Frequent Flier, Forever Useless

July 14, 2010 8:48 PM

I have a specific question regarding airline frequent flier miles. When an airline changes alliances (ex: from SkyTeam to Star Alliance), how do they manage your miles? Is there such thing as a one time one shot transfer?

Specifically, I have a bunch of miles banked in China Eastern which in the past wasn't in any sort of alliance (ex: SkyTeam, Star Alliance, OneWorld). .. essentially useless but I had to fly with them for work.

I learned a few months back that they are going to be a part of SkyTeam mid-2011, to merge into this one big happy airline alliance organization. What's the possibility that all these miles I accumulated with China Eastern, once though to be useless, can be moved to my existing SkyTeam account which is opened under Delta Airlines?

posted by peachtree to Travel & Transportation (3 answers total)

With the One World alliance, you keep the miles with the airline you earned them on, but when an airline joins the scheme, you can start flying on other member airlines with reward points from your original airline.

So in your example, your China Eastern miles stay put, but after they're in SkyTeam, you'd be able to use the miles on Delta flights. The miles are deducted from your China Eastern balance.

But I haven't heard of actually moving the miles from one airline to another. Flyertalk may have more insight.
posted by birdherder at 9:14 PM on July 14, 2010

You can not combine miles from different carriers for one award, even if they are in the same alliance. The only way that I am aware of to move points from one carrier to another is using www.points.com which is generally a terrible deal and doesn't include China Eastern at all. The best thing would be to use the China Eastern miles to purchase a SkyTeam award, which can be used on any SkyTeam airline.
posted by Lame_username at 7:00 AM on July 15, 2010

You're golden.. You can use your existing china eastern miles to buy flights on Sky Team alliance airlines, with exceptions
posted by sandmanwv at 9:50 AM on July 15, 2010