How to earn up to 250K Alaska miles per year with credit card referrals

Alaska Airlines has been at the tip of our tongue quite a bit lately, primarily due to its merger with Hawaiian Air and some broadly positive changes to its award program, Mileage Plan.

We’ve been talking a lot about getting both the Alaska and Hawaiian credit cards this year, and for good reason, there are excellent welcome offers on both.

However, many people apparently don’t realize that you can actually refer friends and family to the personal Alaska card (the business card is excluded). Each referral currently earns 10,000 miles, and you can earn up to a maximum of 250,000 miles per calendar year.

The reason why many folks probably don’t know about it is because you there’s no way to generate a referral link in your Bank of America account. Instead, you have to go through Alaska.

How to refer people to the Alaska Visa card

Unfortunately, Alaska and Bank of America don’t make it easy to refer friends to the Alaska card and there’s currently no way to generate a shareable link to do it. Instead, you have to go to the Alaska website and have them send an e-mail.

First, go to this link, which details all of Alaska’s financial partners. When you scroll down, you’ll see the following invitation to refer friends to the credit card: 

Clicking the button will lead you to a referral screen that looks like the one below. It’s important that you don’t bookmark the link to the page below, as it changes each time the welcome offer changes. Instead, use the “financial partners” link above.

In shout-out to 2010, you have to manually enter in your details and the details of each person that you want to refer in order to generate referrals. Alaska then sends an e-mail to each person on your behalf, inviting them to apply.

Quick Thoughts

This is one of the most bizarre referral processes in the industry. My assumption is that BOA doesn’t have the backend to support referrals on the Alaska card – and/or doesn’t want to develop it. So, this is Alaska’s workaround.

It’s important to note that the referral offer will rarely match the best public offer (which you can always find on our Best Offers Page here), as there’s usually an inflight version of the public offer which tacks on an additional 5,000 miles.

That said, folks in the same household may often do better by using a referral…the public offer + the 10K referral miles will usually beat whatever the current inflight haul is.

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