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 - enter code 482164 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 |
|---|
50k Miles ⓘ Non-Affiliate 50k miles after spending $4,000 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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[…] Airlines Credit Cards that offers 70,000 Hawaiian Airlines Miles after first purchase (read Frequent Miler’s post). I decided to apply for the personal and business Barclays Hawaiian Airlines Credit Cards at the […]
Wow, tough break Greg. Sounds like you got Bonvoy’d!
Wow….finally got my HA biz card approved email!!!
The irony here, is the original rejection letter mentioned:
Length of time revolving accounts have been established
– Time since most recent account opening is too short
– Too many accounts with balances
Yet, when I called recon, they just wanted to know if I could move some of the recently approved personal $24K CL to biz card and a brief description of biz.
Is there any information on how long the merger will likely take to finalize and how long after that it has historically taken airlines to merge their frequent flier programs?
Hey-Greg The Frequent Miler! How did it turn out? “All 5 applications are pending review”
[…] in this hobby have been wondering about this: My big bet on Hawaiian Alaska Mileage Plan. I think I am going to pass for now. The time lag before these Hawaiian miles become Alaska is just […]
Hi Greg, how did the CC applications go? I was 0/2 with personal and biz cards but my wife was instantly approved for the personal.
We transferred all 118k AMEX MR Points from her AMEX account to her HA account and I transferred 417k points into 500k HA miles into my HA account which was about half of my AMEX MR Point balance.
To follow-up on my biz:
Approved for the personal @ $24K CL.
Denied for biz, then recon sort of approved it w/reallocating $15K from personal (asked brief description of biz, dob, salary & biz income). Personal app now displays $9K CL. Next day I get a call and asked for avocado yearly harvest (resp: 20Klbs) and address. May take 10 days for approval & I can call back for status?
Equafax – 2 hard inquiries
I’m in. Worst case scenario, we have fun trying. It’s just points at the end of the day. Best case, we get a whole lot more Alaska miles. When they bought virgin, they went 1:1 to Alaska. Thank you, Greg!
Virgin miles were more expensive, since they transferred 2:1 from Amex.
ah, got it. It was a while ago, I don’t remember all the details. Thank you for the reminder. Even with that in mind, I made the transfer and am excited to see the events unfold.
Greg,
I wanted to share a hack with you and the FM community to avoid the nonrefundable $12.50 partner booking fee on Alaska. When you need to “cancel” a reservation, simply “change” it instead to some distant future booking as a placeholder. Alaska does NOT charge a fee for changes in award booking, so the $12.50 partner fee gets applied to the changed tripped automatically. No additional funds required. In fact, if the new trip requires less miles (e.g., change a 15k mile first class trip to a 4,500 miles coach trip), Alaska will refund the difference back to your account at no charge.
When you are ready to book your next “real” trip on Alaska, simply change that reservation again. Worst case if you don’t have any need to fly Alaska for the next 330 days, you can still cancel it, forfeit the partner fee, and have the miles placed back in your account.
Michael
Awesomeness! Thanks Michael!
i only have 50k AMEX points left but i think i am going all-in…
@greg, did your wife or son apply for both personal and business cards on the same day? Personal first or business first? Any update on the status? I would like to follow your footsteps.
Just to know a correction. The Hawaiian airlines world elite MasterCard is actually issued by Bank of Hawaii and it is serviced by Barclays. Bank of Hawaii is the only bank that partners with Hawaiian airlines. So just to clarify that the card is serviced by Barclays.
I was on the fence but since we have 1.5M MR and many more on the way thanks to employee card offers, I sent 300k to HA. Also applied for biz cards for P1 and P2 thanks to you noting that you can transfer between accounts. Good luck to all of us with the merge.
Wife tried 3x applying for biz card through the FM link and each time at the end we get a “web site experiencing difficulties” screen. Anyone else get this?
The FM link is non-affiliate, so in this case it won’t make a difference if you click through the link to apply or simply google/search on your own.
I got this in Chrome, but it worked fine in Firefox.
High-RISK but High-REWARDS!