Quick hit: Ultimate Rewards points transfers are available instantly when you add an authorized user

This isn’t exactly news, but since I encountered it for the first time the other day, I wanted to pass it along to anyone else who might find themselves in the same situation I was in.

Expiring points are a constant nuisance if you have a lot of loyalty accounts

In general there’s no rhyme or reason to points expiration policies, with some being based on periods of inactivity, some being based on calendar years, some on program years, and some points coded to expire a fixed number of months or years after being earned. There are services that promise to track your expiring points, AwardWallet being the most prominent because they offer an affiliate program, but at the end of the day you’re responsible for your own points.

My biggest expiring-point mishap was with my HawaiianMiles account, where I had earned a sizable balance during a short-lived period when a mainland grocery store was both selling high-denomination prepaid Visa debit cards and participating in HawaiianMiles in-store mileage earning. After the grocery store withdrew from the program and stopped selling high-denomination cards, I lost interest and eventually forfeited almost 25,000 HawaiianMiles simply through years of inattention.

Ultimate Rewards transfers reset inactivity periods

If you see an expiration coming a long way off, there are plenty of ways to trigger activity. Buying a $1 Wall Street Journal subscription through a shopping portal would be enough to save your points, as long as you did it far enough in advance.

If you put it off, or don’t notice an upcoming expiration until it’s close at hand, you’ve got a different problem. Points purchases and transfers will usually reset expiration dates, but they’re preposterously expensive. For example, buying United Mileage Plus miles costs a minimum of $70, plus tax, for 2,000 miles, and transferring miles is almost as expensive.

Fortunately, transfers from Ultimate Rewards to their travel partners are free and instantaneous, starting at 1,000 points, and those transfers also reset expiration due to inactivity.

Ultimate Rewards transfers are available immediately after adding an authorized user

There’s a catch, however: you can only transfer Ultimate Rewards points to the travel partner loyalty account of an authorized user on your own flexible Ultimate Rewards-earning account, whether that’s a Sapphire Preferred, Sapphire Reserve, Ink Preferred, Ink Plus, or Ink Bold.

With my partner’s Mileage Plus balance expiring in just a few days, that got me worried. Would she be added as an eligible recipient in time for the transfer to go through before her balance expired?

Fortunately, after just a few clicks adding her as an authorized user on my Ink Plus account, she immediately appeared in the list of eligible transfer recipients, and I was able to instantly transfer 1,000 Ultimate Rewards points into her Mileage Plus account, pushing the expiration of her miles back another few years.

Conclusion

As I said up top, this won’t be news to heads of household that diligently manage their entire family’s travel finances. But if your family members maintain separate loyalty accounts and don’t carefully follow each other’s expiration dates, it’s good to know that Ultimate Rewards can serve as a quick and easy solution for some soon-to-expire miles and points.