American Express Points
 

I have 300,000 points with American Express that I am thinking of transferring to Continental before the merger is final.

My thinking is that I will now get to use them on the combined United and Continental . And of course all the Star Alliance partners.

United appears to have decent availability on International flights and I have 1p Status with United. If I wait until after the merger I will not be able to transfer to United.

Anyone see anything wrong with my plan.

IMHO Good Idea, firecat69
 

firecat69 -- in my opinion, this makes sense since Continental will most likely be pulled from the Membership Rewards participant list. Then you won't be able to get your miles into any other Star Alliance carrier except Singapore Airlines KrisFlyer which has much higher mileage requirements for awards (than UAL or CO).

Go for it....

putongo

You have until Sept. 30, 2011 to transfer to Continental. It may take that long for the OnePass and MileagePlus programs to merge. Certainly it will take many months after the merger.
What's the rush? If you're not needing to redeem miles for a flight soon, I would wait.

I agree. If you don't need to redeem the miles soon wait it out. You may decide that you want to transfer then to a different program for a certain award. The whole beauty of MR points is the flexibility...
When Sept. next year comes around and you still want the CO/United miles then transfer them all.

What about Air Canada?

And ANA?

I did see the date of Sept 11 but that is an American Express date.

What happens if the merger is finalized and Programs merged before that and Continental ceases to exist????

The ff programs will take a lot longer to merge then the official airline merger.

You are probably right but will I be able to use my Continental miles to book UA flights and Star Alliance airlines after the merger or will I have to wait for the FF programs to be merged???

You can currently book UA and Star Alliance flights using OnePass miles. The only impact I can see is if the combined airline continues United's Starnet blocking policy, where some Star Alliance member flights are blocked for redemption.

Aeroplan is the way to go for *A redemption.

That is a very broad statement. True that they have great routing rules and some very good redemption rates, but on some routes its a lot more miles then others.

I agree. I stayed away from Aeroplan because of their terrible burn rates on certain routes that I fly often. Another reason to look at ANA would be that there is no tax on transfers to ANA (or any other non-US airline). You will have to pay Uncle Sam to get your miles transferred to CO.

ditto on ANA transfer

ANA charges a fuel surcharge (and on most partner airlines)while CO doesnt. Those charges will be a lot more then the $99 fee for transferring 300k points.