talnus

My girlfriend and I are planning a trip to New York. I have enough miles in my USAir Dividend Miles account for one ticket, but I need 50,000 miles for hers. Her dad has about 200,000 AAdvantage miles that are expiring this year. I would imagine the rate of exchange would be about 1:1 between AA and US, but I'm not sure.

Any ideas of the best way to transfer some of her dad's AA miles to my US account? I was looking at transferring through HHonors, but I would end up spending about 166,666 AA miles in the conversion.

Thanks!

mvoight

Coupon Connection is the appropriate place for trading stuff on Flyertalk.

To do it the "contractural" way, would require transferring the miles in hops before they would end up at aa.com. This type of thing can make it cost 10 miles to get 1 on the desired carrier. As you have noted, at least in this case, it will only take 166666 AA miles to get 50000 US miles

It might be better to just buy the ticket to NY

Regarding the dad's 200K expiring miles. There are many ways to avoid expiration.
Any activity in an 18 month period will extend them. The first expirations under this new expiration time is about 3 months away.

Examples of ways to avoid expiration.

1. Idine
2. Donate miles or cash
3. Sign up for a FREE points.com account and request the 10 AA mile signup bonus. Uprgrade to gold for 49.95 and get a 2250 mile bonus
4. Join Netflix (8.99 minimum per month) get 2500 miles. After the miles post, you can cancel.

milksheikh

She could fly on AA using her dad's miles. Or, assuming you want to travel together, you could both fly on AA using her dad's miles (and treat him to flights on US Airways at a later date).

Or as suggested above, buy yourself a US Airways ticket (so you earn more miles) and use your miles for your girlfriend's ticket. And be sure to have her father do something to keep those AAdvantage miles from expiring.

Mwenenzi

Is it not simple for the father to get an award ticket for his daughter with his miles ?
The miles left will then not expire for 10 months

BLI-Flyer

Actually, if dad buys an award ticket it will extend the life of his remaining AA miles for another 18 months.

andrzej

That's what I was thinking. Why exchange miles with total stranger if it could be done with a family member

JGR01

The other option always is to go on e-bay and buy some miles from a total stranger!

Then you and your GF and the stranger will have problems with AA security department (or whatever it is called) .. (search for AA LOCKED MY ACCOUNT thread).

Coupon connection not available to OP due to limited number of posts however... so not an option.

brp

Do you have any link for this 10 month expiration? This must be a new decrease in the expiration period, and we'd all want to know the details, I'm sure.

Cheers.

talnus

Thanks for all your helpful responses. To clarify a bit - we're flying from PHX to JFK, and I found a great nonstop mileage saver award that works in our timeframe for 50,000 miles. AA, however, doesn't have a huge presense in PHX, and she would have to make 2 connections on the outbound and one on the inbound flight to get close to the arrival times I found. It would be shorter for her and easier for us if we travelled together.

nova474

Why don't her father use his miles to get tickets for both of you?

BLI-Flyer

Sometimes "free" and "convenient" don't work together. You have to decide what works best for you. I think the bottom line is that you can't easily or realistically convert USAir miles to AA miles without losing a whole lot in the process.

kebosabi

As with everyone here, I too suggest it would be wiser to use your dad's expiring AA miles to book both of your trips. Not only does it extend the life of your dad's miles, it is the most efficient way of using award mileage rather than transferring miles between rival companies.

Just checked using the webflyer mileage converter, the best it comes up with is 200,000 AA miles = 25,500 US Dividend Miles via HHonors

On a side-note, domestic AA Awards allows one stop over within the lower 48 states. So you could do something like PHX-MCO-LGA-xxx-PHX and head off to Disney World on the way ^

My advice:
Book a trip to New York with a stopover at MCO using your dad's AA miles = airfare covered ^
At the same time, transfer some of your dad's AA miles to HiltonHonors and use that for staying at Hilton Walt Disney World Resort ^
Have fun at Disney World