Frequent Miler on the Air - The best transferable points for multi-player households | Coffee Break Ep111 | 6-23-26

Episode Date: June 23, 2026

When you have multiple family members working together to earn travel rewards, it becomes more important to share and combine points. So which programs are best for this ability to share?(02:07) - Why Transferable Points matter(05:07) - Why transferable point sharing matters(07:20) - Read more about Citi discontinuing points sharing hereAnd read about Wells Fargo's end to combining points here(08:04) - Transferable points ranked from worst to best for points sharingSubscribe and FollowVisit https://frequentmiler.com/subscribe/ to get updated on in-depth points and miles content like this, and don’t forget to like and follow us on social media.Music Credit – “Ocean Deep” by Annie YoderMentioned 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 NetworkFrequent Miler's Best Offers Pagehttps://frequentmiler.com/best-credit-card-offers/

This is a Voyescape podcast. You can find all of our travel podcasts from around the world atvoyescape.com. Today's coffee break. The best transferable points for multiplayer households. Welcome to Frequent Myler's Coffee Break, where we focus on a single topic related to miles and points. Each coffee break is limited to 20 minutes or less or your money back. All right, before we start this conversation, we have to talk about what is a multiplayer household and go from there. So we like to talk about in this hobby, this game, that we often refer to people who do it as the players and players of the game, right? And often people work together, often with like a spouse or a parent or a child, or sometimes multiple people in a family or even friends. And so that's a multiplayer household.

Usually one person in the household or in the group is like the primary person who's into points and miles and really knows what's going on and is taking charge of everything. And we always refer to them as player one or P1 for short, right? And so the others are P2, P3, et cetera. Just the other day, my son learned that he's P3. He was like, what are you talking about? We met someone in town who plays the game. Shout out to Cherry. Hi, Jerry.

And said, is this your P2 and P3? And I'm like, okay, no, I need to explain that. So just did that for everybody else. That's terrific. That's terrific. Yeah, well, and, you know, it also just makes for easy shorthand when you're talking about how you do have multiple people working together because there are a lot of different ways to do that to work together and you might travel with the same people all the time and

want to be able to do that. So being able to combine the forces of your points is really important if you're in a multi-player household. If you're doing this as more than one person, then even if you're doing it as one person, I guess the ability to combine your own points is important. But it becomes even more important when you have multiple people. All right. So you get your player one, your player two, your player three. And of course, they want, or more if you have that, they want to earn transferable points, we would say. But why? Why are transferable points important? Yeah. You know, we always talk about how much more valuable transferable points are than other types of points for a number of reasons. One is that you have a much better chance of having the right points for the right situation.

So, for example, there might be a great deal for using British Airways Avio's or for using Air France flying blue miles or choice points, wind-down points, whatever, if you have transferable points, you probably have a way to get those miles, those hotel points that you need for a particular booking. Even if you have never even thought about using those points before, because you have transferable points, you probably have the points you need, or there's a good chance of it. You also have some protection against devaluations. It's not infrequent to hear about this. airline program, this hotel program has raised award prices. And at the same time, every now and then, a program, you know, shuffles up their award charts and has some better than ever

options for booking awards, right? And by having transferable points, you know, when those kind of things happen, you could just say, all right, well, I'm not going to transfer my points to, you know, Emirates anymore because of their new award chart. But I am going to start transferring to, you know, whatever this other program is, because I'm finding awards there that are much cheaper. Absolutely. So it's useful to have these transferable points for those reasons. So in a multiplayer household, there are some additional advantages that are worth talking about here. So first of all, if you're in a multiplayer household where you've got more than one person

playing the game together, you have the chance to earn a lot more points. If there's a great new card offer, both players or multiple players can apply for the same card offer and get double or triple or however many times the rewards for the number of people that you have kind of playing the game.

And so it can be pretty easy to really amp up your points balances and particularly in one type of currency, maybe in the same type of currency. And so then if you combine forces between those later on, it's all the more valuable. You can avoid paying multiple fees in some cases. There are situations with some banks where maybe one of you has a card with an annual fee for the purpose of transferring to airline and hotel partners, but the other doesn't

necessarily need to pay an annual fee. And we'll talk more about that as we get into examples later on. When you're in a multiplayer household, you have the opportunity to refer each other for new cards and potentially earn even more points that way. So there are a lot of advantages to being in a multiplayer household. Absolutely, absolutely. And so when you're in this multiplayer household or multiplayer situation anyway,

it doesn't have to be the same household, but point shearing becomes essential, point sharing across people. Nick already mentioned you might be able to avoid paying multiple annual fees because one person has sort of the key card that unlocks the best transfers, but that's only helpful if the other players can move their points to that person and then transfer to those programs. In other situations, you might be able to individually transfer your points to loyalty programs, but it's very awkward if you can't

transfer them to the same person's loyalty program. So, for example, if my wife and I each have points in different accounts, each have the ability to transfer. But we want to book from my Flying Blue account. If my wife can't transfer her points to my Flying Blue account, only to her own, we're kind of stuck. So, you know, we might not have enough points individually to each, for either one of us to book the whole award. We might think about booking our flights separately, but then if something goes wrong, you know, our tickets aren't tied together. And so that's awkward. With hotels, it can be even worse because you might not then individually have enough points for like a fifth night free or fourth night free type of thing. In fact, some hotels don't even,

like some really popular hotels won't even let you book less than like three nights at a time during popular times. They sometimes have rules like that. So there's all kinds of reasons why it's so helpful to be able to combine points into one account. And so we want to in this show recognize the programs that make that the easiest to do. Yeah. Unfortunately, though, transferable point sharing is becoming a little bit less common than it once was. We've seen some new limitations put into place. Like, for instance, City recently discontinued their point sharing altogether. So it used to be possible to transfer up to, I guess, 100,000 points a year to another city cardholder. And it could be, could have been anybody. But they discontinued that. So you can't

send points to somebody else at all anymore. Wells Fargo is going to be following in their footsteps, discontinuing point sharing as of September 25th, 2026. So those are two issuers where it is or soon will no longer be possible to transfer points to another person at all. So you, Those will be poor currencies for a multiplayer household, I guess, right? It sure will. All right. We'll be right back after this with the best transferable points for multiplayer households. Hey, Nick, I just got a text from my cousin.

He's asking me about a credit card offer he just got in his email and asking if it's any good. Yeah, well, your cousin ought to go to frequentmiler.com and click the link at the top of the page for our best offers page. That's the best way for your cousin to know whether or not they're getting a good offer. because we're committed to publishing the best publicly available offers. So if you see an offer for a credit card anywhere on the internet, you should always compare and make sure you're getting the best possible offer. And we're back with the best transferable points for multiplayer households. Let's look at all of the transferable points programs,

and we're going to rank them from the worst to the best in terms of point sharing across people. So the obvious worst is the last one that I mentioned. it's a tie between city and Wells Fargo because they both have discontinued point sharing. So you're no longer able to do that. So they're obviously the worst choice for a multiplayer household. Easy winner there. Yeah. Although very, very close to worst is built.

Built doesn't allow point sharing at all. But they do have a little piece of technology that lets you play multiplayer in a way. a cardholder can add an authorized user and can set up that authorized user to earn points in their own account. So there's sort of a multiplayer-ish situation going on there. Just to be real specific with an example, I could ask my wife to sign up for the obsidian card, which can earn 3x at restaurants or grocery stores, and she could add me as an authorized user for that. and set it up so that the points earned from that card, from my authorized user card, go to my built account instead of hers, and that way we're earning points in my build account

where we want them. Interestingly, you also have the option to choose which account earns the built cash, and it doesn't have to be the same. So you can send one to one account, one to the other account as you see fit, and the authorized user gets their own points boosts. they do need to still earn their own built cash in order to enable points boosts, but that's worth knowing, I think. So that's still, I mean, while that's interesting,

it's pretty close to the worst here, because you can't actually combine your points. Exactly. A method of earning points for the player two or player one. So a little bit better than any of those so far is American Express. MX doesn't allow point sharing, but you can transfer to an authorized user, loyalty account after that authorized user or employee card has been active for at least 90 days.

So you want to plan in advance here. What we've done in our household is we both have Blue Business Plus cards in our own name and we just have the other person added as an employee card on our Blue Business Plus accounts. The reason for that is the Blue Business Plus has no annual fee. So we never intend to get rid of that card. It's a really easy one to keep. And once you get past the 90 day mark, then it's easy to transfer to the authorized user's loyalty account. So while that's not quite as good as being able to directly kind of share the membership rewards points, it effectively gets us the result we want for the most part. Yeah, exactly. And I do the same thing. My P2 and P3 both have me as authorized users.

And so whenever we want to move, you know, transfer points out of American Express membership rewards to a loyalty program, they usually end up in my account, because that's where we want them, in my loyalty account, not my American Express account. All right, even better, and I'd say much better than American Express, is Chase, Chase Ultimate Rewards Points. Chase allows point sharing with a person in your household or to a business co-owner. And so you can, once you have set up a connection, you can move points for free, still as ultimate rewards points, to another household member or business co-owner. Even if you want to move points between more than one person in a household, it can be done indirectly by daisy chaining, basically. So, like, for example, if I wanted

to transfer points to my P2, I could, and then my P2 could transfer points to my P3, and then P3 could transfer points to me. Just, for example, I could go around like that. But Chase also allows doing like what American Express does, which is another way of moving points is to transfer to an authorized user's loyalty account instead of your own loyalty account. Yeah, and I'll agree with you that Chase can be much better, but I'll disagree that it's unequivocally much better because some people, and my wife is included in these some people, have had trouble moving their ultimate rewards points around. I mean, we've been in this hobby for more than a decade at this point. And for years, it was really easy. We had it all set up exactly as Greg described for me to be

able to move points to her, for her to be able to move points to me, and between our own cards and own accounts, et cetera. But at some point, that kind of connection just seemed to have broken in her account. And she's not the only one of her reports from readers of this. It has something to do with the mobile number, not showing up properly in her account profile. And so when Chase wants to do a two-factor authentication in order to move points, it fails each time. And she's called and spoken to a rap to try and get that fixed. And they said it was and it hasn't worked. And so I think a lot of people have had success calling and getting their profile cell phone number updated in order to enable that two-factor authentication. But for us, anyway, it's been well over a year, year and a half at this point,

that she hasn't even been able to easily move points between her own Chase accounts online. She can do it by calling. She can call and do it over the phone and it's really easy and it only takes a few minutes. But then I do have to kind of hassle her to make the phone call instead of just being able to easily make a few clicks online. So if you have it set up, great. And once you do have it set up, it's really easy to do yourself online. But there are some folks who've run into issues there. And the solution should be to get that mobile number updated in your account profile details.

So good luck with that if you're running into an issue with Chase. All right. Now, even better than Chase, we've got a Rove, which I'm going to say that their option is great, but still not best. Roev lets you share your points with any other Rove member, and they stay as transferable points. You can send miles to other users three times per year, and each person can receive up to three times per year, a maximum of 200,000. points can be transferred per transaction, and you have to transfer at least 2,000 points at any given time. So there's definitely some limitations there, but at the same time, they're not, you know, huge limitations. So I love that you could literally move them to anyone and they stay transferable.

Yeah, this is awesome. And I really need to get some family members who don't care about miles and points in the habit of booking via Roe so that then if they want, they could transfer me the Roe miles later on because I have, I have some family members that travel sometimes and they don't collect the miles and points at all. And I think this would be a really easy way for them to make some bookings. And then we can get that. Look at the points moved over. It would be terrific. But anyway, I love that they allow for this. I think this is super useful if you're in a two-player household and you both travel a bunch like for business and you're separate and you're able to book your own things and then you can combine the row of miles afterwards.

That's great. Great, but not quite the best. Close, but not quite the best. So what is the best then? Yeah, Capital One is the winner here. Capital One lets you move your points to any other card holder that has a Capital One miles earning card. So cards like the venture cards, venture business cards, the old Spark Miles cards.

All of those have, you know, capital one, like capital M miles. So they're really points that are transferable. And so as long as you have a card that has that type of currency, you can accept points from any other person. And I don't think there's any limits and how often it can be done, how many points can be transferred. No, and we've asked because we do this in my own household quite often. We earn a lot of our points on my wife's cards and then move them over to my capital, one account. And we've always been told that there's no limit on it. Now I say there's no limit. I don't know. You go out there and you spend millions of dollars and try to move your millions of

points. I don't know. Maybe you'll run into an issue. But we've had no problem moving. She just moved 200,000, almost 300,000 miles the other day to my capital one account. So it was easy, just a two minute phone call. And we've done that kind of transfer, 100, 200,000, more than one time in a year without any issue. So, so I can say that it's been really easy to do that. And that's awesome. It's great. And it's great that you could do that with other people. So, you know, if I had a family member who wanted to take a trip and didn't have enough miles, I could easily just transfer some capital one miles to them. I think that's a terrific feature to have. I can understand maybe why some programs have limited this. And maybe, maybe I should ask you about that.

But I'm glad that Capital One has not followed suit thus far. And I hope that they keep it easy and user-friendly like this for a long time to come. But now, we talked about all these different things. And I do kind of want to ask, before we even get into the last points here, why is this easier with some currencies and others? Why would any of these currencies care who you transfer your points to? Yeah, I mean, I wish they didn't. But my understanding or expectation is that the reason that number of banks have shut down the ability to freely transfer points to other people has to do with primarily with mileage brokers that are booking up all of the available award flights and things and buying points from different people. And the easier it is to move your points, easier it is for mileage brokers to buy them from different.

different people. And so, I mean, that's a nice feature, I guess, for people who have points and don't know any way to use them and just want to cash out. But it's really bad for our hobby, in my opinion. It means that there's a real scarcity of available awards for one thing. And it causes banks and loyalty programs to shut down otherwise very consumer-friendly features like point sharing. And so it's pretty discouraging. And also for that reason, I don't know, I'd be surprised if Capital One can keep doing this indefinitely. I sure hope that they have some way of doing this without being, you know, harmed by mileage brokers and other kinds of situations like that that are happening. But I don't know. It would not surprise me if they start limiting it.

Yeah, I hope they don't. I think it's just, like you said, it's very consumer friendly that obviously, you know, within a, particularly within a single household, you would expect to be able to combine your resources, whatever they may be, whether it's, you know, the money that you have in the bank, or the points that you're earning in a loyalty program or with your credit cards. And so I think it's important to be able to have that. It's customer friendly and intuitive to have the ability to share. But not everybody makes it that easy. So I appreciate that Capital One does for now.

So Capital One, by far the best transferable currency for sharing points within a household. So is it the best transferable currency? Is it the only one I should be earning? No, definitely not. And that's a really great point. And something we really need to stress that shareability is just one factor that we care about with transferable points. So, for example, Bill, which is one of the worst for sharing, is probably the single best as far as having the best transfer partners and the best transfer bonuses. So, you know, if you were to look at just which points are most valuable to have in general, I'd say, Bill.

I'd say built, but, you know, which are most shareable. Built down at the bottom, Capital One is best. Of course, there's other factors, too. Like, how easy is it to earn the points? And that's where other programs like American Express might do better or whatever. So, you know, you can't just look at this one factor. However, if you're, again, if you're playing this game in a multiplayer situation, this is a very important factor.

and it's really, really unfortunate that three of the programs we've discussed here, City, Wells Fargo, and Built have really no way to share points across people. 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.

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