It’s now possible to consolidate points from various people’s Alaska Airlines frequent flyer accounts for free. Your friends and family may have Alaska miles, and you can move those miles into your account. You might have them sign up for Alaska Airlines credit cards, but you actually want the miles in one place.

• Hawaiian Airlines lets their credit card customers transfer points to and from other members accounts for free.

• Now that you can transfer points between Alaska and Hawaiian for free this means you can also transfer points between Alaska accounts for free, as long as one person has a Hawaiian credit card.

Hawaiian Airlines has credit cards that your spouse, parents, in-laws might sign up for in addition to Alaska cards and the miles earned from both airline’s cards can be put into one account – yours – because of these transfer options. All you need to do is:

• If you don’t already have a Hawaiian account that matches the Alaska account whose points you want to consolidate, create one (making sure names match).

• Transfer the Alaska miles to the Hawaiian account

• Share miles from that Hawaiian account to the one that has a Hawaiian Airlines credit card.

• Then move the miles from that Hawaiian Airlines account over to its associated Alaska Airlines account.

There shouldn’t be any rush in doing this. The Alaska and Hawaiian programs won’t be combined in the next 12 months. The ability to transfer points between the programs won’t likely end before they’re combined. And since the ability to transfer points between Hawaiian accounts for free is a credit card benefit they probably won’t terminate it without 90 days’ notice. That’s no guarantee, to be sure, but it seems likely that this transfer opportunity should last at least in the short-to-medium term.

Hawaiian Airlines are great for upgrades on Hawaiian. They offer a lot more confirmable upgrade space than other airlines. But otherwise overall Alaska miles are far more valuable. And the play here is combining from multiple accounts into a single account. A reader pointed out that I wasn’t clear enough about this opportunity when writing about free points transfers between Hawaiian accounts with the Hawaiian credit card, and about points transfers between Alaska and Hawaiian, so there, I’m clear now.