Donate miles, points for charitable use
During this gift-giving time of year, travelers have one special way to bring comfort and happiness to others: They can donate frequent-flier miles and hotel points for charitable use.
“The easiest way to donate miles is directly through a frequent-flier program,” said Randy Petersen, editor of InsideFlyer magazine and a frequent-flier guru.
“You can donate individual miles – 1,000 miles, 2,500 miles, 5,000 miles, as many as you wish. You don’t have to give a whole award,” which would amount to 25,000 miles for a round-trip domestic ticket.
Airlines and hotels often list the charities they support with these donated miles or points on their Web sites.
“There are other ways in which you can donate your miles to charities,” Petersen said. “A lot of people have their own charities of choice, but giving them miles is a little more difficult. You can’t donate individual miles, only individual awards. It requires more communication with the charity of choice. You end up being kind of a travel agent.
“Once the charity decides to accept the award, it will give you the name of the member of that organization that could use the award. You then have to go to the airport, arrange with the airline and transfer the award over to that person. It requires you to be pretty committed.”
To assist would-be contributors, a listing of airlines and hotel chains with charity programs is available at the Award Donation Center (miledonor.com), a site established by Petersen about three years ago. In addition to the programs, the site also lists individuals and groups seeking award donations.
Petersen said he gets a lot of questions from his readers about how to donate miles, thus the Web site, but “80 percent of the people I come in contact with have a secondary question: ‘Hey, is it tax deductible?’ The answer is no. There is no legal way for you to donate your miles or points to charity and take any type of tax deduction.”
He explained that individuals can’t take a deduction because the Internal Revenue Service says the person never really paid for the value of those miles.
“In essence,” Petersen said, “when somebody flies and earns miles, the person doesn’t pay any more or any less for the ticket, or for the purchases he or she make using a miles credit card. There’s no way to balance that with a tax deduction.”
Taxes aside, he noted another reason to donate miles: “In all the major reward programs in the U.S., including hotel programs, points still expire unless you have activity within your account. Activity includes anything, whether it’s earning miles or redeeming miles.
“So if you’ve got an account that’s dormant and miles may be expiring, if you donate a small amount of those miles, even if it’s a minimal amount – 1,000 miles – to a charity working with the airline, that activity … will extend your miles for another three years.”