By shopping at the COOP, you can fly business class to New York, for free
Every untapped point is a waste of money
Alitalia
What many people don't know or perhaps don't value is how to turn points from groceries, gasoline, or many other point collections into a treasure trove that can help make trips and stays happen without spending anything or very little.
In this article:
Today let's talk about how to convert Coop member card points into Alitalia Miles and thus get more easily to have enough points to detach a ticket to New York, Tokyo or any other destination.
What is the "coop member" card and how to get it
The card is similar to all other supermarket and single-brand store loyalty cards, the only real difference perhaps being that you have to pay €25 to apply for it
The best bonuses
Simply go to a point of sale and pay the membership fee. This allows you to take advantage of all the benefits reserved for cooperative members. You will immediately get 5 discount vouchers of 10% on a maximum amount of 50 euros of spending in a single receipt that will immediately recover the cost of the SocioCoop Card, which will be valid forever as long as you make at least one expenditure each year.
How to accumulate points
As is well known using the card in stores, online and at participating establishments normally earns 1 point for every euro spent. Then there are promotions that allow you to earn more points if you buy a specific product.
How to turn coop points into Alitalia miles
Alitalia and Coop have been partners for a long time, the standard conversion is for 100 Coop points to become 100 to 500 miles depending on the different "cooperative alliance."
In detail, the current conversion rate is:
| Cooperative | Point of Sale Distribution | Conversion Miles/Points |
|
Unicoop Cooperative |
Tuscany (Arezzo, Siena, Florence, Lucca, Pisa, Pistoia, Prato) | 100 COOP POINTS = 100 MILESÂ
Conversions required by August 31, 2020Â |
|
Unicoop Cooperative |
Tuscany (Grosseto, Livorno, Lucca, Massa-Carrara, Siena)
Latium Umbria |
100 COOP POINTS = 100 MILESÂ
Conversions required by January 31, 2021Â |
|
Coop Northwest which includes: -COOP Lombardy |
Piedmont Liguria Lombardy |
100 COOP POINTS = 500 MILESÂ
Conversions required by February 28, 2021 |
Promotions are often launched that allow even more advantageous exchange, as happened recently when the conversion was increased to 1,000 AZ miles in exchange for 100 Coop points.
Let's make a hypothesis
Assume that a family goes shopping in these hypermarkets once a week spending an average of 100€. Between normal use, bonuses and promotional offers and a few extra purchases in hypermarkets where you can also buy home appliances, clothes, home furnishings and the like, it can easily come to collect between 6 and 10 thousand points in a year.
These points can be converted to Alitalia miles, in the normal conversion we could expect then Between 30 and 50 thousand miles. Often, however. promotions are activated that offer a better conversion rate, as was the case recently with an offer that included the 1:10 exchange rate, that is, for every 100 points 1000 miles were recognized. In this case, 60 to 100,000 miles can be obtained. This treasure alone could be worth a round-trip ticket to Los Angeles in Magnifica class (business class) worth more than 2,500.
To this we could add the points accrued through payment by credit card. If we used for all expenses a american express platinum alitalia which offers us a welcome bonus of 30 thousand miles and allows us to earn 1.5 miles for every euro spent, we may have collected no less than 35/42 thousand miles, also coming in at half of the spending required to get the companion.
Here, by adding up the bonus points, the points accrued from everyday spending and the Coop points conversion, it is possible to get the miles needed for an award ticket in business class, and if we add companions, we can detach another ticket as well, just by going to the Coop for groceries.
It is important to understand that all this is achieved without having to spend anything more than what you spend on a daily basis. What changes is that you decide to use the points not for a new pot or a small discount on your groceries, but to get a prize worth hundreds of times more, such as airline tickets can be
Of course, this is not only done at Coop supermarkets, if you want to find out what point collections allow you to convert points into miles, check out our special: How to collect Alitalia miles without flying.