motytrah

Good news it will most likely work. Bad news, you're going to run into troubles, even if you don't do it. People in the DL forums have reported problems with accounts getting termed because they share a name with a family member. It all gets sorted out, but if you already run the risk of an audit do you really want to have a paper trail of shenanigans?

You would think it would be the other way around to get us to move to SkM.

fti

No typo. Skymiles have an expiration date so transferring TO skymiles won't extend that expiration date.

Worldperks don't have an expiration date so extending the expiration date is meaningless.

slippahs

Wirelessly posted (slippahs' iPhone : Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 2_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/525.18.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.1.1 Mobile/5G77 Safari/525.20)

Further meaningless since Worldperks miles won't be around for much longer.

Daze

BUT, if you had DL miles about to expire you could move them to NW and they would not have an expiration date until the account is merged with DL and then presumably you would then have the DL period again before expiration.

And, yes, I know that the wisdom here is not about extending, it's about burning.

slippahs

Good point.

sam-i-am

Would someone 'splain this? If you can transfer DL>NW or NW>DL, what's the "downside" of irreversible?

slippahs

It's the linking, not the transfer of miles, that's "reversable."

So once you link a DL account to a NW account, that's it. You can't link the NW account to another DL account, or vice versa.

mnredfox

But if you moved your miles from SM to WP, and burned some WP miles and transferred back, does that extend your expiration?

Time to take advantage of the SM 10billionx Hilton promos.

I wonder what DL would think if we got tons of DL PM's to open WP accounts and transfer tons of miles to WP. Ha, wonder if that would do anything. Too bad the old NW mileage award levels aren't valid for NW flights.

sbagdon

Presume that at the end of this year, those linked accounts will be merged on the back-end, and the NW account closed. Merge mismatched accounts, and things could get ugly later this year.

I'd presume there are no new NW accounts, without linking to an existing DL account. That stops the issue of what to do with new NW accounts (they go to the immediately linked-to account).

Presume that there's hourly/daily reports, showing how many NW accounts there are, how many DL accounts there are, and how many links there are. That would assist with the final integration.

Presume there's reports showing NW accounts built with no activity ever, accounts with no balances/reservations/etc, etc. The more accounts linked now, the fewer that have to be manually linked later, or manually fixed later.

There should be a full court-press to stop all new NW account creations, and link all existing accounts. 500 miles is not an incentive... try more like 5k or 10k. Add in a promotion that motivates people to get other people to link accounts (5k for the linked accounts, and 1k for the motivator?). Add in a promotion that shows the total number of all acccounts, and the total number of linked accounts... and award 1k to all account holders, and 10k to all referrers that have more then 50 accounts referred, if DL reaches 50% linking by 4/1. Do this, and you'd have people walking the hubs, carrying sandwich boards, for the bonus miles.

Have your customers do your work for you.

Incentivize people inside DL, for reaching milestones.

Get ahead of this problem. Ever account that isn't linked, and every account that has to have the link fixed, is 15-60 minutes of CSR time. Get in front of this!

pbarnette

If this time estimate is correct, then I think 10k miles is too generous. Even 5k might be too generous. If we assume something like 30 minutes on average per linked account, and that the average CSR has a fully burdened cost of maybe $50/hour (which I suspect is on the high side, possibly very much so), then NW would need to value the miles at less than $0.005 per mile to make a 5k mile bonus more practical than doing it in the back end. I don't know what the revenue deferral is for miles, but I would think it might be around that range.

GreyGhost

So, I read and re-read the T&C of this linked promo and could not find anywhere language stating that I could not link my two WorldPerks accounts(one very old that I re-discovered recently, with 21K orphan miles and my currently active Gold account) with my one and only SkyMiles account.

So, I link the old WP account to my SM account, and transfer the 21K miles. So far so good.

Then I try to link my current WP account. Nope, sorry, there is already another account linked.

Yikes. Any suggestions? (And how much trouble am I in?)

CA flyer

Not in trouble, I did the same thing. Even after you link one of them you can still call NW and they will consolidate your two WP accounts. Just make sure you have them roll the WPaccount you dont want to use anymore into the WP acct that you linked. Done!

thegrailer

Maybe I missed this in the thread. Would EQMs also transfer?
Here is the scenario. Delta account that has 0 miles. NWA gold with ~100K. I just received a "birthday" bonus email offer from Delta - double miles if I book and fly by a certain date. NWA flights count as the bonus points flight. I will be flying NWA but don't want to collect double Delta RQM - to transfer with the linked accounts - if I will lose my NWA EQM.

Thanks

sbagdon

Don't disagree that the bonuses and motivators are redefinable. My point was that there's tons of ways to get the customer to do their work for them, and to get ahead of this problem.

I'd still like to know what the final account numbers are going to looks like. Are all NW 9/12-digit numbers being retired, and everyone being linked or granted a DL 10-digit number? Or is the DL system being enhanced to support 9/10/12-digit numbers.

I say that, in that I'm still using an old US FF# (6 digits, forget), while US appears to now be creating much larger numbers (9 digits, starting with 4?).

fti

I think you meant "that's NOT reversable."

Linking is non reversable. Transfer of miles is.