TAP Miles&Go repriced every India award — the Gulf left Asia

There was no press release. TAP simply published a new PDF, wrote one line at the top of it — “the new values contained in this file will enter into force for issuances after May 4, 2026” — and moved on. Every cell an Indian traveller can reach on TAP Miles&Go got more expensive, and two of them got restructured.

India sits in TAP’s “Asia” origin zone, so the whole board reads off one page of the table. That page now says:

Where you’re going	Old (economy / business)	New
Asia — Tokyo, Seoul, Bangkok, Singapore, Colombo, Malé	40,000 / 60,000	50,000 / 70,000
Middle East — Dubai, Doha, Abu Dhabi, Muscat, Jeddah	40,000 / 60,000	60,000 / 80,000
Europe and North Africa — London, Frankfurt, Paris, Cairo	70,000 / 115,000	80,000 / 125,000
Canada, USA, Mexico and the Caribbean	70,000 / 115,000	80,000 / 125,000
Oceania — Sydney, Melbourne, Auckland	60,000 / 105,000	70,000 / 115,000
Southern Africa — Johannesburg	90,000 / 160,000	80,000 / 110,000
West, Central and East Africa — Nairobi, Addis, Mahé	90,000 / 160,000	110,000 / 250,000

The straight 25% rise on the long-haul cells is the boring part. The interesting damage is structural.

The Gulf moved out of Asia. Under the old chart, Dubai and Bangkok cost the same, because TAP filed both under one flat “Asia” band. The new table gives the Middle East a zone of its own, and India→Middle East is now 60,000/80,000 — up 50% in economy and 33% in business, on a hop of three or four hours. A Gulf award now costs more than a flight to Tokyo. That inversion is the single worst thing in this chart.

Sub-Saharan Africa split in two, in opposite directions. The old flat 90,000/160,000 cell covered everything below the Sahara. It’s gone, replaced by “Southern Africa” and “West, Central and East Africa” — and the gap between them is enormous. Johannesburg actually got cheaper, down to 80,000/110,000, which is a 31% cut in business and the one genuine buff in the whole document. Nairobi, Addis Ababa and Mahé went the other way: 110,000/250,000, with business up 56%. That East Africa business cell is now the dearest thing on the entire Asia row apart from South America.

And the connection rules bite harder than the table does. Page eight of the PDF spells out that when an itinerary involves more than two of TAP’s geographic regions, the price is “calculated on a flight-by-flight basis, with the total value being the sum of the selected flights/regions.” Route India to the US through an Asian gateway and you pay one cell: 80,000/125,000. Route it through Europe — which is the only Star routing we can verify out of Hyderabad and Chennai to Washington Dulles, on Lufthansa via Frankfurt — and TAP bills you India→Europe plus Europe→North America: 145,000 economy, 245,000 business. Same corridor, nearly double the price, decided by which way the connection points.

Our take. Miles&Go was never a program you targeted from India; it’s a program you end up in. No Indian card transfers to TAP directly, and no TAP metal touches India, so every mile in the account arrived through a hotel hop — Marriott Bonvoy at 3:1 (with the 60,000-point bonus), Accor at 2:1, IHG at a punishing 5:1. You took a haircut to get here, the miles started a hard three-year countdown the moment they landed, and now the chart they buy has gone up a quarter. TAP was already the Star program that lagged Aeroplan and LifeMiles; after 4 May it lags them by more.

The one thing worth remembering: Johannesburg at 80,000/110,000, kept inside two zones on a Singapore Airlines routing via Changi. It is the only cell in this entire devaluation that a reader should be pleased about — and it’s a corridor almost nobody was flying TAP miles on. Our board’s 1,626 TAP options, spread across 813 corridors, have been repriced to the new table.