Got an email to upgrade to Krisflyer Ascend, seems to promise 49,500 miles for annual fee of $337. Any catch to this and should I upgrade?

Hi Yixuan,

I hope I'm not reading the T&Cs wrongly, and that your upgrade offer can stack with the welcome offer already available, but assuming you have no issues to meet the minimum spend, or max out the sup cards and referral, you are effectively paying $337 for 42.5K miles, or 0.79 cpm, which is a very decent rate to buy miles. 42.5K because I'm looking at 5k welcome bonus, 15k $10k bonus, 3k for 2 sup cards, 7.5k for refer a friend, 12K for the upgrade.

I would not count the normal miles awarded via spending as a bonus since you're going to get it anyway, and in fact it can be argued that if your normal spend was on BOC elite miles with 1.5 mpd, then you're actually losing out 3000 miles on $10K spend.

Do give them a ring to confirm what are the bonuses on offer and work out the cpm on your spend, anything below 1.8 cents can be considered, anything below 1cpm is awesome.

Hmm from below - the current offering for ascend cards is 32k on spend of $10k

(there is some other miles offers but related to referrals not own spend)
https://www.americanexpress.com/sg/credit-cards...

So if instead thinking about 32k+12k=44k miles for $337 and 10k of spend - a little worse than you mentioned but not too far off.

Assuming you can hit the spend requirement (10k in 3 months may be tough given Amex weak acceptance around town), then should be worth Generally base line valuation of a mile is $1 per 100 (1%) and can be 4-8% depending on travel pattern (see post below). Given the reward is better even on baseline valuation (and could be much better) - seems like a good thing to go. https://seedly.sg/questions/what-is-the-dollar-...