Alaska Airlines acquired Hawaiian Airlines last week and promised that points transfers between the two programs would come the same month. And they’re here.
As of September 26, 2024, Alaska Airlines and Hawaiian Airlines have officially enabled mileage transfers between their frequent flyer programs. Points transfer at 1:1 in 50 point increments at no cost.
- While there is no cap on the total miles transferable, each individual transaction is limited to 500,000 miles.
- They say transfers can take up to 72 hours, but seem to be working near-instantaneously.
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.
Status matches between Alaska Airlines Mileage Plan and Hawaiian Airlines HawaiianMiles are expected this year as well. 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.
Has anybody tried yet to transfer miles between when those miles were first transferred in from somewhere else? Technically Hawaiian does not allow you to transfer “out” miles that are transferred in. Not sure if a transfer to Alaska would count as a transfer “out” in this case?
Transferred miles from Amex to HA prior to merger.
Was Able to quickly setup the link between my accounts and transferred miles to AS and had them arrive instantly.
Best deal of 2024.
Kudos to AS / HA IT. The legacy carriers could never achieve this in 2 weeks post merger. AA talking about you…
Amex blocking transfers to HA now.
Please use your connections to find out what’s going on, or at least update your post.
@Too Many – I just pushed an Amex -> Hawaiian transfer on the website. It didn’t error out. And the transfer hasn’t been reversed, but the points didn’t instantly post to HawaiianMiles. Developing.
Airline companies need to trade miles & accept them
Just did it- TXFR was instant on a large cache of miles.
I just created an HA account, linked with Amex and pushed. No apparent issues, but the Amex points balance bounced back up maybe 10 minutes later. I have tried again and will see what happens. Definitely nothing showing up in HA as yet.
Cheers.
Following up on my prior comment – the Amex point balance has now, for the second time, decreased by the amount I transferred and then bumped back up. Seems it’s not going to let me do this for some reason.
Cheers.
No-go on the Amex MR xfer to HA. I just tried moving 350K MR points to HA from Amex and like mentioned above, the points initially debited from my Amex MR balance, but eventually reverted and my Amex balance bounced back to the pre-xfer level.
I’m upset…. Because I called regarding my miles that I have… they said there’s no news yet… now I hear that you offered a 20 percent incentive… I have many miles on Hawaiian & some on Alaskan…
Mine was “successful” until it wasn’t. When I checked Amex points activity, it stated “These points have been added back to your Points Balance because you returned or canceled a reward.” I’m almost glad that happened. What if Hawaiian starts enforcing its terms and conditions? Under earning miles, part 21: “Points/Miles transferred into a HawaiianMiles Account from another program may not be transferred to another loyalty program.” That would mean our miles would be stuck with Hawaiian, and most of us want to use Alaska miles. This is definitely a gray area since they are merging but they are still separate programs.
Didn’t some people have recent success with calling up Amex to do the transfer over the phone instead of online?
I transferred 140k Hawaiian miles to Alaska on Sept. 26. About half were miles I transferred in from Amex during the most recent bonus offer, and half were in my Hawaiian account already. It was instantaneous.
It kicked back on me regarding the points transfer last night with AMEX…did it again this morning, no issues.
For those of you experiencing this issue, just try again.
Same here. Worked immediately this morning. Thanks for your note.
Cheers.