Before I disappoint all of you, Etihad for some reason only (as far as I know) partners with Membership Rewards Canada. They were there earlier in the year, but the transfer option hasn’t been present due to some technical difficulties, as I’ve been told. Finally, we have something that the US don’t.

It is a transfer ratio of 1000:750, which is not that great combined with the fact that Etihad Miles aren’t worth that much. But at the least, you can get cash from the points as Etihad partners with PointsPay, a service where you convert your points into cash. I haven’t looked at it in much detail, but it looks like you can get around 50 dollars in a VISA (or some other form of money) when you convert 10000 AMEX -> 75000 Etihad -> Cash. Quite a horrible redemption.

Update: Via the RewardsCanada website, “with Etihad Guest it costs 16,069 Guest Miles to load your PointsPay account with US$100. Those same 16,069 Miles can get you an AED500 Etihad Holidays Voucher that is worth roughly US$136.” I would have to be broke before I do that.

Also, the Etihad Guest website is always down. A little inconvenient. There are some good gems, though, which I will talk about when I get to a series about foreign mileage currencies. You can also top up your account using SPG which transfer at 1 -> 1.25 although I wouldn’t think that would be a very good use of SPG points, although it would be a lot better than the 807,000 SPG points spent in getting two business class tickets. Yep, I didn’t misplace the commas.

Look for some interesting posts coming up (yep, that’s always what I say, but it’s true!)

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