Transferring your frequent flyer award miles between airlines

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Did you even know that you could actually transfer frequent flyer miles from one airline to another? You should certainly read on if you only need a few miles to get a free flights or you have some miles close to expire that you already gave up on.

The answer to your problems of getting those miles you need or ‘recycling’ the ones that are about to be expired is transferring them to another program! The below chart will show you what are the best and weakest transfer rates for different programs and airlines – if you’re a frequent flyer, you should really know how transferring your frequent flyer award miles works.

Plan Ahead!

I would recommend you to acquire a Chase Saphire Preferred Card with 50K bonus points, then you can easily convert the points at a great 1:1 rate to boost your airline accounts by just calling Chase Saphire. You can also acquire an account Starwoods Preferred Guest and a Starwoods card, with this Starwoods card you get 10K award points – you can transform those to the same amount of American AAdvantage or Delta Skymiles bonus miles or 5K United Mileage Plus Miles, you just have to make a call to Starwoods.

Transferring miles through a middleman

Hilton Honors can be used as a middleman for award mile transfers, but they transfer with a very bad rate. Amtrak is good for Continental points, but has got its limits.

Points.com allows you to transfer miles from one program to another, it is costly in terms of points and cash alike, but you might want to take a look at it still.

Start with miles in	Transfer Ratio	Middleman	Transfer Ratio	Turn bonus miles into	Gotchas
American Express	1:1			Alitalia MilMiglia Aeromexico Aeroplan All Nippon Airlines AirTran British Airways ElAl Frontier Flying Blue Hawaiian JetBlue Iberia Singapore Air KrisFlyer Virgin Atlantic Virgin America Best Western ChoicePrivileges Jumeriah Hilton Honors IHG Priority Club Starwood	There are some programs where you cannot transfer directly, but if you really need to, for those you can use third parties like Amex, Starwood or even Hilton Honors if you’re very desperate.
Continentale.g. 10,000	1:1	Amtrak e.g. 10,000	1:3	Hilton HonorsChoice Privilegese.g. 30,000	Must be Amtrak Select or Elite, or hold an Amtrak Guest Rewards MasterCard, max 50,000 points/yr
Starwood			1:1 1:1 1:1 65:1 1:1 1:1 1:1 1:1 1:1 1:1 1:1 1:1 2:1 1:1 1:1 1:1 1:1 1:1 1:1 1:2 1:1 1:1 1:1 1:1 1:1 1:1 1:1 2:1 2:1 1:1	Aeroplan Air Berlin Air China Air New Zealand Alaska Airlines Alitalia MileMilglia ANA All Nippon American AAdvantage Asia Miles Asiana British Airways Exec Club China Southern Continental OnePass Delta Skymiles Emirates Skywards Flying Blue Hawaiian Japan Air JAL Kingfisher LAN Lanpass Mexicana Miles and More Qatar Saudi Arabian Air Singapore Krisflyer Thai Airways Royal Orchid US Airways Dividend United Mileage Plus Virgin Atlantic VARIG Smiles	Very good rate for conversion, if you need to top up a program use Starwood!
Chase Ultimate Rewards			1:1	Most Airlines including United Mileage Plus
American Amtrak CSA Czech Hawaiian Icelandair Mexicana Olympic Air Virgin Atlantic	3:5 1:3 1:1 1:2 1:2 1:2 1:2 1:2	Hilton Honors	4:1 10:1 10:1 10:1 1000:2 10:1 10:1 10:1.5 1:3 10:1 10:1 10:1 10:1 10:1 10:1 10:1.5 10:1.5 10:1.5 10:1 10:1 10:1 10:1 4:1 10:1 10:1 10:1 10:1.5 10:1 10:1 10:1.5 10:1 10:1 10:1 10:1.5 10:1 10:1 10:1 10:0.85 10:1 10:1.5	Aeromexico Aeroplan Air Berlin Air China Air New Zealand Alaska Airlines All Nippon American AAdvantage Amtrak British Airways Cathay Pacific Continental CSA Czech Delta Skymiles Etihad Frontier Gulf Air Hawaiian Icelandair Japan JAL Jet Airways JetBlue LAN Kingfisher KLM/Air France Flying Blue Malaysia Mexicana Miles&More Olympic Qantas Qatar Saudi Singapore South African TACA THAI United MileagePlus US Airways Virgin America Virgin Atlantic	Increments of 5000;90% reduction in value, but if the points are going to expire or never be used anyway, using Hilton as the transfer is a method of last resort.