Questions and Answers

Hi Lucky,
I am an Emirates Gold Member and received a promotion mail from Emirates to join their new Family Skywards Miles program. By doing so, one could pool in the Skywards points of family members. I joined the program along with my partner on 1 June.
At that time, I had about 9,000 points each in my personal account and 9,000 in the Family account. I needed to upgrade a ticket which would have used 13,000 points. So I called Emirates and told them to take the first 9,000 from my personal account and the balance 4,500 from the new family account.
I was shocked to learn that one could not combine the points for the award. So I had to use the personal account points and buy the remaining 4,000 (costing $120). I explained that both accounts (personal and family) belonged to me so I should be allowed to use aggregate points from both accounts. However, Emirates was adamant and said I could not do so.
Subsequently, I realised that I also have crossover points from SPG – all the points for my Starwood hotel stays keep going into the personal account. I had opted for 100% allocation of my Skywards miles to the family account. While the SPG crossover points are nominal, I expect them to add up in the coming months as I am a frequent SPG guest.
Further, if I transfer any points from Amex Membership Rewards, they will end up in my personal account and not the family account.
So I will be left with residual balances in my personal account and all the new flight points going to the family account.
Clearly, this is an unsatisfactory situation. While launching this so-called Family Program, Emirates could have thought about these implications. Could you please escalate this issue with Emirates and suggest two possible solutions?
a. Allow members to use points from personal + family accounts while making bookings, or,
b. Allow free transfer of points from personal to family.
I am sure several of your readers will be in this same situation. I would appreciate if you could post this on your blog too.
I have been following your blog for the past three years and have found it very useful.
Thank you,
Dr Rajiv

That’s a weird way to run a family pooling program but Emirates Skywards itself has never been that great of a program to begin with.