Wells Fargo has added another new transfer partner: Cathay Pacific Asia Miles

When Wells Fargo launched its own transferable currency a couple of years ago, it started off with a fairly lackluster set of transfer partners.

Over time, that list has both increased and become more interesting, particularly now that they have 1:2 transfer ratios for Wyndham Rewards and Choice Privileges and Citi has reduced its own transfer ratio for Choice.

Hot on the heels of Wyndham being added to its fold, Wells Fargo has added another new transfer partner: Cathay Pacific Asia Miles.

In keeping with its other transfer partners, Wells Fargo allows transfers from only 1 point to Cathay Pacific, rather than the minimum 1,000 points that many other transferable currencies require.

That can be particularly useful if you have an existing Asia Miles balance and you don’t want those miles to expire. Nowadays, your miles don’t expire provided you earn or redeem Asia Miles every 18 months. A transfer of a single point should therefore reset the clock, providing a low cost way to keep your miles alive.

This leaves Chase Ultimate Rewards as the only major transferable points currency to not transfer to Cathay Pacific. Amex Membership Rewards, Citi ThankYou, Capital One miles, Bilt Rewards, and Rove also all transfer to Cathay, so it wouldn’t surprise me if we see Chase get in on the action too at some point in the next year or two. That said, they’ve had many years where they could’ve added Cathay and haven’t, so perhaps there’s some kind of reason for that. For example, it might be that Cathay Pacific is wanting to charge more for Asia Miles than Chase is willing to pay, a theory backed up by the fact that Amex recently lowered its transfer ratio from 1:1 to 5:4.

Speaking of predictions, the addition of Cathay to the Wells Fargo transferable points ecosystem is great news for me and Tim as we both predicted Wells Fargo adding new partners at the start of this year.

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