I’ve written often about Malaysia Airlines Enrich program offering excellent value for their frequent flyers and credit card program partners with excellent redemption rates on Malaysia Airlines operated flights. Unfortunately, as of Feb 16th, this value is gone.

Malaysia Airlines today reworked their award chart for both earn and redemption – my attention is on redeeming Enrich miles which can easily be transferred from a range of credit card partners, and they have effectively gutted the value overnight – although if you get in quick, you can still transfer and redeem Enrich miles at the current, cheaper rate.

I really hate to say I told you so.

Key changes for Australian travellers

  • There’s an addition of a new zone 7 for travel over 10,000 miles – pretty much all Australia to Europe flights fall in this new, higher, band
  • Zone 4 flights (Australia to Kuala Lumpur) change from 40,000 (without the 15% online booking discount) to 55,000 miles, one way, in Business Class
  • All Australia to Europe (Paris, London and Frankfurt) flights that are now in Zone 7 go up from 60,000 miles (no online booking discount, 52,000 with) to 115,000 (97,750 with discount) miles, one way, Business Class – with a couple of exceptions…

Thee exceptions to routes that fall into Zone 7, and are in Zone 6 are:

  • Adelaide to Frankfurt (9752 miles via Kuala Lumpur)
  • Perth routes to London, Frankfurt and Paris (via Kuala Lumpur)

These all fall into Zone 6, at 90,000 Enrich Miles one way (without the 15% online booking discount).

There’s also an FAQ document on the changes here.

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Where does this leave those who used Enrich for cheap Business Class redemptions?

The new pricing flat out sucks. There’s now little appeal in looking at Enrich-booked travel on Malaysia Airlines for long-haul Business Class redemptions, as the new pricing is comparable to their competitors in KrisFlyer, Asia Miles and Qantas Frequent Flyer, but with a worse in-flight product.

In short, if you were planning on making an Enrich redemption, you should transfer your credit card points over ASAP and book before February 16th.

I’ll try and dig into the changes in more detail in the next couple of days and see if there is any extraordinary value left in the Enrich program for me – but at this point, it doesn’t seem so. I haven’t yet looked at any planned changes to redemption on oneworld partners (which were historically poor value anyway), for redemption in Zones 1 or 2 (which are now cheaper, but probably not much use to us) or for Enrich points earn.

External link credits to AFF.

Old vs New Award Charts

This is the current award chart, which is still online on the Malaysia Airlines website (along with no messages I can see about the changes):

Enrich-Redeem-Enrich-Miles-Malaysia-Airlines-Malaysia-Airlines.png

This is the new award chart:

Malaysia Airlines New Award Chart

Malaysia Airlines slashes the value of their points – we’ve got a week to take advantage of new redemption pricing from Feb 16th was last modified: February 7th, 2023 by Keith