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Avianca LifeMiles has revamped its website after a five-day outage at the beginning of February. The update brings two major changes to the loyalty program: a fresh new design and expanded award availability on Star Alliance partners. One the design side, the new website has a more modern feel with larger fonts and menus, taking on a very mobile look.
For points collectors, the big news is that you can now book South African Airways and Scandinavian Airlines (SAS) flights without calling a phone representative. Additionally, you can now make cash and points bookings using LifeMiles. A slider will appear on the checkout screen that where you can choose how many miles and how much cash you'd like to use on your booking.
Key Details
- The Avianca Lifemiles website has been completely redesigned with larger menus and font
- Cash and miles option has been added
- South African and Scandinavian Airlines (SAS) award availability now shows in search results
- Access the Avianca award search here
Our Take
It's great to see LifeMiles add new functionality to its website. If you're planning a trip, check out our post about the best ways to redeem Avianca LifeMiles. One of the most frustrating things about the old LifeMiles site was discrepancies between LifeMiles and other Star Alliance booking engines like Aeroplan and United MileagePlus. Although it isn't entirely clear that all issues have been fixed, the results for the new site seem more in line with other Star Alliance award search tools. LifeMiles is a transfer partner of Capital One Rewards, Amex Membership Rewards, and Citi ThankYou Rewards, so it should be easy to top up your account.
Source: One Mile At A Time
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Just started checking out LM, due to some expiring points in my Cap1 account I had to do something with. Seems like there is very scant avaiability and options, compared to UAL site. I get a maximum of 3 or 4 options between points, and there is almost never any business/first options, despite what is viewable on UAL. I have tried both with and without “smart search”. Love that there may be a Star Alliance option now that Mileage Plus seems to be going the way of SkyPesos, but I am concerned about the search function/availability, and I don’t like calling the call centers when they DO speak English, so am concerned about the CC reviews for LM…..
Hey Curt, what routes/dates are you looking at? LM is known for not always matching the rest of Star Alliance, but on the whole, I don’t think it is systemically fewer seats across the board.
It’s always great to be able to book awards online!
Wasn’t the ability to pay for award bookings by a method of Lifemiles and points always there? I’ve used it a lot over the years.
It’s wonderful that we can get more airlines’ award availability.
I’ve done some searches for award ticket and the process in a little longer.
Anyway, the results are better!
Avianca’s website was in desperate need of an overhaul, so this is a welcome change. Hopefully the functionally actually works as expected (which hasn’t always been the case with much of the Avianca experience).
Thanks, Andrew. Now let’s just hope the site doesn’t keep erroring out when you try to complete.
Nice update by Avianca Lifemiles. I didn’t explore all the new features yet, but it seems a good improvment.
Had thought about jumping on the lifemiles bandwagon. These changes make this move more appetizing. Will see if it makes sense to do so given our upcoming travel plans in the future.
Good to see SAS get easier
Thanks for the update. I had a tough time booking online last week and the site kept crashing. Hopefully that was during the update and everything will be much improved. 🙂
Theory and reality are two different things: their entire system has been notoriously dodgy for years; their “app” basically had no functionality until recently, and even with the much heralded “upgrade”, their hotel redemption simply did not work at all. In normal cases, you would just call in by phone: in the case of Avianca, they have the worst telephone connections I have ever come across, and an appalling disconnect between seats/upgrades that you pay for, and those you are supposed to be able to get by awards. So a place can go out empty in Business Class except for 1 upgrade, with a waiting list of 20 people who want a mileage upgrade but can’t get it because the mileage upgrade quota for that flight has been filled. Absolute lunacy.
I’ve used the life miles site to look for award tickets a few times. Once you get used to it, fairly easy to use although I haven’t booked anything yet.
The enhanced features are sweet.
More partners, more choices. Good news for travelers.
It is always welcome to be made aware of airline or bank new partners. Thank you!
Great news, been hoping to see an upgrade to the search!
New partners are always a good thing. Thanks for the information.
That’s great news. Lifemiles award search engine used to be cumbersome to use and cannot find a lot of the availability compared to united.
Hopefully this time it will be improved.
Game changer! Scandinavian Airlines (SAS) flights without calling a phone representative!!!!!!
Always nice to see these types of additions, making it more customer friendly!
SAS fills in a lot of gaps in Europe, do check options on Norwegian and others though since these can sometimes be about the same as the cost of taxes on an SAS award.
For whatever reason, I’ve felt that I’ve noticed over the years airline websites lagging behind in their functionality and user interface versus other industries with highly trafficked sites. Not everyone, of course, but enough that I’ve paused to make the observation and wonder. So, I always like seeing such improvements when they do finally happen.
Great news. I love LifeMiles, but dislike their call center to make awards.
The idea of calling the call centre has put me off but I might be willing to give it a go now!
Just tried to book a *a award flight last weekend, despite there were plenty of space (over 4) for the one way pt to pt simple flight, it kept on bumping out with an error msg when keying in my name. Eventually need to call and go thru all the hassles.
Very buggie and even worse than before per my recent experience.
Awesome upgrade to the website. This will come in handy for booking some of our upcoming trips to ZA & Thailand.
I had heard people speak of LifeMiles as an interesting program if you knew how to maximize the benefits. It is always nice to have better functionality through a website than to have to make phonecalls and possibly be on hold for an extended period of time. Thanks for the updates.
Well, now it is easier reediming with LifeMiles.
I have bought some miles and so I will redeem them in the future.
It’s not earth shattering but more or easier travel partners will always be a win.
Lifemiles has always had “cash & miles” awards, although perhaps not as obvious as part of the booking process.
You always have to play around with the slider to find the sweet spot of cents per mile saved…
Good news for those who have purchased Avianca Lifemiles.
It’s great that we can see more airlines’ award availability.
I love that you can now book SAS flights online with them!
Great to see that South African Airways is back bookable online again with Lifemiles.
Awesome value!
Lifemiles is getting more and more valuable. However, i’ve also seen that overall the award availability on Lufthansa has started going down.
Do you know where to find the list of carriers which cannot be searched online on Lifemiles?
Just tried to book some award flights on the new Avianca web interface. Selected my flights, entered all may passenger info and credit card data, and was then errored out when I hit the final redemption button. Rinse and repeat, errored out again with message to call them. That is the last thing I want to do, of course, as I don’t speak Spanish and the internet reviews of their call centers are not good. Will try to get the tix again tomorrow, but not a good first experience with the new website.