Etihad Airways 15th Birthday Promotion: 1500 Free Miles, 15% Off Award Bookings & More

It’s Etihad Airways 15th birthday and to celebrate the occasion the carrier has a couple of promotional activities especially for members of their Etihad Guest frequent flyer program.

Members receive (after registration) 1500 free miles into their account and can also profit from a 15% “cashback” when redeeming miles for an award between 31st August – 6th September 2021.

Etihad also has a cheritable side to their campaign as they’ll donate one mile for every 15 miles their Etihad Guest members earn until 6 September to good causes in order to support the Global Education Project.

Having to celebrate an anniversary during a global pandemic with severely limited travel options is challenging and a little sad as well but since dates are set you can only put the best face on it and push through.

Etihad is trying their best as can be seen on the 15th anniversary website they set up.

These are their three campaigns:

1. 1500 Free Miles (Registration Required)

Every mile counts so 1500 free miles are definitely nice especially since you have to do nothing except registering for the campaign.

2. 15% Return On Award Miles spend (Award Tickets, Upgrades, Shopping) completed by September 6:

This is potentially a rather big savings opportunity depending on what type of award you manage to book or how many miles you redeem for other things such as the Travel Rewards or shopping with miles (the latter having a very bad value for obvious reasons).

Lastly, the charity contribution:

It’s hard to put the finger on it how much this really contributes as the 1 mile donation per 15 miles earned by members is a fluid value but you have to consider that normally Etihad Guest has a lot of members that earn miles every day (less so now as people aren’t flying much).

Conclusion

Members of Etihad Guest can get at least 1500 free miles from this campaign and if you have enough miles to redeem maybe even a 15% kickback from that redemption.

Airlines usually come up with interesting promotions when they celebrate a large milestone such as a round anniversary. Etihad pours a lot of money into marketing but it’s a relatively small airline compared to the other direct competitors in the “ME3 Group” which are Emirates and Qatar Airways. Nice to see they put something together despite the difficult times we live in.