In non-shocking news considering the route that other transferable currencies have gone down in recent months, Capital One has announced that it’ll be reducing the transfer ratio to Emirates by 25% in January.
As per the above message on Capital One’s website:
Effective January 13, 2026 at 12:00AM ET, the ratio for transferring Capital One Miles to Emirates Skywards Miles will update from 1000 Capital One Miles = 1000 Emirates Skywards Miles to 1000 Capital One Miles = 750 Emirates Skywards Miles.
While this is disappointing, it doesn’t come out of the blue. The first domino to fall was Citi; back in April, they announced that transfers of ThankYou points to Emirates would reduce by 20% on July 27, 2025 from 1,000:1,000 to 1,000:800.
There was then a period of several weeks where no transferable currencies could transfer to Emirates. Shortly after the ability to transfer returned, American Express stated that their transfer ratio to Emirates would also drop from 1,000:1,000 to 1,000:800.
Speculation was rife that Emirates was trying to charge transferable currencies a much higher rate for their miles and Chase subsequently said “we’re out.”
That’s left Bilt and Capital One as the lone holdouts at a 1:1 ratio. Capital One has now decided to take action by dropping their transfer ratio even more significantly than Citi and Amex seeing as they’re making a 25% cut rather than 20%.
It therefore wouldn’t be too surprising if we see Bilt also make some kind of transfer ratio change in the coming year.
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Looks like Emirates doesn’t want award travelers, at this point. Is it still worth it to redeem their business/first class with miles? I saw they also increase some taxes/fess on the JFK – MXP route
Damn, this puts me in a tough situation. Just booked economy JFK -> MXP for September 2026 with the intention of upgrading.
This is my first real award travel, so I’d love to hear experts’ opinions on how likely getting a business class upgrade is, don’t want to pre-transfer if that’s unlikely.
Unless you have specific data about that route and timing indicating business class upgrades are likely to be available with miles, you should not count on upgrades