Redeem topbonus miles for flights with Germania and Condor!

If you have been holding on to your topbonus miles from defunct airberlin, your prayers have been heard! You can now redeem topbonus miles – again – for flights on Germania and for discounts towards tickets on Condor! There are some hefty fees associated with those “free” flights, but it’s certainly better than have the miles expire, so check out the details!

You have been able to earn points on flights with German leisure airline Germania for a while (read details here) and now you can also redeem them for flights to the European tourist destinations listed below:

There is a lot of fine print to consider: You have to book by March 2, 2018 for flights through October 31, 2018. You can book one-way flights for 15,000 miles and return trips for 30,000 miles. Unfortunately, there are pretty hefty fees for each ticket, listed in the table below:

In some cases I checked, the “fee” was more than half of the cash price for the same ticket, leaving limited value for your miles. But in some cases, as Germania flies some unusual routes with no competition (Rostock to Hurghada, Egypt, anyone?), the value is very good and worth the redemption – so compare cash prices before you book!

Another redemption option is with German leisure airline Condor – you can use your miles for a 30% discount on short-haul flights or 20% discount on long-haul flights. This is especially interesting because Condor operates a Business Class cabin on flights to North America, making it a potentially lucrative redemption for your orphaned topbonus miles. You can see the miles needed and discounts below:

As with Germania, you’ll have to do the math on how much you are getting for your miles. While I usually value airline miles around 1.5cents/mile, topbonus has been in bankruptcy and near death since last year, so even minimal value now might be better than no value later…

I lost most of my topbonus points on a cancelled airberlin flight last year and my remaining points are enough for a short-haul Condor discount. I’ll try to use it, but I won’t accumulate new points into topbonus given the situation.

If you have topbonus points, I recommend you take a look and try to use them. Good luckIf you’d like to get more travel related news like this from around the world, please follow me on Twitter – I’m posting news daily, so you can stay up to date on the world of travel with my Twitter updates! Or, for a weekly update, sign up for my newsletter for a Sunday Summary!


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