Back in April, British Airways and bmi announced that beginning July 3 it would be possible to move points between Avios and Diamond Club accounts.
They brought the functionality up some hours early and it’s now live, which is great, but it appears that the option exists only one way — from bmi to Avios, and not as I had expect from Avios to bmi as well. And the transfer is irrevocable.
Roughly speaking you will want to make this transfer unless you expect to use your bmi miles with partners that British Airways doesn’t share (and don’t expect those partnerships to last beyond their current contracts!). So that means you have a near-term desire to redeem on Virgin Atlantic (you know that transfer is going away!), Qatar, and Jet Airways.
GhettoIFE walks you through the transfer process, step-by-step.
You use the same tool online as for transfers between British Airways and Iberia (you can move your bmi points over to British Airways Avios and then on to Iberia if you want to book Iberia transatlantic flights without fuel surcharges…).
Lucky points out that the account details have to match exactly when making a transfer, so if the first attempt is rejected check to make sure that names are formatted the same in both programs. Also, though it had been reported earlier that British Airways family accounts wouldn’t be able to accept points transferred in from bmi, he actually finds that if you have a British Midland family account, you can transfer bmi miles from family member accounts into your own BA account.
I know where im supposed to see the “combine account” but my acct is missing that link. How come?
Do you have to be Gold for this?
I don’t see the “combine my avios” option.
Do y’all have your Avios accounts set up as family membership?
Gary, as I posted in Lucky’s thread too, I was able to transfer BMI miles out of my wife’s account, which is NOT set up as a part of a household account with BMI, into *my* BA account, which IS combined with hers and my son’s into a household account. It doesn’t appear to be necessary for the BMI accounts to be set up as household.
Worked like a charm transferring from my individual(and my wife’s) BMI DC account to our BA household account this evening. Bye Bye BMI…sad to go, but at least they didn’t become totally worthless – although I guess that is a matter of opinion;-)
Just an FYI… when I entered my BMI account number, I left off all the zero’s at the beginning. It took me 5 minutes to realize that I needed to enter all the numbers in order to breeze through the transfer.