Hi,
Does anyone know if its possible to trade or swap miles with someone? For example, I give you 200,000 Hawaiian miles, and you give me 200,000 United miles.
I've been saving up miles on Hawaiian Airlines to use with their partner airline American so we can take the family to Europe early summer 2016. Now that I have enough miles, I've come to find that it's impossible to get any flights with my miles on American because I have to go through their mileage call center to book and they have limited availability, no flights available at all to Europe on American!
It would be much easier if I had the miles with American, United, Delta, or any other major carrier that flies to Europe and could go to their website and book myself. Is it possible to 'gift' my miles to someone that needs Hawaiian miles, and they might have a lot of miles on another major carrier that they could 'gift' to me. Is that possible? and if so, how can I do that without getting scammed? Are there any websites where people come connect to do such a thing.
Thanks for your advice!
Aloha!

Trading actual miles (ie, someone else's miles going into your account and your miles going into their account) is generally not practical, since it involves losing tons of value and/or incurring high cost, and there may be limits on how many miles you can actually transfer to someone else a year (using the airline's own miles transfer program, which is the method that has high cost). Points.com allows exchange of miles with some combination of loss of value and added cost, but the details vary with each exchange.

"Virtual trading" can be done (but may or may not be against the Terms and Conditions of a given airline miles program) by you reserving tickets for someone with your miles and them reserving tickets for you with their miles.

Meanwhile, the lack of availablity of AA flights to Europe you see with Hawaiian is probably reflecting AA reality you'd see at aa.com if you had AA miles. There are lots of threads in the AA forum complaining about poor availability to Europe. Ironically, the best availability to Europe with AA miles is from airlines that you can't book awards with online using AA miles, only by calling the AA center!

But you can research your own availability. As a FlyerTalk member, at www.awardnexus.com (click "more signup options" under the green "Purchase Now" button to sign up as a FlyerTalk member), you get a certain number of searches free. You'll have to know which airlines are Hawaiian partners and which aren't, but it's still probably easier than calling Hawaiian for each search.

There are a few things to consider here. Generally, trading or gifting miles in the way you describe is not permitted with most programmes, and you may end up in the unlikely situation of having your account shut down. You also need to trust someone if you do this. You could certainly get someone to use their 200,000 miles to book tickets for you, but how do they know that you'll do the same when it's their turn. I've done this once with another FTer many years ago, but we knew each other, so there was trust. Selling miles or going through a broker is usually illegal of poor value.

The other thing to consider is that the award availability on AA/UA/DL is what it is, and it changes all the time. Calling the AA centre shows the same availability as if you were to check on the website. Similarly for UA and DL, you won't actually know what availability is until you check, so finding a friend that has UA miles won't help you unless the seats are actually released to be booked. My suggestion is to set up a dummy AA account so that you can do your own searching for flights to Europe, and then call in if you see something you like.

Welcome to FT, Kcotton16!

Wirelessly posted (BlackBerry: BlackBerry8530/5.0.0.1030 Profile/MIDP-2.1 Configuration/CLDC-1.1 VendorID/417)

"My suggestion is to set up a dummy AA account so that you can do your own searching for flights to Europe, and then call in if you see something you like."

As aa.com does not require any log-in for award searches, the OP does not even have to set up an AAdvantage account to search.

I presume -- but do not know for sure -- that any "MileSAAver" award seats on AA metal would also be bookable with HA miles.

Thank you!
I tired doing this yesterday on AA site then calling into Hawaiian Mileage center and they kept telling me there were no flights at all. Didn't make sense to me why they'd be available on AA but not on Hawaiian. Any other insight would be helpful. I'll try it again though.

Wirelessly posted (BlackBerry: BlackBerry8530/5.0.0.1030 Profile/MIDP-2.1 Configuration/CLDC-1.1 VendorID/417)

Did you restrict your aa.com award search to "AA only" flights? Did you find "MileSAAver" availability on an all-AA itinerary?

I'm trying that now, to see what they have available. Thanks for your advice!

If you are looking for Y space, eligible flights (aka milesAAver flights) on AA will show up on aa.com costing 30k/per person each way. Anything higher and those flights are not milesAAver and will not be available to you with HA miles.

Thank you all very much. Got it figured out.