mileage transfers?
 

Hi all!

Here's a weird question I had:

I have FF miles on a whole bunch of different airlines (TWA, CO, UA, USAir, DE), but not enough for an award ticket on any individual one. Is there any good way to get any of these miles in 1 place (preferably including TWA) to get myself a free ticket?

Thanks in advance!

How many miles do you have with each airline?

Welcome to the board!

A very common question many of us have ask too.

There are many answers to your question. Mine is to just wait and over time things seem to grow. Many credit card providers will give points in a particular program for just signing up and perhaps one purchase. This is the same for the long distance phone companies. My Points, Greenstamps and many other programs also offer chances to get ff miles. Some online brokers do the same. The point is that there are numberous way to get miles in addition to flying, renting cars and staying at hotels.

There also ways to transfer some points from one program to another, most of these are to costly, in the loss of points to be worthwhile.

If you are handy with the computer, you might try the search funtion on this board, as this topic has been covered over and over.

Maybe some more skilled than I will reply and give you the links to some of the previous posts.

Again welcome to the board.

ranles

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Only God does not have to travel

I think you can convert the miles to HHonors points, and then back into miles on another airline, but they lose some value due to the conversion ratio.

Using the HHonors Reward Exchange you can transfer miles first to Hilton and then consolidate them in the program of your choice (probably the one that already has the most miles). The major disadvantage to this is that (a) you lose around 60% of the transferred miles in the process, depending on the airlines involved and (b) it's verrrry slow, so plan ahead if you know that you'll need a specific award in the future.

You mentioned that you have some miles with USAirways. If you have any with American Airlines, you can combine the two to get a joint award, so that might be an option also. (What I would do in that situation is transfer the miles from TWA, Continental, etc. to American since they have a more favorable exchange rate with HHonors, and then combine them with the miles you have with USAirways).

We can give you more specific advice if you let us know more details.

Hi all!

In response to jaguar (& this might affect things a bit):

I've got around 15K on TWA, 5K on CO, 5K on DE, 2K on USAir, & about 1K on UA.

Thanks all for the HHonors link -- I'll look into that. I know about all the credit/LD offers (been lurking here for 3-4 months now), but since I can't afford the annual fees for all those credit cards I've got the Starwood AmEx Optima.

Thanks again to all!

That 15K on TWA will get you a free RT less than 750 miles apart. I had 12700 TWA miles and am sending my wife from MSP to STL (a $250 ticket) by transferring 2300 Amex MR points.

I was glad to get something out of those miles.

TWA is not a partner with Starwood (Optima), but look into other methods of accumulating points into your TWA account.

If you are not going to add miles to Continental or Delta you could move those miles to Hilton. 5K miles from each airline will get you 10K Hilton points each, so you could redeem for a 20K Hilton award.