Thus far I’ve stayed away from booking any Skyteam airlines (Garuda, Delta, KLM, Air France and the like) for a mixture of reasons, with a contributing factor being my allegiances lie with star alliance and one world at this stage. Like you all, I like to make the most of my miles and the idea of flying at all with an airline where I’m not accruing anything worthwhile I find a bit of a turn-off.
Recently though I’ve come across some good fares in business class to Europe with the likes of Air France and Garuda, so I’ve started looking into skyteam loyalty programs.
Does anyone have any experience in converting miles earned via Skyteam airlines to any star alliance or oneworld loyalty programs? Is anyone aware of any skyteam airlines who have relationships with oneworld/star alliance airlines that will allow you to transfer points between the two?
I don’t want to keep my miles/points with Garuda or KLM or whoever, just because I won’t use them. They’re better to me if I can add them to say my QFF or Krisflyer accounts, even if the transfer rates skim a bit off the top.
I don’t think there are any straight forward ways to convert FF points/miles between programs. These are like different ‘currencies’ with not many available ‘money changers’.
The only one possible that comes into mind is between Velocity FF and Krisflyer FF.
It also make sense to be restrictive because FF programs are predominantly airline loyalty programs. Key word loyalty.
The best way around your problem is to credit your revenue flights with Garuda and AF to their respective partner airlines. Hopefully, there would be 1 or 2 non Skyteam partners in the mix.
I think it might be worth some research into Delta Sky Miles which is part of Sky Team. Then explore going from Delta to Starwood Preferred Guest (SPG). From Starwood Preferred Guest I think you can get to lots of airlines.
Not sure if there is anything on Point Hacks about this (if there isn’t maybe the mods could write something) but from my casual reading from time to time I think SPG is often used as an intermediary to move points around like you have asked.