How I turned my expiring Etihad Guest miles into cash with the Etihad Guest Reward Card

When Etihad Guest overhauled its programme this year (for the worst), it brought in a nasty rule regarding points expiry.

You now need to take a cash flight on Etihad or one of its airline partners every 18 months to stop your miles expiring.

(Technically, you need to credit a transaction to your account which earns BOTH miles and tier points, which means a flight.)

With some airlines – say, those with a short haul network or those in a major alliance – this could just about be acceptable (see Air France KLM’s Flying Blue for example). For a long haul carrier with few partners, it is not.

I had 13,564 Etihad Guest miles. I’ve forgotten how I ended up with such an odd number – I think I moved some Amex points across for a redemption pre-covid but it ended up being cheaper than expected.

An email this week reminded me that they were going to expire on 30th September unless I took a qualifying flight. That’s not happening.

This meant that (ironically) I was forced to do something which cost Etihad Guest real money. I turned the miles into cash via the Etihad Guest Reward Card.

Etihad Guest will give you real cash for your miles

Etihad Guest lets you cash out your miles – for real cash – via the Etihad Guest Reward Card.

This model is not new.  It is run by a company called Loylogic and has been around since 2012.  Whilst no other airline has ever signed up, it is an interesting product.

This is how it works.  You download the app called ‘Reward Card by Loylogic’ to your smartphone.

You can then download a virtual Etihad Guest Reward Card, which is a Visa product, to your phone wallet:

You can then transfer your Etihad Guest miles to the card to create a cash balance which can be spent via online shopping.

The process has got slicker over the years and your balance is now available for spending immediately – or, at least, mine was. The process may have been expedited because I had set one up in the past for purposes of doing HfP screenshots.

How many £ do I get per Etihad Guest mile?

More than you might think.

Here’s what I got for my balance of 13,564 miles, which included a small loading fee:

I ended up with £68.  This works out at 0.50p per mile.

You can convert as few as 1,000ish Etihad miles which gets you around £5.  However, because the loading fee is fixed, you get a slightly better deal the more you convert.

0.50p per Etihad Guest point is certainly not outstanding – I would look to get closer to 1p if redeeming for flights. However, you are cleanly exiting your miles.   A few years ago I used an Etihad Guest Reward Card to cash out a small number of miles from a Korean Air flight taken by my wife which were credited to Etihad Guest.

There is a quirk

There is an odd quirk to Reward Card.

When you load your card, you only have 48 hours to spend the money. You can request a 24 hour extension via the app if necessary.

After that, the balance is sent back to your Etihad Guest account. If you still want to spend it, you need to reload your Reward Card – and pay another small loading fee.

My best guess as to why this happens is to protect Etihad Guest. What it doesn’t want is people like me, facing miles expiry, moving their points to Reward Card and then forgetting about the money. Etihad Guest would simply be making the card operator rich.

How did I spend my balance?

The easiest way to spend your Reward Card balance cleanly is to add credit to your Amazon balance.

What’s good about this is that you can top up any sum, to any random penny amount. It will clear out 100% of the balance of your Reward Card in one transaction.

There are no security issues loading up an Amazon account for a Swiss-based pre-paid card, it seems! My transaction went through without a hitch.

My Reward Card balance is now zero:

Conclusion

The new expiry rules for Etihad Guest miles mean that keeping your balance alive is going to get difficult if you are UK based.

If you need to cash out, with expiry looming, I can confirm that Reward Card is a quick and easy way of doing it.

You can find out more about the Etihad Guest Reward Card on this page of the Etihad website.