of their different partners. And now it's just a distance-based chart. However, there can be some really good values in it.

For instance, one of the ones that, man, I use this all the time, is you can book a short distance award. I think it's under 600 miles, 500 miles is one of the two, for only 4,500 points. And that can be a terrific value for both domestic and international flights that, you know, a lot of times, especially domestically with like American Airlines, Those short flights can be ridiculously expensive for like a 400 mile flight or 450 mile flight.

Yeah. And here, you can get it for 4,500 points. That includes flights between Hawaiian or Hawaiian Islands, which I use all the time. Inter-Porter Airlines flights in Canada. It can be a really useful spot. In addition, you can get 4,500 points to go from the East Coast to Europe and business class. 45,000, I rather. Or 45,000, 45,000.

4,500 would be incredible. That would be a good deal, yeah. This is the best program. Let's just stop there. And then what's cool is even like, so from in the West Coast, from Seattle, I can get to Europe on a direct flight for 5500 points, or 55,000 points, which is really, really good value. And there's just a bunch of, there's some fun little kind of works about the chart that

it shows a lot of value. So another great aspect of the Amos Rewards Program is that, especially compared to other domestic carriers, it can be relatively easy to gain elite status, especially meaningful elite status, the lowest tier silver starts at only 20,000 points. And while that's not necessarily super valuable, you do get some things like upgrades in premium economy or free bags, you know, like kind of basic stuff like that. And you can get gold status at 40,000 points, which although you will often end up at, you know, number 45 on an upgrade list for some like short West Coast flights and things like that, you'll actually get

business class upgrades or first class upgrades domestically with gold status. And the points bonuses are really nice. Even top tier status is 135,000 points. And all of these can be reduced effectively by 10,000 points a year by holding the Alaska Summit card. And so 125,000 points for top tier status is pretty good when you compare to something like, for instance, American that I believe it's 200,000, right? And then 200,000 loyalty points to get to top care status. So it's, it's nice. And you actually, not only do you get elite status at fairly attainable levels, but there's milestone rewards along the way that you can get little, and, you know, they get better the larger, the higher you go. But the first milestone rewards, you get 10,000

mile or 10,000 status points. So you're actually starting to get benefits at a very, very low threshold. And something that I really like for both status points and redeemable miles is Alaska is the last of the major domestic airlines that awards redeemable miles and status points based on the actual distance that you're flying as opposed to the amount of money that you're spending on a ticket. And that can be really valuable in a couple different ways. First of all, there's sometimes for me, I have this great say. to say the East Coast where you can get a ticket to New York, say, for $149. But that 2,500 mile flight, I'm getting 2,500 miles plus a 125% bonus for my elite status. So I'm earning somewhere around $100 based on our reasonable redemption values of Alaska miles for a $149 ticket. Wow.

And then that gets even better once you start combining the American Express's business, the business platinum cards, ability to redeem points at 1.54 cents apiece towards your selected airline. When you have in Alaska, when I have, Alaska is my selected airline. So take that $150 ticket. I can book that for 10,000 Amex points. And not only am I getting 1.54 cents, but I'm also getting an additional $100 of miles back on that ticket. So we can make well-priced domestic tickets as opposed to earning hardly anything, they can make them very valuable. Right, right. And I love, as someone who doesn't fly Alaska much ever, you know, what I love is that you can earn loyalty points or status points from award bookings.

So I could book an international, long distance award flight where I'm not flying Alaska at all, but earn thousands of status points from that. Totally. It's amazing. And I think too, and correct me if I'm wrong, but something people always bring up Delta as Delta earned status points. But the key differentiator there is you earn status points on Alaska partner flights as well, right? Yeah, I can't remember whether.

Delta, I think is like, or somebody, or maybe it's United, one of them, they award status earning points on, but you have to be flying their own war or their own middle flights. Yeah, I think Delta wards them for partner flights too. The main difference is that Delta miles are rarely valuable anymore for booking Delta or its partners, whereas Alaska frequently is very valuable for booking its partners. So, you know, when I fly to Europe on American Airlines using Alaska's miles, I'm earning Alaska elite. points, you know, status points for that trip. Even when I change the, when I've had American Airlines elite status, I've changed the ticket to have my American Airlines number on it so that I would

get elite benefits while flying. But I still got awarded the loyalty points from Alaska for that, for those flights. I didn't realize that. I don't know how that works, but. It's a good feature. I'll take it. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And another thing I like about Alaska a lot is that they have many partners. So they are a one world airline, but they also partner with all kinds of airlines beyond one world airlines.

So for example, I've used Alaska Miles to book Starlux business class to Taipei, which was fantastic. And I bet you've used a lot more partners than that. than me that are not one world. Oh, yeah, totally, totally. I've used to blind. And they're very useful. It's not just like a sides. A recent one that Alaska just added that I've already booked is Philippine Airlines.

And that's a terrific way to get from the U.S. to Southeast Asia. There's non-stops from Seattle, Vancouver, and L.A. and San Francisco on the West Coast, but then it's all the way from New York on the East Coast. Like, they can reconnect all to it. And the most flights, that I've been seeing that are on, and with the asterisk that it's not necessarily the world's most luxurious business class cabin or seat, but there's like five seats available on every single flight when they release them. Like, that's an incredible, incredible amount of U.S. to

Southeast Asia, nonstop business class availability. Yeah, especially these days. It's so hard to get across the Pacific and business class with award flights anymore. Totally. Condor is a great. partner to get to Europe. And again, I think now they actually have a couple dozen U.S. departure points. And Nick has actually found many instances of being able to fly the whole family and business class from the Northeast for 45,000 points of Germany. And then another one that I just used recently was Porter Airlines, which that's where that 4,500 point short distance flight came in really, really handy. We flew from Montreal, Quebec, to Halifax, Nova. Scotia, the cash for on that flight would have been somewhere around $280.

And we got it per person. And we got two seats, no problem for 4,500 points. And Porter has a really fun route network within Canada that can take you to some kind of unexpected places. So that can be another one that's really, really valuable. Yeah, that's huge. The last thing that's sort of a unique feature of the Atlas Rewards Program are their companion certificates.

And companion certificates themselves aren't necessarily terribly unique. a lot of airlines will offer them. What's unique about Alaska, there's a few things, actually. One, they allow that with the business card and the regular visa card, there's a paid companion fare where it's good towards paid tickets and you only pay $199 plus taxes and fees, so around $120 to have the companion join you on that ticket. Then the summit visa card has an anniversary 25,000 point companion fair that effectively works as a 25,000 point discount on any round trip or one-way award. But then if you spend $60,000 on the card within a card member year, you can earn a 100,000 point discount on a companion on a round trip or one-way award.

What's unique about the way these work is, A, you don't have to be actually flying on the ticket to use it. You can use them for anybody so long as you pay for the taxes and fees with your Visa card. That's a really unusual feature. Then also on the paid fare, you can book what's called a multi-stop itinerary. So you can add up to four legs and have a companion join you for only taxes and fees plus that $99 on up to four legs. And you can do some really creative rooting with that. And they don't necessarily have to even be linked. There can be like stopovers, quote unquote, of months or weeks in between those flights. So you can get a lot of flying out of these companion fares. Even better, the companion earns both redeemable and elite status qualifying points.

So last year, my wife and I probably took around, I say, 16 to 20 companions or 16 to 20 flights off of five companion fares. She earned titanium status, and she never paid for a solo flight. So you can really get a lot of value out of these things. And Greg, I think actually the 100,000 point certificate has really affected how you think about spending on the summit card, hasn't it? Yeah, yeah, it really has because, you know, Lasca's Atmos program is probably not something I would be actively, like, seeking elite status with, except for the fact that the credit card

makes it possible to earn status points. And also, as we talked before, about when you book awards, you can earn status points for the flying those awards. And that combination means that that companion award, spending $60,000. in a year, getting the 100,000 point discount off of a two-person award flight means that the spending on that card can make sense from the point of view of like you're getting a lot of value out of it on top of also earning status points. So it all kind of fits together to make it like, okay, now it's valuable to spend on the card and these other things make it easier to get elite status. So suddenly, even though like a

Elite status isn't like something that would be a primary goal of mine. It almost makes it so easy with that combination of things that it is something I'm looking at. Yeah. All right. With that, we now know that the Atmos program is perfect with all these great pluses to it. But we will be back after this to talk about whatever small cons we can dredge up. All right. And we are back. During the break, we actually thought of some cons to this atmost program. So what's not to love? Well, there's a few things. And you need to be clear-eyed

in terms of understanding what they are. One of them, and this is a significant feature, is Alaska's root network, especially internationally, is a fraction of the other major American carriers like Delta United American. They've just started flying to international destinations. So they do fly to Tokyo, Rome, Reykivik, Iceland. And then there's some Hawaiian Airlines flights to Australian, New Zealand. But you can name them. Whereas Delta United American have a network that goes all over the world with tons of flights

throughout the world. So it's really just a small fraction. And that does limit both where you can get paid flights, where you can use your elite benefits, all those sorts of things. So that's a weakness. Yeah. Well, you know, and you mentioned international, but to me, the domestic route network is very problematic too because, you know, out of Detroit, there's exactly one flight. We can fly to Seattle on Alaska and that's it. I really wanted when spirit collapsed.

I was like, Alaska, you need a second hub. that's closer to the East Coast, but they apparently did not agree with me. Yeah, I'm sorry, they should have listened to you. They need to call you up more often when they're thinking about buying airlines. Yeah. Yeah, one. And also, I mean, another comparison that I think you've run into is not only do they have a less robust root network, but there's not as many ways to earn the points compared to the Delta United American. Right, right. So, you know, if you're into transferable points, which if you're listening to this podcast, you probably are, then you probably know that you can't transfer from

MX or Chase or Capital One or City to to Atmos. You need built rewards to transfer one-to-one to Atmos rewards, and that's, you know, pretty limiting. Absolutely. Well, and even built rewards themselves, it's not like, you know, an American Express or a Chase or something like that, where you have multiple ways to get large welcome offers and quickly combine a lot of Atmos points. You know, Bill, you can earn a lot. There's some really good earning mechanisms, but you only have the one currently, the only one card offering the sign-up via welcome offer.

So that even that just really limits the velocity that you can get Atlas draws from herbal currencies. In addition, and this to me is, this is one of the most irritating things about Atmos. is the inability to book most multi-partner award flights. And so what a multi-partner award flight would be is, so let's say you're flying from Seattle to Germany on Condor, but then you want to fly from Frankfurt to London on British Airways.

So most, nearly all, I mean, there may be some other programs that don't, even worldwide, that don't allowed, but pretty much everyone, as long as that partner is part of your partner network, you can freely mix and match them. With Alaska, you can't. You can add an Alaska flight on the front end or Hawaiian, so you can, for instance, fly from, say, Seattle to New York and then catch a flight on Alaska and then catch a flight from New York to Frankfurt on Condor. But then once you're having to mix two different partners, it doesn't work. Now, they've been promising that this would change for forever. Even when they start, when they ramped up the new program last year and relaunched the program last year, they said that this year would be the year that multi-partner

awards finally become available. And they've trickled out a little bit. You can book some multi-partner awards with American British Airways and Finare. However, outside of that, that's it. So until they change that and I keep in you know they keep saying oh it's coming it's coming it's coming but until they actually change that it's a severe limitation for the program it really is I think that's probably the number one thing that limits what you could do with the points because there's so many international trips that you know I can find availability on American Airlines using American Airlines miles but not Atmos miles because of this and if it wasn't due to this like

Atmos would be way better than American because it has so many more partners than American does. So that would make it, you know, if it was just a free-for-all, you could book, you could connect any, any of their partners together on one itinerary. That's what we're waiting for. And so hopefully we'll get that soon. We'll see. Lastly, I'll add that they have another quirk that the other U.S. carriers don't have, which is they're going to charge you 20 bucks per person just to book an award that's on a partner airline. And that's not refundable. Now, if you have the summit card, they won't charge you that as long as you're paying with the summit card.

Other than that, though, yeah, $20 per person per direction, right? Yep, per direction. Yeah. And I will add on, I've actually, and I think the terms and conditions actually say that you have to pay with the summit card, but I've actually found, and this may not be universal, but I've found that they don't charge it even if you don't pay with the summit card. that just holding the card I haven't had that experience oh really that's really funny well you know and it's not

and it's not always I mean I think you could say that's another con of Alaska there's some really weird stuff or like some people can do some things on their account I can do some things on my account that other people can but that's good to know that so for you you actually have to pay with the summit card or else you don't know oh yeah yeah

that's good to know this episode was produced and edited by Carrie Yoder music by Annie Yoder. If you've enjoyed what you've heard today and you'd like to get more of this in your email inbox each day or each week, go to frequentmiler.com slash subscribe to join our email list. Follow us on all the various social media. Join our Frequent Miler Insiders Facebook group. And wherever you're watching or listening, don't forget to like this or give it a thumbs up. If you have a question that you'd like to be considered for a future question of the week or a piece of feedback that you'd like to be considered for our giant mailbag. You can send that to

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