On June 7th Sun Country announced ‘enhancements’ to their Ufly program, anybody that has been in this hobby for awhile will shudder at the word enhancement as it’s generally marketing speak for a devaluation of a rewards program. Unfortunately this case is no different. We’ve only briefly covered Sun Country before as they are a smaller region airline based out of Minneapolis/St. Paul (their credit card has a healthy sign up bonus of 40,000 points)
Changes
- Members can now earn up to 10 Ufly points for each $1 spent (not sure what it was previously)
- You can book flights with a mixture of cash + points
It addition to this it looks like award flight costs are now tied strictly to the cash price of the ticket (similar to the system that Southwest airlines uses). Before it seemed to be a mixture of this, some unpublished award charts and whatnot, but there was less emphasis on the cash ticket price.
How Much Are Points Worth?
This depends on the date you want to travel, premium dates will set you back 130 points per $1 (0.769¢ per point) and standard dates will cost 110 points per $1 (0.909¢ per point). You can view the redemption table below:
Our Verdict
Previously their credit card could provide up to $700+ in value from flights, now that it’s tied to the ticket price the best you can do is $363.9 and a minimum value of $307.9 if you fly during the premium times. Still decent value, but maybe not as good as before. You can read more about their credit card here.
Hat tip to ilikelogic on /r/awardtravel
I was turned down for too many inquires and called the recon line. They said that they look at how many inquiries you’ve had in the last six months, but wouldn’t tell me how many too many are. The card is definitely less attractive with the devaluation.
It’s worth noting that the bank that issues the Sun Country credit card, FIrst of Omaha, looks very unfavorably at applicants who churn or otherwise have a large number of open credit cards. Of the fifteen or so cards I’ve applied for in the past two years, the Sun country card was the only for which I was denied, with the bank citing that I had too many applications on file. Tried recon, they wouldn’t budge. This appears to be the norm, so apply at your own risk.