It’s right there on the American Express website now:
Effective June 30th, 2025, the ability to transfer Membership Rewards® points to Hawaiian Airlines’ HawaiianMiles will no longer be available.
For months now, this has been a fantastic way to move Amex points to Alaska, which otherwise is only a Bilt Rewards transfer partner (and I guess Marriott Bonvoy as well although I wouldn’t). No major bank transfers to Alaska and I would think they plan to keep it that way.
But since the merger was approved for Hawaiian Airlines and Alaska Airlines, we gained the ability to transfer Hawaiian Miles into Alaska MileagePlan miles 1:1 and instantly.
Even better, if you open a Hawaiian Airlines credit card from Barclays, you can transfer your miles to anyone else with an Alaska account. I personally had my wife as well as both parents grab a Hawaiian card, transfer the points to my Hawaiian account (again, no fee as a cardmember!) and then to my Alaska account.
You can move points into another account as a Hawaiian credit card holder. It does not differentiate how you got the miles, so if you have a Hawaiian credit card and then moved 500,000 Amex to your account, you could transfer that to another Hawaiian account. It’s like a temporary (very temporary) household pooling technique that follows all of the rules.
I’m secretly hoping Hawaiian might do just one last 20% transfer bonus from Amex to Hawaiian which has averaged about once a year. And so I’ll wait until mid-June before making a last transfer just in case. But they very well may not do that precisely because of the merger. Many did the transfer bonus last August speculating on the merger being approved and they won to the tune of 20% in the end 😉
Do keep in mind that you’ll pay an excise fee to Amex for the transfer since they are a US partner and Amex asks cardmembers to reimburse the excise feee of .0006 cents per point – but up to a max of $99. 165,000 points is that magic number so if you plan to transfer more – definitely do it all at once since you’ll pay $99 for 165,000 or 999,999 points….
Thoughts?
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