Earn rewards
The Emirates Skywards Premium World Elite Mastercard® earns at the following rates:
- 3 Skywards Rewards miles per dollar spent on Emirates.com or at an Emirates sales office
- 2 Skywards Miles per dollar spent on qualifying airline tickets, hotel stays and car rentals
- 1 Skyward Mile per dollar spent on all other purchases
The card also offers a welcome bonus: Earn 40,000 bonus Skywards Miles after spending $ 3,000 on purchases in the first 90 days
Redeem rewards
Emirates does not publish an award table but does have a miles calculator which allows you to see how many Skywards Miles you can earn on an Emirates route, or how many Skywards Miles you need to redeem for a ticket or seat upgrade on an Emirates flight.
To redeem your miles for a ticket, log into your Skywards account and use the calculator to determine the number of miles you will need to book. You can book the flight from the site or call an Emirates representative to book over the phone.
One-way flights can be booked from 15,000 miles or you can pay with a combination of miles and cash to book flights on Emirates and partner airline flydubai. Seat upgrades start at 9,000 miles and you can use your rewards to upgrade from Economy to Business Class or from Business to First Class.
You can also redeem miles against a ticket using Cash + Miles. Emirates does not publish an exact conversion rate if you use this feature, but published reports show a value of less than one cent per mile, which means that is not a good use of your miles.
More relevant to travel to the United States: partner JetBlue offers flights from 7,500 miles.
Reward potential
To determine the rewards potential of the Emirates Skywards Premium Rewards card, Forbes Advisor uses data from various government agencies to determine both basic income and average spending in various categories. The 70th percentile of salaried households report $ 100,172 per year and $ 52,820 in standard expenses. Assuming that 50% of these expenses were charged to this card, the total annual spending per card in our household sample would be $ 26,410.
Based on Forbes Advisor estimates, the sample household will spend $ 3,510 on airline tickets per year. If someone who holds this card is spending their airfare with Emirates, the earnings would amount to 10,530 Skywards miles.
Additionally, Forbes Advisor estimates that the sample household will spend $ 1,430 each year on other travel purchases for an additional 2,860 miles. Finally, we can estimate that the same household will spend each year $ 21,470 on other purchases, for 21,470 additional miles earned.
In total, you can expect to earn 34,860 miles each year. You will also earn a welcome bonus in the first year: earn 40,000 bonus Skywards Miles after spending $ 3,000 on purchases in the first 90 days and a 50% bonus on miles earned traveling with Emirates with Free Gold status .
According to the Emirates calculator, a return economy class ticket from New York to Dubai will cost 72,500 Skywards Miles to get the free flight. This means that even if you use the card for all of your credit card spending and earn the welcome bonus, you still won’t be able to get a free flight on that route.
You can use your reserve to pay for most of the trip and pay cash for the rest of the fare, but as mentioned above, that’s not a good use of your miles from a value perspective.
If you are based in the United States, you are more likely to benefit from using your Emirates Skywards miles with partner JetBlue. Since one-way flights with these airlines start at 7,500 miles, you would have enough miles for at least one return flight to the United States.