Intermiles Redemption - Findings

[phildunphy]

Found some intermiles from old HDFC card of my dad's. Here are some of my findings after couple of hours of research.
Please add your ideas since i am new to Intermiles.

Firstly, Intermiles suck. Absolutely suck.
Now that we have established that, moving on to ways one can redeem it in the increasing order of "worth it"

• Shopping vouchers. At 5.9:1 conversion , 16.9p for 1Rs this is one of the worst ways

Please note, if you have <5k miles, you can use it to pay part of your amount using miles and that is almost 2.4:1 conversion and worth it, but at scale this isn't possible.
You can get 25Rs off for 61 miles and so on.



But their lineup is pretty impressive.

If you need a no headache, no research solution just buy one of these vouchers. People with sudden intermiles problem like me because HDFC closed the card, use this

• Domestic short haul flights: At 5:1 conversion, sometimes going up to 5.9 : 1, this is equally worse but free money is free money i guess
• Domestic Long haul flights: They sometimes offer 4.5:1 at higher priced airlines and specific routes

Would not recommend

• International Hotels: I have not explored business hotels, but name brand ones (Mariott, Accor, Taj) have the worst conversion at 4.5-5 :1 and higher priced resort chains are okayish at 4:1
• Domestic Hotels
  • Metro: At 3.5 : 1 , this is pretty decent if you want to do a staycation.
  • Non Metro: Resort chains, once again this goes up to 4.5 -5 : 1

Example: The Oterra Bengaluru Electronics City​

With taxes etc, it comes to 3.3 : 1

Hilton Suites Embassy, and Courtyard also has similar conversions

Taj uniformly has the worst conversions



4.2 : 1 is the best one can find, Seleqtions and IHCL go up to 5.5, definite avoid.
One can also waive off 10% of bill using 1000 intermiles


Lastly International Flights - Business

In general, this is consistently the best at conversion. Ethiad some routes give 2.9: 1 which is amazing but the issue is , it starts at 3L miles which is nuts w.r.t Intermiles
Even the random Sri lankan airlines flat bed ones, one can get 3.3 : 1 business class seats on proper dates


Please add your findings too. I am leaning towards spending the miles on staycation or vacation.

 

[RTR01]

How to track miles after shopping through intermiles?