(If you are planning on transferring Choice Privileges Points to Southwest Airlines, you need to read this post.)
Choice Points Post – How to Transfer to American, Alaska, Delta, United, US Airways, and Southwest
This is a follow-up post to my previous post Why did I Buy 144,000 Choice Privileges Points for $550? which is a follow-up post to Today Only! Buy SWA Points for 1.3 cpm and American / Alaska / United / US Airways / Delta miles for 1.87 cpm.
I purchased the Choice Privileges Points on June 27 and have been waiting patiently for the points to show up in my Choice Privileges account. After refreshing my Award Wallet balances (read What is Award Wallet?), I was glad to see that the points had finally posted, all 144,000 of them. BTW, I did not receive an email from the US Travel Association or Choice Hotels alerting me of the point transfer.
After logging into my account, here is the message I received.
From here, I was able to see the 144,000 Choice Privileges point deposits by clicking My Points – Stay Activity and clicking the yellow GO button.
This screen shows when the Choice Privileges Points were deposited (today – July 11).
Now for the exciting part. To redeem your Choice Privileges Points for airline miles, click Redeem Points and click View Options.
Here are all the airline transfer partners, I have crossed off the bad airlines.
This is what the transfer screen looks like for most of the airlines.
From here, just enter your frequent flyer mile number (or anyone else’s frequent flyer mile number) and click the submit button.
Everything was going well until I tried to do a Southwest Airlines transfer. I couldn’t figure out the problem. I logged into my Southwest Airlines account, copied the account number, and pasted it into the box. ERROR MESSAGE!
After a quick call to Choice’s Customer Service Number (1-877-424-6423), the problem was resolved. To save you time calling, click View/Edit Profile, and find Southwest Airlines.
The secret here is to enter ‘0000’ before your Southwest Airlines number. You do not need to do this for any other frequent flyer programs. At the bottom of the page, click the Submit button. You may want to log out and log back into your Choice Privileges account.
Now you can transfer Choice Privileges Points to Southwest Airlines. The Southwest Airlines number you entered above should automatically be entered on the below screen.
At this point, I checked my account activity to make sure all the transfers were successful.
At this point, I wanted to transfer all of my Choice Privileges Points to Southwest, so I selected 18 as a quantity. This will convert 108,000 Choice Privileges Points into 32,400 Southwest Airline miles.
Same process as before, except quantity is 18 instead of 1.
My account had 114,000 Choice Privileges Points, now it has 0.
Here is all my account activity.
Every transfer resulted in an email from Choice Hotels, here is a copy of my big transaction.
If you have any questions, please leave a comment below.
So you got 32,400 Rapid Rewards points? Does that get you far with SWA?
32,400 SWA Points x 1.67 cents per point = $541 in Southwest Flights. I usually fly short flights from Orange County SNA, so this will be good for a few trips. I was able to get a few SNA-SFO flights for around 4,200 SWA Points each way.
For how much did you purchase the Choice Points? Do you value SW points at 1.67 cents each?
I redeem SWA points for 1.67+ cpm, but I value them at less than that.
Missed that deal!:-( Will it appear again this year?
The Choice promotion was a one time deal from the US Travel Association. They have deals for 5 weeks every summer. I think we are in week 5 now and today is the last day.
Thanks you sooooooo much for this post! I was pulling my hair out. I really appreciate this!
Glad I could save some of your hair. I did transfers to all airlines so I could see how long it takes for each transfer. I will have an updated post when most/all transfers are completed.
So next year, when the deal becomes available again, would this be a good option if you are trying to earn points for the SWA companion pass?
Yes, I believe all transfers to SWA count, except the UR Point to SWA 1:1 transfer.
If you have a ton of UR Pts and want the SWA Companion Pass, you can move 5,000 UR Pts to 5,000 Hyatt Pts, which can be converted to 2,400 SWA points. http://www.hyatt.com/gp/en/awards/points_to_miles.jsp
If you have 1 SWA CC, you should have 52,000 SWA Pts. You need an extra 58,000 SWA Pts. There is a special transfer ratio where 50,000 Hyatt Pts = 25,000 SWA Pts. So 100,000 UR Pts = 100,000 Hyatt Pts = 50,000 SWA Pts. You are 8,000 SWA Pts short.
20,000 UR Pts = 20,000 Hyatt Pts = 12,000 SWA Pts. So with 1 SWA CC + 120,000 UR Pts = SWA Companion Pass. If you really take advantage of the SWA Companion Pass, you can do quite well.
Hi Grant thanks for the post, i like ur illustrations too! I was just looking at UR, it appears to me that UR to SWA is 1:1, can you double check on it? thx
You can transfer UR to SWA at 1:1, but they won’t count for the SWA companion Pass.
thx 4 for clarification!
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