Originally Posted by
Raffles
It is not TOTALLY useless. If you get a small number of miles in a programme because you take a flight on an airline you would never ever normally use, you can usually convert them to something you can use. Yes, the rate is terrible (my 1000 US miles got me 100 Priority Club points!) but that is 100 PC points more than I would otherwise have had ....
(And I got some PC bonus points during a 'use our partners' promo!)
...and I have transferred say 3000 miles to another person using the airline's portal for doing this, which is essentially operated by points.com and it
has in fact worked. But it is not 100% reliable.
There have been instances where this practice has NOT worked for me and others... where some glitch takes place--who knows what (system upgrade, an issue with your computer, theirs, the airlines', whatever). It is in this area where I will note that one should have avoided points.com. They are not equipped/willing to help fix things
if and when they go wrong. Hence, the best thing to do is to avoid them if possible!
For example, if those 1,000 US miles of yours did not convert over for you to PC, how much effort would you have put in to recovering them? Given that, after several phone calls to each party, both PC and US tell you to deal with Points.com, what would you think you would do about it and what would you expect Points.com to do about it for you? All I can say is that if your miles transferred over to PC then you were dayummmm lucky! Problems with them HAVE happened and they have never fixed them for people.
To me a good company is one that can solve issues
when they go wrong, not operate as if they never will go wrong or deny it when they do and not even have the personnel available to solve said issues.