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Well, that was fast. Last week, Alaska Airlines closed its merger with Hawaiian Airlines. This week, mileage transfers between the two airlines are already live. It was publicized that this functionality could take up to a month to arrive, but wait no more. You can now convert HawaiianMiles to Mileage Plan miles and vice versa.
Here's how to transfer miles between the two carriers — and what to do if you tried initiating an Amex-Hawaiian transfer only to have your points reversed.
Now Live: Transfer Miles Between Alaska Mileage Plan and HawaiianMiles
You can now transfer miles between Alaska Airlines and Hawaiian Airlines, and the process couldn't be easier. All that's necessary to fill your Mileage Plan account — or your HawaiianMiles account if you opt to go the other way — is to click this link, select your destination program, sign in, and hit transfer.
The government-mandated 1:1 ratio is as advertised. However, you must transfer points in increments of 50. At most, you can transfer up to 500,000 miles per transaction.
The FAQs at the bottom of the transfer widget suggest transfers can take up to 72 hours, but we're happy to report that our team is seeing miles post much faster than that — as in, instantly. That's a pretty awesome deal if you've been eyeing a Mileage Plan sweet spot and want to book it before award space dries up.
Amex-Hawaiian Transfers Aren’t Working. What Gives?
Alaska Airlines Mileage Plan miles are incredibly valuable. Alaska's distance-based award charts have value from top and bottom, and the airline's membership in the Oneworld alliance unlocks award availability on some of the world's best carriers.
So, if you're considering transferring a few extra American Express Membership Rewards points to Hawaiian Airlines in the hopes of transferring them over to Alaska, that's understandable. I was in the same boat.
However, I (and other members of the AwardWallet team) had multiple transfers fail. Word to the wise: if you try more than a few times, you might lock yourself out of your Amex account.
I dialed American Express using the number on the back of my Membership Rewards-earning card to reconcile my account situation. And after seconds on the phone, it quickly became pretty clear that there's something at play between Amex and Hawaiian — but it has nothing to do with Amex. Instead, Hawaiian is overwhelmingly rejecting points transfers.
In other words, if you try to initiate a transfer by yourself, your transferred points won't stick. For now, the fix is to call Amex and have a representative push a transfer through manually. It's unclear if this solution will work 100% of the time, but it's worked for me twice.
As to the future of Amex-Hawaiian transfers, who knows how long Hawaiian Airlines will remain on the list of Amex transfer partners? It's also anyone's guess as to whether you'll ever be able to transfer Amex points to Hawaiian without a little extra handholding ever again.
Final Thoughts
You can now transfer Hawaiian Airlines HawaiianMiles to Alaska Airlines Mileage Plan miles — and go back the other way. Transferring is quick and easy, and we couldn't be happier not to have to wait a month to do so.
But if you've been waiting on the sidelines for the Alaska-Hawaiian merger to complete, you may run into issues transferring Amex points to Hawaiian Airlines. We don't know what's causing these issues — Amex is blaming Hawaiian for rejecting transfers — but a solution for now appears to be to call American Express and force a manual transfer. It's unclear how long this solution will work (or if transfer functionality will revert back to normal), but we'll keep you updated as we know more.
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