Hawaiian Airlines Allows Flyers to Buy COVID-19 Test with Miles
Joe Cortez November 16, 2020
As the State of Hawaii is working with airlines to safely welcome flyers to the island once again through COVID-19 testing, Hawaiian Airlines is introducing a unique way to get around the cost of paying for a kit. The carrier will allow flyers to pay for their Vault Health exam with HawaiianMiles, with one kit costing 14,000 miles.
The State of Hawaii is starting to once again open to tourists during the COVID-19 pandemic, working with several airlines to offer testing plans to bypass the 14-day quarantine requirement. As opposed to paying for a test kit and online exam, Hawaiian Airlines is offering an alternative to their flyers. The carrier announced they will make COVID-19 tests available using their frequent flyer miles, HawaiianMiles.
Vault Health COVID-19 Test Costs 14,000 HawaiianMiles
Working with Vault Health (the same company partnered with JetBlue), Hawaiian Airlines is offering a test kit accepted by the State of Hawaii for inbound travelers. After spitting into a tube, a negative result in 72 hours before a flight will allow travelers to enter the state without quarantine.
But for those traveling as a family, the $119 test kit can get expensive quickly. For a limited time, the airline will allow travelers to pay for test kits using miles instead. The sum of 14,000 HawaiianMiles will get you one Vault Health test kit, delivered to your home and processed within 24 hours of arriving at a lab. Redeeming miles for a test kit reflects value of $0.0085 cents per mile.
“We remain dedicated to making testing for our guests as convenient and accessible as possible,” Avi Mannis, senior vice president of marketing at Hawaiian Airlines, said in a press release. “So we’re incredibly pleased to extend our partnership with Vault Health to allow our HawaiianMiles members to purchase their at-home test kit with miles.”
The test kits are available for flyers of all ages. All inbound flyers five-years-old and above are required to take a COVID-19 exam from a provider approved by the State of Hawaii. Test results must be uploaded to the state using their COVID-19 travel portal.
More Airlines Offer Pre-Flight COVID-19 Testing to Hawaii
Hawaiian is among several airlines partnering with COVID-19 test providers to offer various exams to flyers traveling to the island state. American Airlines is partnered with LetsGetChecked to offer a pre-flight exam option, while United Airlines is offering COVID-19 exams at San Francisco International Airport (SFO) to all Hawaii-bound flyers.
Before purchasing merchandise or COVID tests with your miles you might compare the cents per mile valuation with the cents per mile value of tickets that you could book using up those miles instead. If the miles needed for a desired ticket is low enough that the same ticket paid for with cash represents, say, 2 cents or better value per mile then it might be better to save the miles to book the ticket with, and pay cash for COVID test whose cost in miles has a poorer exchange rate, 0.85 cents value per mile as someone stated stated.
Testing is recommended for all close contacts of persons with SARS-CoV-2 infection. Because of the potential for asymptomatic and pre-symptomatic transmission, it is important that contacts of individuals with SARS-CoV-2 infection be quickly identified and tested.
It seems like if it's going to be a saliva based test, they should be able to have an option for a "mass test" for the family and allow an entire family to be tested together without having to run multiple tests (and multiple $119 charges). Most of the time when I'm traveling with family, if one person is sick, none of us want to go...