50,000 Hawaiian Mile Sign Up Bonus, and How to Use Them

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Log into your Hawaiian Miles account or create one and log in. You should see an offer of 50,000 bonus Hawaiian Miles after spending $1,000 in the first 90 days on a new Hawaiian Airlines World Elite MasterCard from Barclaycard. The offer expires November 30, 2015.

This offer is a big improvement on the normal 35,000 mile sign up bonus on the card. Other features of the card:

• 2x Hawaiian Miles on Hawaiian airlines purchases, 1x on all other purchase
• Free checked bag when you book directly with Hawaiian Airlines and pay with the Hawaiian Airlines card
• Get 50% off the base fare of a roundtrip flight between North America and Hawaii for one companion within 13 months of getting the card. Every year after you pay your annual fee, get a $100 discount on a companion’s roundtrip ticket between North America and Hawaii.
• “Discounted award travel” but the discount isn’t specified. I believe, from past experience, the discount is 2,500 miles per one way SuperSaver award between North America and Hawaii, bringing the price down to 17,500 miles one way. Let us know in the comments if you’ve gotten other discounts.
• Cardholders can receive free Hawaiian Miles transfers from any other account. (Since you can book anyone a ticket from anyone’s account, this is a great way to pool miles for free.)
• Hawaiian Airlines elites get up to a $10 credit per day, up to $100 total in the first 12 months of holding the card to offset drinks, meals, and entertainment purchased onboard.
• 5,000 Hawaiian Airlines bonus miles when you spend $10,000 within your cardmember year
• $89 annual fee, not waived

This card is terrible for every day spending because Hawaiian miles are worth about 1.2 cents each, and you can earn 3x ThankYou Points per dollar on all travel and gas purchases including Hawaiian Airlines purchases with the Citi ThankYou® Premier Card. You also really shouldn’t spend $10,000 on this card to get a bonus 5,000 miles (that’s like getting 1.5 Hawaiian Miles per dollar on $10,000 in spending) because you could get so many more miles putting that spending toward clearing new minimum spending requirements and sign up bonuses or at least by putting it on a card that rewards every day spending more.

The ability to share miles is really cool and the various award and cash ticket discounts are nice, but nothing really gets me excited about this card other than the sign up bonus.

What can you do with 50,000 miles? Here’s the award chart. (I hate that Hawaiian calls their medium priced award tickets “Coach Saver.” Only pay attention to the “Coach SuperSaver” and “First Class Saver” columns.)

The chart is quite expensive:

• Most of Hawaiian’s North American destinations are on the West Coast where an Avios award would be 12,500 miles one way. Hawaiian charges 17,500 miles one way after the cardholder discount.
• Hawaiian basically charges for every segment, so North America to Asia or Australia is 60,000 miles one way in economy when American Airlines charges as little as 25,000 miles from the United States to Japan.
• Hawaiian charge 7,500 miles one way interisland for what is often and $80 flight. American charges 5,000 miles for the same flights.

The awards that attract me the most are New York to Honolulu one way in economy for 17,500 miles after cardholder discount and Honolulu to Samoa or Tahiti in economy for 27,500 miles one way, and both are pretty niche.

For most people, they just won’t get much value out of Hawaiian miles, so even 50,000 can be skipped.