AAdvantage, Radisson Rewards End Mileage-Earning Partnership

While it's generally better to earn airline miles when flying and hotel points when staying, many airlines have partnerships with hotel loyalty programs to allow travelers to earn on each other's program. For example, until this week, you could earn American Airlines AAdvantage miles for staying at Radisson hotels, and you were also able to transfer your Radisson Rewards points to your AAdvantage account.

However, overnight Wednesday, American Airlines removed all references to its now-former hotel partner Radisson Rewards from its website. That leaves seven hotel partners from which you can transfer points into miles and 18 hotel partner programs with which you can earn AAdvantage miles for your stay.

Formerly, you could earn 250-500 miles for each qualifying stay Radisson properties. At current TPG valuations, that's no more than $7 worth of points for a stay. So, this isn't a huge loss.

While Radisson Rewards still lists American Airlines as a partner on some pages, it's not listed as an option when it comes to transferring points to miles:

TPG reached out to American Airlines to confirm and allow for comment. The AA spokesperson confirmed the partnership has ended and noted that the airline is "always evaluating our partners and ways to provide more value to our AAdvantage members." Meanwhile, a spokesperson from Radisson Rewards confirmed this as well, adding that since March 1, the program has actually changed how you can earn miles with all remaining airline partners:

"All guests wanting to earn airline miles for their hotel stays need to become a Radisson Rewards member, where they can redeem points for airlines miles starting with only 2,000 Radisson Rewards points. This allows guests to also benefit from Radisson Rewards frequent generous points-earning promotions and earn more airlines miles than they were able to in the past."

In other words, you can no longer elect to earn airline miles directly from your stays; you must earn Radisson Rewards points first and then transfer them to your desired carrier.

Radisson Rewards still lists 37 different airline mileage programs for which you can transfer your hotel points to get airline miles. However, it's generally not a great idea to transfer Radisson Rewards points to airline miles, as the transfer ratio is an awful 10:1. Considering TPG's valuation of Radisson Rewards at 0.4 cents per point, you're going to need to get at least 4 cents per mile of value out of the airline miles for this to make sense on paper.

As noted above, your best bet for redeeming hotel points is generally to book award stays at participating properties. However, if you don't otherwise have any use for Radisson Rewards points, it could make sense to transfer points to miles anyways. You just can't do this with American AAdvantage any more.