Redeem Albertsons, Safeway & Other Just For U Rewards For Alaska Airlines Miles

I discovered today that you can redeem Just For U Rewards for Alaska Airlines Mileage Plan miles. I wrote about it earlier on Frequent Miler, but wanted to cover it here too because it’ll be gift card resellers who can potentially get the most use from it.

The way it works is that Safeway and Carrs (both are grocery store chains owned by Albertsons) have a partnership with Alaska Airlines. You can link your Mileage Plan account with your Just For U account and redeem Rewards for Alaska miles. There’s a sort-of catch though – this benefit is for people who shop at Safeway and Carrs stores in Alaska.

I say it’s a sort-of catch because there’s a super-easy workaround – all you have to do is change your local store to one in Alaska and voila – the option to redeem Rewards for Alaska miles will appear on your account.

Here are the steps you need to take:

1) Link Your Alaska Airlines Mileage Plan Account

If you have a Safeway Just For U account, you can link your accounts here. If you shop at another of Albertsons chains, all you need to do is add this at the end of the domain name:

/customer-account/loyalty-partners.html

For example, if you shop at Albertsons, you’d go to albertsons.com/customer-account/loyalty-partners.html

2) Change Your Store Location

As mentioned above, you have to set your local store to one in Alaska. There are Carrs and Safeway stores all over Alaska, but here are some zip codes for Safeway stores there:

• 99801
• 99709
• 99901
• 99603
• 99664

3) Redeem Your Rewards

Go to the section where you normally redeem your Rewards (e.g. here on a Safeway account). As you scroll through, you should see the following options:

• 1 Reward=  100 miles
• 2 Rewards = 250 miles
• 3 Rewards = 400 miles
• 4 Rewards = 600 miles
• 5 Rewards = 850 miles
• 7 Rewards = 1,300 miles

That’s a total of 22 Rewards you can redeem for up to 3,500 miles. You can redeem one of each set and the limits reset every Wednesday, at which point you can redeem another set of Rewards.

Depending on how many Wednesdays there are in a month, that means you can redeem either 88 or 110 Rewards in a month for a total of 14,000 or 17,500 Alaska Airlines Mileage Plan miles respectively. That’s not bad going if there are some decent gift card deals available at Just For U stores. If you have lots more Rewards available, you can still redeem those for the grocery Rewards or for savings on gas.

4) Change Your Store Location Back (This Is Important!)

Once you’re done redeeming your Rewards, be sure to change your store location back to your local one. The reason why is because Just For U Rewards and digital coupons are regional. If you redeem Rewards or clip coupons when your store is set to one in Alaska, those Rewards and digital coupons won’t necessarily work at your actual store.

Is It Worth Redeeming Just For U Rewards For Alaska Airlines Mileage Plan Miles?

I was surprised when looking into this that redeeming Just For U Rewards for Alaska miles represents very good value. To give you an idea of that, you can normally redeem 7 Rewards for $10 off groceries. With the Alaska Airlines option, you get 1,300 miles which are worth more than $10. Depending on how you value the miles, that might be even better value than redeeming the Rewards for savings on gas.

Scaling The Redemptions

One question you might be wondering is if you can add your Mileage Plan account number to multiple Safeway Just For U accounts. The answer – I’ve no clue. I only discovered this redemption option today.

Personally, I’d be wary of doing that. While Safeway’s IT isn’t the most sophisticated and so they might not pick up on you doing that, Alaska Airlines might notice when multiple Safeway accounts are feeding into your account. That could risk account closure with Alaska and who knows – they might even share that information with Safeway who could in turn close all your accounts there, although it’d be easy enough to create new ones with Safeway.

I know that I’m more cautious with these kind of shenanigans than others out there though, so I’m sure some people will enjoy the potential here 🙂

~

Thanks to Shay for helping me research this.