On last week’s podcast, Nick and I discussed Alaska Airlines’ pending Hawaiian Airlines purchase. Following the Department of Justice’s lack of objection, the merger seems increasingly likely. Further, Alaska Airlines has stated that they will combine the two loyalty programs into one: Alaska Mileage Plan. Additionally, Alaska Airlines confirmed to Beat of Hawaii that miles will convert 1 to 1 from Hawaiian. Given that most of us find Alaska miles to be far more valuable than Hawaiian miles, this situation has raised some near term questions:
- Should we apply for Hawaiian Airlines credit cards before it’s (potentially) too late?
- Should we transfer Amex points to Hawaiian Airlines while the 20% transfer bonus is in effect through 8/31/24? This may be a great way to indirectly transfer Amex points to Alaska miles, but we don’t know if Amex’s transfers to Hawaiian miles will stick around post merger.
For me, the answers were yes and yes.
Everyone should decide for themselves whether the Hawaiian Airlines credit cards and/or the Amex to Hawaiian transfer bonus are a good bet. But since a number of readers have asked what I plan to do, I figured that I’d answer it here.
I decided to go big (bigger than I originally thought).
Hawaiian Airlines Credit Cards
At the time of this writing, there are 70K offers available for both the consumer and business cards. This display will show up-to-date offers:
| Card Offer and Details |
|---|
70K Miles ⓘ Non-Affiliate 70K miles after one purchase in first 90 days - must enter any 6 digit code (such as 123456) when applying$99 Annual Fee Information about this card has been collected independently by Frequent Miler. The issuer did not provide the details, nor is it responsible for their accuracy. Earning rate: 3X Hawaiian Airlines ✦ 2x gas, dining, and grocery stores ✦ 1x everywhere else Card Info: Mastercard World Elite issued by Barclays. This card has no foreign currency conversion fees. Noteworthy perks: Two free checked bags when flight is booked through Hawaiian Airlines ✦ One time 50% off companion ticket ✦ $100 off a companion ticket for roundtrip coach travel between Hawaii and North America on Hawaiian Airlines at each account anniversary |
| Card Offer and Details |
|---|
Up to 70K miles ⓘ Non-Affiliate 60K miles after $2K spend and an additional 10K for making a purchase on an employee card within the first 90 days $99 Annual Fee Recent better offer: Expired 9/11/22: 80K + $99 statement credit after $2K spend in first 90 days Earning rate: 3X Hawaiian Airlines ✦ 2x gas, dining, and office supply stores ✦ 1x everywhere else Card Info: Mastercard World Elite issued by Barclays. This card has no foreign currency conversion fees. Big spend bonus: Earn up to 40,000 annual bonus miles — 20k miles with $50-$99k annual spend or 40k miles with $100k or more annual spend; Noteworthy perks: One-time 50% off a companion discount on roundtrip coach travel between Hawaii and North America on Hawaiian Airlines |
Both of the above are excellent offers. The consumer card is especially great since the only requirement for earning the bonus is to make a single purchase.
Going for 5 cards and 350,000 miles
My wife and son each applied for both cards (personal and business). I applied only for the business card since I’m just under 5/24 and wasn’t ready to go over just yet.
To determine your 5/24 status, see: Easy Ways to Count Your 5/24 Status. The easiest option is to track all of your cards for free with Travel Freely.
More:
According to Doctor of Credit, the following banks do not routinely report business accounts to the personal credit bureaus:- American Express (except for Canadian Amex)
- Bank of America
- Barclaycard
- Capital One Spark Cash
- Chase
- Citi
- FNBO
- Navy Federal CU
- PNC
- US Bank
- Wells Fargo
The following banks do report business cards on personal credit reports (and therefore do count towards 5/24):
- Capital One (except the Spark Cash Plus charge card)
- TD Bank
- UBS Bank
All 5 applications are pending review. Fingers are crossed.
Normally I wouldn’t be too excited about earning miles separately across multiple accounts, but in this case it’s not a problem at all. A cool feature of the Hawaiian Airlines cards is that they enable transferring miles to and from friends for free. Once my wife and son earn their miles, they should be able to freely move those miles to my account.
An instant millionaire plus 20%
In the post “Does that Amex to Hawaiian transfer bonus make sense now that the Alaska merger is likely?” I stated that I’d probably transfer around 350K of my ~1.5 million Amex points to Hawaiian while the 20% transfer bonus was in play. But then I looked at my wife’s Amex account. She was sitting on 3 million points. I decided to go really big. She transferred 995,000 points to my Hawaiian Airlines account. She was able to do that because I’ve been an authorized user on one of her Membership Rewards cards for more than 90 days. But that wasn’t absolutely necessary: assuming at least one of her credit card applications goes through, she could have transferred Amex points to her own Hawaiian Airlines account and then freely transferred her Hawaiian miles to me.
Thanks to the 20% transfer bonus, my wife’s 995,000 Amex points turned into 1,194,000 Hawaiian Airlines miles (AKA HawaiianMiles). Now my fingers are triple crossed that all of those miles will become Alaska miles.
Why I decided to go so big
In December 2021, American Airlines ran an incredible promotion with SimplyMiles where you could earn 240 miles per dollar donating to Conservation International. That was equivalent to buying AAdvantage miles for less than half a cent each. Incredible. I bought 1.2 million AA miles through that deal and later wished that I had bought many more. Having so many miles in a a valuable program like AA has been awesome. I’ve been able book multiple international business class trips whenever I found award availability even if I wasn’t sure I’d take those trips. AA offers free changes and cancelations.
Having a huge stash of Alaska miles will allow me to do the same thing, but better: Alaska has more non-alliance partners than AA, and Alaska allows free stop-overs. Once Alaska adds the ability to mix partner awards on a single booking, I expect it to become one of my favorite programs. I don’t like that Alaska charges a nonrefundable $12.50 partner booking fee per passenger and per direction of travel, but otherwise I’ve been impressed with things like short-haul flights for as low as 4,500 points, and business class to Europe for as low as 45,000 points with a stop-over each way.
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