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How long does it take to transfer Starwood Preferred Guest Starpoints to Asiana Club Miles?
An astounding 17 days.
Why would you want to transfer Starpoints to Asiana Miles?
Starpoints transfer 1:1 to Asiana miles. As with all 1:1 Starpoints transfers, you get 5,000 bonus miles for every 20,000 points transferred.
Asiana has an incredible award chart. Asiana miles can be used to book any Star Alliance airline, often for cheaper award prices than United, Lufthansa, Avianca, Singapore, and Air Canada miles.
- What is the transfer procedure?
- What are the Asiana sweet spots?
Transfer SPG Points to Asiana Miles
Sign into your SPG account and head to the airline-miles transfer page.
I made my 20,000 Starpoints transfer on September 15 at 11 AM ET. It was simple.
One screen in the process tells you how many miles you’ll receive. In this case 20,000 points becomes 25,000 miles.
After making the transfer, I got an immediate email to let me know the transfer was done and that my miles would appear in “up to four weeks.” My Starpoints were deducted immediately.
I checked my Award Wallet account every day to see if my miles had appeared. They didn’t arrive until 8 PM ET on October 2, 17 days after the transfer.
Seventeen days is entirely too long. My Starpoints to US Airways miles transfer took two days, which I thought was too long.
I had actually initiated this transfer because I wanted to use 17,500 Asiana miles to travel from the United States to Colombia. While I waited for the transfer, I ended up buying a cash ticket for various reasons I might discuss in a future post.
The 25,000 Asiana miles will not be orphaned though because Asiana has an incredible award chart.
Asiana Sweet Spots
From the Asiana Star Alliance chart:
- Mainland to Hawaii: 35k/55k roundtrip in economy/business for direct flights. Flights with a connection cost quite a bit more.
- USA to Southern South America 50k/70k/90k roundtrip in economy/business/first
- USA to Europe: 50k/80k/100k roundtrip in economy/business/first. I have investigated this one. These awards allow connections. Fuel surcharges are lower than I feared. Europe to USA in Lufthansa First Class is 50k miles + $311.
- Plenty of other deals far cheaper than other Star Alliance award charts:
I have not had a chance to investigate Asiana award bookings, but that will be the next step. I believe one way tickets can be booked for half the miles, and that fuel surcharges will apply when they would apply on cash tickets.
Just getting started in the world of points and miles? The Chase Sapphire Preferred is the best card for you to start with.
With a bonus of 60,000 points after $4,000 spend in the first 3 months, 5x points on travel booked through the Chase Travel Portal and 3x points on restaurants, streaming services, and online groceries (excluding Target, Walmart, and wholesale clubs), this card truly cannot be beat for getting started!
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Incorrect, Korean Airlines charges 25000 miles roundtrip between MainLand USA and Hawaii.
Their new award chart: https://www.koreanair.com/content/koreanair/global/en/skypass/redeem.html#cta-large=/global/en/skypass/redeem/skyteam-awards/skyteam-bonus-north-america.html
Also Korean Airlines is Chase UR partner and the transfer is 1:1 and you can call to put the tickets on hold. Enjoy.
Their old chart was arguably the best, as it was distance-based and allowed for up to 7 stopovers, I believe. I just redeemed 50,000 miles for a round-trip ticket to Europe that included more than $300 in surcharges. The website is terrible, and you have to book by phone (no fee).
I would be curious to know how the availability on partners’ search engines aligns with Asiana’s own space for those carriers. For example, I found ample space on United’s search engine for Award Saver flights, but they were not available when I tried to book them with Asiana. I had to go through the tedious process of effectively searching by phone, which is inefficient and not exhaustive.
very interested to find out of they have one-way awards. Also 80k for bus to europe looks like a sweet spot, but do they have access to the same amount of award space on partners as united? like on lufthansa or swiss?
I’m an Asiana Club Diamond (*gold) FF and I must say that their website is by far the worst I’ve used to book award tickets. It takes a while to even figure out which links will allow you to reserve an award; the site has a tendency to revert to Korean on subordinate screens, even when you have selected English on the us.flyasiana.com site; and, worst of all I had difficulty getting the site to allow me to choose an embarkation airport which is not actually served by Asiana, even though I was booking on a *A partner. I believe you are correct that fuel surcharges are required. Telephone customer service presents some communication challenges depending on the English proficiency of the agent you reach. Give it a try and perhaps you can share some tricks in a future post.
hold your horses, you should rephrase the tittle as last week post about the lowest miles to hawaii was with KE through skyteam of 25k which is same with BA Avios. so what miles can be lower than that ??
@choi With BA 25K miles are valid only from certain west coast cities (LAX, SFO etc).
With Korean Airways 25K miles are good from even JFK, ORD to Hawaii.
@Ankit Who has found low level delta award space to Hawaii? Anyone? Anyone? Nah didn’t think so.
I found low level DL award space to Hawaii….about 5 years ago.
Delta site is weird. But KLM shows wide availability of DL flights in FEB:
Delta site is weird. But KLM shows wide availability of DL flights in FEB:
http://i59.tinypic.com/14xzbly.jpg
http://i59.tinypic.com/vnmtyv.jpg
Was able to price an itin for 45,000 Miles round trip on Delta Lax-HNL in couple of minutes:
http://oi61.tinypic.com/33ky8nt.jpg
Wow! 70k biz class to SoAm and with up to 8 segments and 7 stopovers. Is that for realz? EZE-JFK(stop)-ORD(stop)-LAX(stop)-SFO(stop)-KOA(stop)-LAX-PTY(stop)-EZE…or something like that. I always hate burning starwood points, but that could be worth it.
Scott –
Had you booked the one way what would have been your plan for the orphaned 7500 miles?
I had two choices: transfer 17,500 Starpoints and have zero orphaned or transfer 20,000 Starpoints and at least temporarily orphan 7,500 Asiana miles. I figured spending the extra 2,500 Starpoints was worth having 7,500 Asiana miles because they have cheap awards to several regions I like–like South America–so I could transfer more Starpoints later to “un-orphan” the 7,500 miles.
[…] in my experience, SPG points took 17 days to show up in my Asiana account. I just made another transfer now; hopefully it shows up […]