Alaska Airlines acquired Hawaiian Airlines last week and promised that points transfers between the two programs would come the same month. And they’re here.
As of September 26, 2024, Alaska Airlines and Hawaiian Airlines have officially enabled mileage transfers between their frequent flyer programs. Points transfer at 1:1 in 50 point increments at no cost.
While there is no cap on the total miles transferable, each individual transaction is limited to 500,000 miles.They say transfers can take up to 72 hours, but seem to be working near-instantaneously.
Although Hawaiian was the better program for upgrades between the mainland and Hawaiian, Alaska’s miles are worth far more and with more and better partners. HawaiianMiles members get a nice upgrade in value.
And there’s an easy play to get Hawaiian Airlines credit cards and Alaska cards, knowing that the miles from Hawaiian’s will go into your Alaska account. In fact, Hawaiian Airlines credit card customers can transfer miles between Hawaiian accounts for free. So if your spouse, parents, inlaws, and siblings all get Hawaiian cards (or just have HawaiianMiles laying around) those can be transferred to you, and will wind up in your Alaska account.
HawaiianMiles is an American Express Membership Rewards transfer partner. They even ran a 20% transfer bonus that ended August 31. Some folks speculatively transferred to take advantage of that, but in any case Alaska doesn’t partner with any of the bank transfer currencies and Amex will presumably lose the transfer relationship once HawaiianMiles gets sunset.
Status matches between Alaska Airlines Mileage Plan and Hawaiian Airlines HawaiianMiles are expected this year as well. And they’ll combine your qualifying miles between the two programs to determine your tier status, so if you’ve earned with both Alaska and Hawaiian the total between the two will count.