Converting NWA & BA miles
 

I have around 8K miles on NWA and the same on BA. I can't find any way to convert these miles to either AA, Marrott....or something I can use!

Any thoughts or am I S.O.L.?

Thanks!

Margy

Mileage Converter
 

No conversion available for NWA or BA...

No way to convert BA miles to AA, but you can redeem BA miles for an award flight on AA (or other partners). I believe 25,000 miles is required for an economy class round trip within North America. Click the "table" link in the first paragraph of this page...

http://www.britishairways.com/travel...o/public/en_us

How to get from 8,000 to 25,000 without flying on BA? The BA Visa card issued by Chase will generate a 15,000 mile introductory bonus plus 1 mile per dollar spent. Which means you could apply for the card, spend about $2,000, and then you will have 25,000 BA miles.

You can also transfer points to BA from several hotel programs, Diners Club or Merill Lynch's Merrill+ card.

dennis

Thanks so much for the tips Mia! I'll give those a try..

margy

You can pretty much do the same thing (or better) on NWA. 15,000 miles for signing up for the NW credit card. 10,000 miles for the Fly Free Faster promotion (see http://www.nwa.com/offers/fff2005/). With 8,000 of your own miles that leaves you with 33,000 miles -- just short of a trip to Hawaii, if you manage to snag an award.

As you've already learned, you can't transfer out of these programs, and you aren't yet at a level where you can use them within these programs.

Any chance you'll fly on NWA, Delta, Continental, or KLM again SOMETIME? If so, might be worth signing up for World Perks Dining (with one credit or debit card that's not already in another dining program) and occasionally do a dine with that. That'll keep your NWA miles around forever, until you can add to them in some signficant way.

Same thing (if you have yet another credit or debit card that's not already in a dining program) for Executive Club dining. Or, for BA, rent from Avis occasionally: at Avis you earn 500 BA miles for even a one-or-two-day rental, but at Avis with other airlines and at other car rental companies with any airline (other than Southwest) you earn a measly 50 miles per day.

Keep in mind, btw, that you don't need to get to 25k with BA necessarily, if you sometimes visit Europe. Within Europe, you can use 10k BA miles for an upgrade to Club Europe.