With the deal for Alaska Airlines to buy Hawaiian Airlines ,now done, they’re beginning to move forward on integrating the two carriers.

• We know that Alaska has agreed to maintain flight capacity between the Hawaiian islands, but also that they plan to move widebodies to Seattle. Honolulu will see less long haul, and Alaska will get into long haul flying. That won’t happen right away.

• But the real play for frequent flyers is in the miles. Although Hawaiian was the better program for upgrades between the mainland and Hawaiian, Alaska’s miles are worth far more and with more and better partners. HawaiianMiles members get a nice upgrade in value.

• And there’s an easy play to get Hawaiian Airlines credit cards and Alaska cards, knowing that the miles from Hawaiian’s will go into your Alaska account. In fact, Hawaiian Airlines credit card customers can transfer miles between Hawaiian accounts for free. So if your spouse, parents, inlaws, and siblings all get Hawaiian cards (or just have HawaiianMiles laying around) those can be transferred to you, and will wind up in your Alaska account.

• HawaiianMiles is an American Express Membership Rewards transfer partner. They even ran a 20% transfer bonus that ended August 31. Some folks speculatively transferred to take advantage of that, but in any case Alaska doesn’t partner with any of the bank transfer currencies and Amex will presumably lose the transfer relationship once HawaiianMiles gets sunset.

Alaska has now told us a bit about what to expect, and things will be happening sooner than I’d have expected.

• While combining loyalty programs won’t be announced until “mid-2025,” “later this month” you will be able to “seamlessly transfer miles between Alaska’s Mileage Plan and HawaiianMiles at a 1:1 ratio, for no charge.”

• Already Alaska Airlines lounge members can use those lounges when flying on Hawaiian (i.e. Hawaiian counts as an eligible partner airline for Alaska lounge access).

• Status matching between the programs will happen “later this year.” And they’ll combine your qualifying miles between the two programs to determine your tier status, so if you’ve earned with both Alaska and Hawaiian the total between the two will count.

  

We know that eventually they will combine into a single loyalty program. I have wondered if they would brand the programs separately (some members would be Hawaiian Airlines Mileage Plan members, while others would be Alaska Airlines Mileage Plan members, but it’s the same program). Regardless all of the miles will go to the same place whether you do these early transfers or not.

However there’s one interesting wrinkle for those transferring American Express Membership Rewards points into Hawaiian, planning to move those to Alaska right away. A long-standing rule in the program is that miles transferred into Hawaiian cannot be transferred out:

Points/Miles transferred into a HawaiianMiles account from [American Express Membership Rewards may not be transferred to a third party loyalty program.

I don’t think that will be an issue with transfers within Alaska Air Group. Mileage Plan is not a transfer to a third party. And this isn’t a rule specifically put into place in consideration of the merger. I have to think these transfers will be permitted later this month, not just when the programs combine. But the first 1,000 miles transferred into Hawaiian from Amex, and then over to Alaska, will tell us with certainty.