MilesBuzz! - FF miles and estates and wills

Does anyone have any information about how frequent flyer miles are treated on the death of the owner? I seem to remember reading somewhere that American Airlines will transfer them as specified in the will if and only if the will specifically addresses the issue. Anyone know if this is true? What about other carriers? Hotels?

Thanks for any help anyone can give me.

After my father died I called USAir about his Dividend Miles. I was given an address to send the info along with a copy of death certificate. The miles were added to my account within two weeks. Hummm... you got me thinking, perhaps it's a good idea to have a codicile added to my will just in case.

Most airlines will transfer miles to a residuary beneficiary upon presentation of the death certificate, and Letters Probate (or Letters of Administration).

However, each airline sets its own policy on this. Some will transfer only to next of kin which can be defined very loosely or very narrowly. Some will not transfer at all.

So which airline and hotel programs will permit transfers under the terms of a valid will?

My husband died in November and I so I just went through this with AA and TWA. I had to send a copy of his death certificate and a copy of his will. Since I was his beneficiary I had no problem even though I never had the will probated because the only thing we didn't have jointly was FF miles. I had no problem with TWA. They processed everything very quickly and were really very nice. On the other hand, AA took several months, many phone calls and $50 to do the same thing. In the end they did transfer his miles to me but they made it a rather unpleasant experience.

Actually, TWA didn't even ask for a copy of the will. They accepted the copy of the death certificate alone. Of course, the address was the same on both accounts so I guess they didn't think I was trying to steal the miles. Now, if all works out well AA will sometime in the future combine my TWA and my AA miles and I'll be finally finished.

Chris

When Law Lord Sr. died I asked United about his 150,000 FF miles. UA asked for a copy of his will but agreed simply to take a statement of who his personal representative or beneficiary was. I got the impression that UA would transfer his miles to either his PR or to his beneficiary, and had them transferred to my mother for a fee of $50. Unfortunately the transferred miles don't count toward million miler status. http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/frown.gif

Law Lord,

That was one good thing. The FF miles on AA did count towards million mile status and there were 167,000 of them. There's another 95,000 waiting at TWA and I'm hoping they will also count since AA allows miles from any source to count.

Chris

There was a discussion on this topic in the Hilton forum at:

http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/Forum57/HTML/001295.html

My thoughts are toward the end of that thread.