Frequent Miler on the Air - Should I split a points transfer into smaller buckets? | Question of the Week Ep5 | 5-31-26

Episode Date: May 31, 2026

Should I split a points transfer into smaller buckets? Frequent Miler reader Keith wrote in with this question:I tried to transfer 560K points to Air France to snag a redemption. had previously transferred about 280k points from Amex to KLM, I thought for sure the points would have similarly come through with Chase. Sadly, the points took 4 days to transfer, and I missed my booking window. Looking back, should I have spread my point transfers across different currencies to lower the transfer risk? I could have also covered the transfer using Capital One or Amex points. How do you balance speed with lowering the risk that your points will miss their intended purpose?We’ve been answering a reader or listener question at the end of each Frequent Miler on the Air podcast episode. Now, we’ve turned the question of the week into its own weekly episode. Tune in every Sunday at 5pm for our Question of the Week podcast. And if you have your own question you’d like to submit, you can send it to [e-mail] in this episode:Check out all of our other travel podcasts from around the worldThis podcast is part of Voyascape, a podcast network that brings together the world's best travel podcasts. You can find all of our podcasts from around the world at Voyascape.com. If you are interested in advertising or sponsored content on any of our shows you can find out more at the link below.Voyascape Podcast Network

This is a Voyescape podcast. You can find all of our travel podcasts from around the world atvoyescape.com. This week's question of the week, should I split a points transfer into smaller buckets? Keith writes, I tried to transfer 560,000 points to Air France to snag a redemption. I had previously transferred about 280,000 points from Amex to KLM. I thought for sure the points would have similarly come through with Chase. Sadly, the points took four days to transfer, and I missed my booking window. Looking back, should I have spread my point transfers across different currencies to lower the transfer risk?

I could have also covered the transfer using Capital One or Amex points. How do you balance speed with lowering the risk that your points will miss their intended purpose? All right. So what happened here to Keith is Keith tried to transfer a large number of points, 560,000 points to Air France, KLM, and the transfer snagged up for some reason. It took four days. Normally transfers to Air France, KLM, Flying Blue, are instant from all of the transferable currencies. But for some reason, in this situation, it took four days. So Heath is essentially

wondering, is it because I transferred this huge chunk all at once, the 560,000 points, did that trigger some sort of a manual review that I could have perhaps sidestepped or avoided by transferring a hundred thousand points each from five or six different transferable currencies or whatever the case may be. So my answer to Keith here would be, no, I don't think that would have helped. I think that this is just bad luck. And it's not common, but we do hear about this kind of thing from time to time where a transfer that ordinarily is instant from, in this case, it was from Amex, I guess, to Air France, KLM or Chase, rather to Chase to Air France, KLM. But I've heard that occasionally on a transfer from Chase to Air Canada Aeroplane or Hyatt in a situation where they're

ordinarily instant, but for some reason it takes a couple of days. It's bad luck when it happens. I don't think there's anything that Keith could have done to reduce the risk here. And if anything, I think this idea of, well, I could have made smaller transfers from three or four transferable currencies, I think if anything, that's more likely to cause a problem. Again, I don't think there's anything Keith could or down. I think that activity is more likely to cause a problem, though, because on the back end, most of these points transfers from transferable currencies to airline and hotel programs, on the back end, they are mostly sort of facilitated by Points.com, even though you don't see Points.com in there. That's who behind the scenes is doing the transferring

and the movement of points, usually. And so I think if Points.com sees points coming in from three or four transferable currencies into your Air France, KLM Flying Blue account, it's probably more likely to trigger a fraud alert either with them saying, why is this person transferring small chunks from a bunch of different programs, or trigger a fraud alert from Air France, KLM Flying Blue saying, why is this account suddenly getting points from four different sources? I think that that's more likely to trip you up and slow you down than transferring the 560,000 points in one shot. And I know that that's not necessarily a solution to the problem here. But what I can tell you, Keith, is that I've transferred that many points to Air France, more than that, to Air France, KLM flying blue at once before and not

had a problem with it. And in fact, in all of the transfers I've made, I mean, over the last decade, I can't tell you how many millions of points I've transferred. And I can count on like one or two fingers the number of times I've had what should have been an instant transfer get held up take longer than instant. Take a day or two or three or what have you. So there are some programs that have slower transfers like A&A. It takes a couple of days. I'm not talking about that. I mean situations like Keith's where you would expect it to be instant and isn't. It's happened a couple of times in the last decade to me. So it's pretty uncommon. We do hear about it from time to time from people. And when it happens, it really stinks because in this case, I know Keith missed out on the

redemption that he was looking to use those points for. And that really stinks because and you end up with this pile of points that you can't necessarily use for the intended use and you can't send them back. Transfers are a one-way street. So that's a very slim risk. I want to emphasize that that's so slim, but it does happen from time and time. Right. I want to add just a couple things. One is anecdotally, I feel like I have heard this more often with Chase transfers than with other programs.

So there might be something Chase is doing either technically or with like fraud prevention. that is slowing things down every now and then. So, you know, maybe you would have had better luck with another program, but there's certainly no guarantee of that. But the other thing I want to add is what to do afterwards. So you've transferred these points. You have all these points there, and that award you were looking at is no longer there. A couple things. One, I've often seen awards that were available and have disappeared come back later. So if you don't already use a award search tool that has alerting capability, you should. Set up an alert to watch that route to see if that award comes back.

But also set up alerts for other routes that would work for your situation because even if that exact flight doesn't come back, maybe another flight would become available and you'd be able to use your. your points for that. Finally, it's possible that, you know, let's say you were looking to book for four people. It's possible that you can still make a booking for three people. And what do you do with that fourth? Well, maybe the pricing for that fourth person, if you booked three and then one person separately, maybe the pricing would be still okay, but just not as good as it was before. It's really hard to tell that until you've made the booking of the three to see what the fourth would cost. But that's another thing that you might want to look at.

Overall, though, I've had really good luck in the past, just setting up alerts. Often availability does come back. Great tip. This episode was produced and edited by Carrie Yoder, music by Annie Yoder. If you've enjoyed what you've heard today and you'd like to get more of this in your email inbox each day or each week, go to frequentmiler.com slash subscribe to join our email list. Follow us on all the various social media. Join our Frequent Myler Insiders Facebook group. And wherever you're watching or listening, don't forget to like this or give it a thumbs up. If you have a question that you'd like to be considered for a future question of the week

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