AFmoneyguy

I am trying to transfer American Express MR points to Emirates. I have it set to contribute to My Family and in my profile dashboard I am listed as contributing 100%. However, every time I move 1,000 points as a test, they just end up in my account and not the My Family account. Any ideas?

Dambus

Weirdly I had the reverse problem about a year ago and ended up with a block of miles in My family account by mistake.. It took a phone call to fix it for subsequent transfers (they couldn’t moved the existing miles though)

ual902

Same here I transferred 13000 from Capital One to my account thinking it would go into my family account and I only see it in my account.
Just spoke to an EK rep and they said there is some new rule from January 22nd, 2024, about pooling from other Finacial banks and not allowed into family accounts, rep said the back office will call me.

Jaegersss

I had the same problem and have been mailing with the skywards team for a while. They wrote me, "Effective 22 January 2024, all members will no longer be able to pool Miles to their My Family account for transactions with Financial Points Exchange/Conversion partners. This is the reason why your transferred AMEX points is not pooled to the Family account."
I made screenshots of the Q&A page, showing them it's misleading. Today they sent me a mail, telling that they have updated their web page, however they refused to pool the miles to the family account.
"The same is updated on our website as below : Please check this link : https://www.emirates.com/ae/english/...amily-account/Can I contribute all the Miles I earn from Emirates Skywards partners to the My Family account?Yes, you can contribute up to 100% of the Miles you earn on flights with Emirates, flydubai and other airline partners, as well as the Miles you earn with our bank, hotel, car rental, retail and lifestyle partners. Only the Miles you’ve earned with financial conversion partners can’t be pooled into your My Family account.
Unfortunately we are unable to transfer Miles to the family group account."
unprofessional communication, very disappointing...

ual902

Just received the email from Emirates:

DYKWIA

Typical of EK... make changes with no communication whatsoever.

AFmoneyguy

This is frustrating. On January 8, 2024 I tried to transfer points to an individual account and they ended up in my family pool. I didn't understand that if you were contributing 100% of your points to your family pool, this included bank and credit card transferred in points. My mistake, lesson learned.

Now, Feb 2, I transferred points into my individual account thinking they were going into my family account (because that's how it had worked 3 weeks earlier!) and they are now stuck in my individual Skywards account. So now I don't have enough family points to book the trip I want and not enough individual points, and of course they can't transfer back and forth between family account and individual skywards account!

Lesson learned here: forget the family pooling option and just transfer as many points as you can to an individual account. You can make bookings for other passengers using your individual points.

Like someone else said, typical Emirates completely changing how there program works with zero communication, just changing some wording in the FAQ and not communicating it at all. A very frustrating program to deal with, despite some decent redemptions.

anassef

Exact same happened to me. Transferred Amex points on the 8th of Feb expecting them to go to my family pool (as always), only to find them in my individual account.

The more frustrating thing is that I immediately double checked their website (where this update wasn’t mentioned) and called their call centre where their representative confirmed that their website is indeed not updated and that an exception should be made to have these miles transferred to my family pool but this one be a one-off and wont happen again in the future.

One day later, I received an email stating that they cant make the move due to the rules that changed on the 22nd of January with 0 communication and the website wasn't even updated!! They very kindly pointed me to the website which had been updated by the time they sent the email.

Extremely unprofessional and disappointing behaviour from Emirates. It has been a while that all frequent flyer programs are going down the drain but updating your terms with no communication and not updating your website then refusing to correct your mistake is a new low. It’s sad to see that this how loyalty is treated in the industry nowadays.
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Db12457

So, question - I have 130k ek points in my family pool. If I can no longer transfer credit card points to the family pool, does that mean I’m just stuck trying to figure out the best way to use the 130k family pool points? As far as I understand, you can’t combine personal points with family pool points to make a booking (for example 130k family pool points plus 50k personal points for a 180k points booking). Is my only option now, aside from earning EK points from paid flights, to purchase the additional 50k points from EK?

AFmoneyguy

Is my only option now, aside from earning EK points from paid flights, to purchase the additional 50k points from EK?

I'm not sure even purchased points can go into family pool. It's really quite useless.

From the FAQ on 14 Feb 2024: