How Long After a Flight Does It Take for your FF Miles to Post?
 

I have noticed that the time it takes for miles to post significantly varies and always gets anxious when I am not given instant gratification.

Delta Skymiles usually posts by the time I arrive home and certainly by the next day. US Airways usually takes 5-7 days to post.

Starwood Hotels seem to post within 3-5 days for the stay but have great difficulty having my Platinum 500 points amenity post and I often have to call both the hotel and corporate customer care to get the points.

Marriot usually takes about 7 days to post in my particular case.

Dollar Rentacar takes about 3 weeks to post to US Airways.

What experience has others had with miles/points posting from hotels, car rentals, and airlines? I was curious if it was consistent within a particular program, if it varies for individual travelers, how often miles DON'T POST for an individual when you qualify for the flight and/or stay, and if it matters if you are an elite member or not?

By obtaining everyone's input about the various programs, we can get idea on how long to wait before calling customer service.

My experience with United has always been 2 days.

One of the reason it varies, especially on transfers from partners, is because it doesn't take a certain number of days, rather it happens on the next whatever. For example, the transfers may happen twice a week, once a week, twice a month, once a month, etc. If they happen once a month and you activity is posted with the partner right before that, you may get it in your FF account in just a few days, while if you did the exact same activity a couple days later, it could take almost a month, because would have just missed that transfer window.

Almost all partner to airline transfers are done in some sort of window (for example, at the very least not likely more often than once a day, but usually even less often than that).

The longest tends to be retailers (like FF mileage malls). That's because the retailer doesn't want to pay for miles if you return the product, so they typically wait 30 days or more to make sure you didn't return it (or otherwise reverse the charge), and only then does the wait for the next transfer window begin. Thus mileage mall transfers can take MONTHS!

You might think, just because you access all this information over the internet, that all the transfers are done that way. But I know for a fact that a number of these transfers are done by a physical mailing of a tape or disc or some other physical storage medium. And in that case, sometimes they'll have problems reading that tape (or whatever), and then an EXTRA transfer time has to be added. (If the transfer is only done once a month, then they have to wait an extra month!)

Anyway, because of these transfer windows, you cannot evaluate what the transfer speed is just from one or two anecdotes per partner-airline combination. You have to have a variety of examples spread over different times of month before you can deduce the pattern.

For example, over many months I've figured out that iDine and Priority Club each transfer to BA only once a month, tho each at a different time of month. I've done HHonors to BA less, and I'm not positive, but I THINK they transfer either twice a month or every two weeks. Avis to BA is faster but I haven't done enough to figure out the exact pattern.

There's also the issue of posting process at the FF program. At some programs, not everything posts correctly the first time, but the FF programs do automatic "sweeps" periodically looking for things that didn't post right (eg, bonuses) and straightening them out. There's a lot of instances documented in threads in the AA section right now about people who don't see the right number of bonus miles for some flights and then a couple days later it's all fixed without them doing anything.

You must mean just from United flights.

United posting from mileage mall partners such as Barnes & Noble defnitely takes multiple months (3, 4...)!

iDine (MP Dining) to United is much faster but still not 2 days in my experience.

AA typically takes 2-3 business days to post flight activity. AA.com makes you wait two weeks to use the automated system for requesting missing mileage, but in my experience, if it's not there in well under a week, it won't be there at all (unless you do something about it).

Their oneWorld partners - at least BA and QF, the only ones I've used enough to see a pattern - seem to take about the same time.

Non-airline partners are all over the map. One stay at the Vienna Hilton posted almost exactly a year later. I had totally forgotten about it; it posted with no action on my part to ask where my miles were.

United and Star Alliance flights (at least Thai Air; I'll be flying Spanair and bmi in December, so we'll see about those). MP Dining usually takes about a week. I've never tried mileage mall.

Based on a few FFPs..

Very fast for same carrier (sometimes even before flight lands!!), quite fast for airline and non-airline partners (unless misposted). For airline partners I generally chase up after about 3 weeks, for non-airline I wait a bit more (say 6 weeks).

it took mine 7 days once.

My NW and DL flights post very quickly. The KL credit sometimes takes a couple of days.

I've averaged about two days with NW flights... longer if taken on the weekend.

aloha

Most recent experiences:

AA: two business days.
UA: the next business day.
Hilton: one business day

I find UA and AC are the quickest for me, usually within 18 hours.
Hilton is by far the slowest. I never see any posting before at least 3 days.

DL - almost as your plane is landing

UA - 2-3 days later

Hilton 5-7 days later, 2-4 weeks to post mile to UA-MP

Avis - 10-days, 4-6weeks to post mile to UA-MP

Hertz - 10 days, 4-6weeks to post mile to UA-MP

What kind of experience do people have with US AIRWAYS?

credit cards...before i get the bill.
aa...3 days.
varig & lan chile as partners...less than a week.
had a problem w/ qf - aa in march....took about 2 months to get straightened out....daughters challenges were a mess due to ~ 16k q pts posting after other flights & electronic ug's & bonuses were problems...i think that we were close to correct at the end of the day.