Originally Posted by
phospho
so in your opinion, if you wanted to close your diners club card and transfer ALL your points into united airlines (around 250k), EVEN if for a loss, would the most efficient way still be SPG?
Through SPG, it's going to be
DC 33750 > SPG 20250 > UA 12125, or
about 3:1. So that route, your 250k points would convert to about 85k UA miles (not even enough for one TATL round trip in business). Is that really a good use of DC points???
The second post of this thread:
http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/diner...os-2012-a.html
shows the conversion rates to
all the programs that DC supports.
For UA, it looks like you'd get a signficantly better conversion by going through Best Western (though still a signficantly loss compared to any airline to which you can transfer directly from DC).
DC to BW is almost 1:3, and then BW to UA I
think is 5:1, and so it would seem that DC to BW to UA would be "only" about 5:3. (You should verify all this before you commit to that. You should also verify whether BW has any limits on how much you can transfer out per year or not for non-status members.)
But you can't find an airline (to which DC points can be transferrred directly) in which 250k miles would be worth more than 150k UA miles to you? And you can't find a hotel program in which the transferred DC points would be worth more (if remaining as hotel points) than 150k UA miles?
(Of course, don't choose another airline or hotel program that you don't yet use without becoming familar with their terms. For example, some airlines and at least one hotel program have "hard" expiration policies, while others have "soft" expiration, ie, expiration which can be continually deferred.)