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Old May 7, 2005 | 4:04 pm
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Stefan Daystrom
 
Join Date: Aug 2001
Location: Los Angeles, CA, USA
Programs: AA Plat, BA, DL, Frontier, NWA, SWA, UA, HHonors Gold, Priority Club Plat, Choice Priv, BW, Diners
Posts: 1,554
Originally Posted by michaelr
I have seen a lot of posts of people asking how long it takes to transfer points to miles, etc. I have recently transfered into AA and thought it might be a good to start a consolidated thread.

Format should be MM/YY FROM - TO: #DAYS. Mention if you paid any fees to speed up the process. I didn't.

03/05 Starwood - AA: 7
03/05 Priority Club - AA: 6
04/05 Marriott - AA: 5
If you got lots of data for each pair (one example of each pair is not enough!), then you would get somewhere. Unfortunately, I'm reading this a couple weeks after your post and no one else has replied to date!

Sorry, I don't have specific data of the type you wanted handy. The typical statement I can look up doesn't show the date an activity posted to the airline, only the date of the activity, so if I don't remember on which day I saw it post, I don't have the data in the form you want). And I don't tend to check my FF statements on a daily basis, so I don't usually know exactly how many days something took to post.

But I can tell you that what confuses most people is that they think there's a transfer time. Well, what is actually much more important is the transfer INTERVAL. The actual transfer time (which would be counted from the next available interval) depends on the means of transfer: Some partners transfer "by wire", but others send tapes or discs physically, and that obviously takes longer.

The transfer interval is more relevant, because for some pairs of partners it is only once a month, and then if the transfer method is prone to occasional failure, you have to wait a SECOND transfer interval for the transfer to work. (At some other partner pairs the nominal transfer is twice a month, or every two weeks, or every week, or twice a week, or daily or at best instant.)

Finally, there the "finality" aspect. The transfer won't even start until the transaction is considered pretty final. Now, in the case of an airplane flight that was prepaid, it's theoretically as soon as your boarding pass is scanned at the gate. In the case of a hotel stay or a rental car, it's as soon as you check out or make the return, and settle the final bill with no problem, and the payment clears.

But in the case of an online mall purchase, the finality may not be for a month or more later, as they wait to see if you will return your purchase within the allowable refund/exchange period! That's why "mileage mall" purchases are considered among the "slowest posting" types of mileage transfers most people run into (they typically only have a monthly transfer, on top of a month+ "finality" wait, which means 8 to 12 weeks typically and sometimes even longer).

Because of these variables, you cannot take any ONE specific experience ("data point") for a partner pair and make a judgement based on that. For example, while Priority Club transfers to British Airways only once a month, stays that happen right before that transfer post in days, while stays that happen a day later WILL DEFINITELY take a month to post! You'd need a lot of stays at different times of month (which I had over the last couple years) to figure out this pattern.
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