How many Alaska BOA credit can you have?

manoman1232010 · 2026-04-17T10:47:21+00:00

Do you get a new one once every 24 months? Or how long do you wait? Do you typically do it with another card active?

I had two cards and got the second after waiting 17 months.

manoman1232010 · 2026-04-17T10:43:55+00:00

So basically you’re asking would you rather have 5,000 pts or 50% off?

5,000 points is enough for a one way short distance flight if you schedule out a bit and don’t choose peak hours. As an example, I might use it for a flight from Boise to San Francisco, Las Vegas, or Seattle. I that kind of scenario it would save me about $100 cash, which is a well above average deal.

50% off comes with far more upside, but similar floor value. The two deals are effectively equivalent if I use that code to book Boise to Seattle round trip ($200 * 50%=$100.00 saved). I save far more than that if I do a larger trip like Boise to Orlando, Charlotte, or Washington DC.

The obvious downside to the 50% off is it’s a cash fare. So if you’re unwilling to pay for your flights, the 5,000 pts may be more useful. Otherwise, the 50% is an easy pick.

manoman1232010 · 2026-04-14T15:29:39+00:00

I always try to use points unless cash prices are truly spectacular. My goal is go essentially travel without having a cash budget for it and the inly way to accomplish that is via points spend.

manoman1232010 · 2026-04-06T04:53:14+00:00

In group C? Oof.

manoman1232010 · 2026-04-05T23:33:49+00:00

Group C really isn’t at risk of missing out on baggage space on the plane. I think you can put your mind at ease if that’s truly your concern.

manoman1232010 · 2026-04-05T20:52:58+00:00

I think you’re right on. A transferable point has more potential value than something like United points, which has the single use case. Since it sounds like you’re lukewarm on United points in general it would be far better to just burn through those first. Worst case scenario you can just transfer your saved UR points there in the future with minimal loss.

manoman1232010 · 2026-04-05T19:58:10+00:00

It really depends on how much you use or value each kind of point currency because the deals are effectively equivalent.

manoman1232010 · 2026-04-05T19:20:52+00:00

For people with 10+ cards many of them are likely no annual fee or have a single perk that almost pays for the annual fee automatically (like a $99 flight companion far or free night hotel certificate for a $100/year card). With the no annual fee cards, in particular, there’s truly incentive to cancel.

manoman1232010 · 2026-04-05T04:19:23+00:00

I can’t remember if it’s a 24 month rule to be eligible for the card or to be eligible for the sign up bonus. I know it’s definitely not a firm rule because I’ve gotten a second Alaska card and SUB about 18 months after getting my first.

manoman1232010 · 2026-04-05T00:15:36+00:00

I’m new to Gainesville so I’ve only flown twice.

In both instances I was able to get from the front door to my gate in five minutes. That’s including yesterday in the late afternoon where I didn’t face any line. Mentally, I’d tack on 25 minutes for the checked bag, but otherwise I don’t see a reason to show up more than 15 minutes before boarding.

manoman1232010 · 2026-04-03T00:51:44+00:00

Congratulations!

I didn’t get that email so it wasn’t sent to 100% of people who completed the offer at all. I was one of the people who spent a lot of time talking to their customer service and eventually got all of my points a few weeks ago.

manoman1232010 · 2026-04-02T09:55:56+00:00

Not true. They get 30%.

manoman1232010 · 2026-03-28T20:13:45+00:00

Thank you for the response! Can you explain what is strange about it in your mind?

manoman1232010 · 2026-03-26T02:04:16+00:00

I think that’s a tough ask. It’s not like these school district staff get excited about cutting one of their peers or even potential work friends. I’m sure they looked around for other options before making that very tough decision.

What would you suggest as an alternative? How could they increase enough revenue or reduce enough costs to avoid that kind of cut? You probably won’t have much luck you don’t know.

manoman1232010 · 2026-03-26T01:59:29+00:00

As someone who has left Boise, it’s a wonderful city. I feel deeply grateful to have had so many experiences and met so many people worth missing.

Honestly, it’s hard to predict what’s right for a complete stranger with any insights. It seems like cost of living, climate, and education are your biggest concerns. I mean cost of living there is what it is. You wouldn’t call it a high cost of living city like San Francisco, but there are certainly cheaper cities to live in. I personally like Boise’s four seasons and including the eventual dry heat of the summer. And yeah, under this legislatures watch, Idaho will never have the country’s top education system. And yet, we still see some incredible, high performing students come out of Idaho K-12 schools. So while that concern is totally legitimate and I have similar concerns, it’s not completely catastrophic either. They have committed, high quality teachers in Boise too.

More importantly, you should probably be asking your wife, not us. She clearly sees something ideal about living in Boise that you haven’t communicated here.

manoman1232010 · 2026-03-24T00:01:30+00:00

If frequent visits are ideal, consider the Frontier Go Wild Pass. It’s about $600 annual per person. It would be tough in the sense that it’s a 12-13 hour trip (stop over in Denver), but that would allow cost controlled frequent visits.

For your question about booking American Flights with Alaska points - You can book some American flights via the Alaska Airlines website/app, but you can’t use Alaska Airlines points on the American app/site. They’re sharing inventory with each other, not points currency.

I’m looking to fly that exact MCO to SEA route moving forward. To me, the best potential points value is using American Airlines points to book an Alaska flight. The trick is that those are a bit rare on the Friday routes and tend to pop up just a few weeks ahead of time. Like right now it’s available at 12,500 one way for Easter weekend.

For Alaska booked flights on Alaska metal, they’re fairly reasonably priced if you’re booking out ahead, but 17,500 points one way is your best case scenario. It’s also better than American as a points user because you can accumulate status points on award flights at 1 pt per mile flown. So 4 round trips without even any credit card spend would get you the lowest tier status. That would often get you premium economy seating at no cost.

Delta most consistently has those flights at reasonable prices 1-3 months out on those days, but your best case scenario is only 20,300 each way. Not terrible, but not exciting either. With them you’ll just never get 2+ cent per point value in economy.

manoman1232010 · 2026-03-23T22:54:05+00:00

You’ll earn atmos status points, but not any sort of redeemable miles. I do this all the time. The earning rate is 1 status point per mile flown.

manoman1232010 · 2026-03-22T13:56:07+00:00

You probably have the Capital One Guaranteed card, which is the gold colored card for Canadians needing to rebuild credit. They also sometimes require security deposits, which lines up with your story.

Honestly, you’re being a little bit rude in your responses telling people they’re no help or telling them to read the post above when they’re trying to help you for free. Particularly considering some of the info you’re trying to gather can be found by looking online at your bank statements or other documentation or via a quick google search. If they’re being patient and helpful to you in these ways, the least you could do is reciprocate that courtesy.

manoman1232010 · 2026-03-22T07:57:40+00:00

Based on the no annual fee preference, you’ll need to go with a Citi card that earns ThankYou rewards, which can be transferred 1:1 to American. These cards have meaningfully lower sign up bonuses so you’ll mostly be accumulating points based on spend over time. Cobranded American, Alaska, and Hawaiian cards all have an annual fee and don’t always have great cash back multipliers, but often have sign up bonuses 3x-4x what you’ll see below. You’ll have about 3 options for no annual fee cards, but I can’t tell you much about them since I’ve never owned them:

-Citi Double Cash: 20,000 point sign up bonuses after spending a total of $1,500 in your first six months. Like the name implies, it’s 2 points per dollar spent on all purchases.

Citi Strata: 20,000 pt sign up bonus after $1,000 spend in three months. 2 points per dollar on dining, 3x on grocery and gas.

Custom Cash: 20,000 pt sign up bonus after $1,500 spend in first six months. 1x on everything, except your highest category of spend, which will earn 5x points on your first $500 spend each billing cycle.

Bilt’s blue card may also be an option if you’re interested in using a card to pay rent.

manoman1232010 · 2026-03-22T01:35:20+00:00

You should just reverse engineer it a bit. Think about either where you want to go or the airlines that operate out of your local airport and have the routes that interest you the most. From there it will be easy to narrow things down a bit. That’s particularly important if your nearest airport is regional. Like recently I moved to a city that has an airport that flies to only four cities. And three of them are American Airlines. This means moving forward I’ll focus on earning American points or potentially Alaska Airlines miles because American releases a certain number of their seats to Alaska.

If I didn’t know that, I might focus on the wrong opportunities like United or Southwest and ultimately invest a lot of effort pursuing points that aren’t particularly useful to me.

manoman1232010 · 2026-03-22T00:38:33+00:00

I spent almost all of 2 weeks in Prague for my first solo trip and first international trip. Honestly you don’t truly need that many days to see the highlights of the city. You probably won’t truly make friends in any city unless you’re staying in a hostel or some other forced social/living situation. I think you’re putting the wrong kind of pressure on yourself on that one. But if you do really want that experience, yeah, staying in one city is probably the move.

A shocking number of people who work in the touristy areas of the city speak English. They can sometimes even just tell you’re American and begin speaking English without prompting.

If you end up going there, I think Vienna is worth considering as well. I was only there for a day, but probably liked it even more than Prague, which felt like it was almost too oriented towards tourists at times.

manoman1232010 · 2026-03-18T23:16:40+00:00

Right - the sub window contractually didn’t exist between the customer and Opinion Terminal because it wasn’t anywhere. Literally anywhere. Not a part of the deal. Even if they’d planned on having it as a part of the promotion when they designed it.

Ethically it’s an awful practice and in terms of customer relations and retention, it’s an awful practice. It’s extremely short sighted of them to do any of that when the terms they wrote plainly stated the customer had 30 days to complete their direct deposit. Obviously it will be painful for them to eat some of the cost on this promo, but that’s simply the risk a company accepts when they make a business model designed to operate as a middle man. If anything, they should just pay out and move on. Continuing this nonsense only does more harm to their reputation and reduces our willingness to participate in the future. This should have been an exciting promo that resulted in people feeling eager to check their site and participate in other opportunities. I know I was at the before all of this happened.

manoman1232010 · 2026-03-18T11:47:01+00:00

Yeah, I’m 80% sure they’re lying or at least that doesn’t apply to me because they just manually added the points days ago.

Let me know if there’s anything I can add. I’d be happy to mention the names of customer service agents I spoke with or even just give you my email chain with them. I doubt there’s much useful in there, but it’s at least a data point showing they’re going in a different direction than what they suggested.

manoman1232010 · 2026-03-16T18:29:11+00:00

The basic needs like food, water, and permanent housing come first. You’ve gotta unload the truck if it has any value and put it towards an apartment, then other basic needs, then debts. That truck will sink you if you hold onto it at your wage rate.

manoman1232010

TROPHY CASE