Anyone have problems transferring Capital One points to their BA Club account?

I would be very surprised if this is even possible.

First of all, British Airways Executive Club is a listed partner for point transfers for Capital One. It should be working. I have transferred successfully, but that was about 6 months ago. Have you tried contacting Capital One customer service? Usually their transfers are immediate and seamless.

Are both accounts in the exact same name? No difference with initials, missing middle name, a hyphenated name?

Good to hear that at least someone has been able to do this!

Both names appear to be the same with the only exception that, with the BA account, my middle names (I have two) are in all lower case letters whereas with Cap One my full name is in upper case. What little I know about software makes me doubt that this is the issue although I am willing to concede anything at this point. More likely, perhaps is that there are fields in the softwares (both Cap One and BA) for first name, middle name, and last name and perhaps one has my name as with both middle names in the middle name field and the other has one of my middle names in the surname field.

I have tried calling Cap One for help but they are useless. Today I will try to call BA (again!) and see if I can make any progress.

Thanks for your help!

Couple things...

First, a caveat: I play with points a fair bit, but I stay far, far away from anything to do with Capital One for reasons that are beyond the scope of this discussion, so I have no direct experience with Cap One in any way. That said...

Second: The mechanisms used to transfer points to/from/between various airline/bank programs that use Avios have always been fragile at best, and are known to be extremely intolerant of any deviations from the assumptions that their developers made when writing core code long ago. Well-known examples include requiring a perfect match between every single character in every field of any database they look at when going from one system to another (NOT just your name, but also email, phone numbers, postal address - everything).

Keep in mind: core parts of the software were written decades ago, and were never intended to inter-operate with multiple banks and other airlines. More recently, software has been written by different developers somewhere else, who have little insight into the original code, and things are now supposed to connect to systems that never existed when the original software was dreamed up for a different purpose. Each development team makes their own set of assumptions about the details which populate database fields, and it's all supposed to work seamlessly now. It doesn't always. It's a miracle that it works at all sometimes.

This Franken-ware system has created many a headache for customers attempting to do simple things that are expected to work. Staff at the airlines and banks are typically no help whatsoever, and users are left twisting in the wind, trying to read tea-leaves and make wild guesses into details that are hidden from them. Many people give up after investing way too many hours trying to fix things. Though folks here are well-intentioned, the degree of effort required and knowledge of obscure minutiae required to fix this might exceed what you are likely to find here. Better sources for a fix might be uncovered with some time scouring Flyertalk or a reddit search.

Third: I can tell you from personal experience that airline IT infrastructure is often a cruel joke, falling so far below what one would expect for any medium-sized business, and this particular system (Avios transfer and related bits) seems to be among the least polished and functional. I've been able to make some things work (after way too much futzing) but other things that are just supposed to work simply don't, despite all my efforts to make them. So, keep your expectations in check, and be patient, persistent and thorough.

Finally: It seems (from what I've read elsewhere) that SOME Avios functions at SOME airlines (around tasks such as transferring, combining and sharing points) were recently shut down completely, as the IT staff discovered there were exploits that were being regularly exploited, to steal points from innocent account holders. To stop the bleeding, they quietly turned off some options, temporarily (they claim) until they can get a better grip on things and patch the systems so they're not getting pillaged. This happened recently (I think) maybe a few weeks ago. I saw evidence of this (at least I think that's why I saw it) when I attempted to move some points, I get messages about the function not being currently available and to try again later - it's been this way for at least a couple weeks (this is not at BA, this is at another airline that uses Avios). There's no timeframe for a fix that I've seen, just "sorry, try later" which could mean hours or months. It's not a great customer experience.

In your case, my advice would be to do everything you can to ensure that every single detail in your accounts (across all systems involved) all match perfectly, 100% character-for-character. Then give it some time.

Aren't Loyalty Points fun?

Hopefully some of this is useful. Good luck.

I would be very surprised if this is even possible...

Oh, it should be.

I'll add this: I don't do Capital One, but I have definitely transferred points successfully from another major bank program to my BA loyalty account several times in the past year. So what the OP is suggesting is by no means unusual or outlandish. It's a well-known and popular "feature" of multiple loyalty points programs.

I'll admit it did take me a while to get everything matched up - the systems are famously intolerant of ANY mismatched details (see my post above) - all my attempted transfers failed before I got all the bits to match up perfectly...but once all the stars aligned it has worked smoothly for me each time I've done it (and quickly, too). So it should be possible. Just...the devil's in the details (I think).

David in Seattle,

How did you go about getting everything to match up? I spoke with customer service at BA Exec Club and they confirmed my information and even verified that my two middle names were in the field for middle name. (Of course, spelling was correct.)

Now I am on the phone with Cap One and have gotten transferred to a digital support person, they are consulting with their supervisor. They too have confirmed that my two middle names are in the field for middle name.

May I ask how did you go about comparing the two systems and confirming that there were no discrepancies? I can look at the interface with my eyes, but you and I both know that some things, like spaces, etc, don't always show in the interface and you have to look at the data in the system.

Thanks for all of your information!

Helen,

I only went into the various user-facing screens for each system I was dealing with (BA and a couple other airlines, not Cap One). In all cases, I merely went to my "user profile" or equivalent page, and edited the fields there, ensuring that everything was the same (typically I'll do a copy-paste from an open text file, that way just in case there's some invisible difference, eg a conventional "space" character versus something obscure like an "em-space" character), also to be sure any capitalization or punctuation characters are consistent.

Having two middle names could be the rub. Sure, it's not that far outside the norm, but it's not plain vanilla standard either.

How are those expressed (in text)? Is there a space character between them or are they concatenated ('Mary Jane' versus 'MaryJane')? Some database field might stop parsing characters after it encounters a "space" character but the other system may be smart enough to recognize the whole text string (letters-space-leters)...remember, you are dealing with (at least) two different companies, so (at least) two different development teams, possible multiple programming languages, etc. etc. so one may interpret "Mary Jane" as "Mary Jane" and the other might only see "Mary" and move on. It's impossible for us to know, but software coding is like that - fraught with tiny assumptions that can make things go sideways. I would just suggest that any complication may introduce surprises.

To keep things simple, I wonder if just picking one middle name might reduce opportunities for software bugs.

Just shooting in the dark here, it may have nothing to do with your middle names.

But to answer your question directly: all I did was go through all the user-facing data fields I could find and re-enter each character carefully. I will also share that one time I had to wait about a week or so for the change I made in one field to "stick" and show up correctly after logging out and returning to log back in. I had made the change, came back, and my old info was still showing (in this case, my email) - but there were two different places on the airline website that displayed my email address after logging in. After i updated my email, that appears updated in one place, but in another place it still showed my previous email - I surmise that it took a while for the change I made in place to propagate through their systems and show up correctly in the other place. That's really annoying when you are trying to troubleshoot any system, but that's how it went with that airline. Point being: do what you can to make things match up, but be patient and give it time for those changes to make their way through all their related systems. In this case it took somewhere between an hour and a week, I don't know how long - initially it did not seem to "stick" but I came back a week later and it had magically updated (to my surprise).

Crazy stuff. I do not miss finding and fixing bugs in software. Most companies cut-corners to save money and software testing (to find things exactly like this) is one of their favorite places to cut.

Hope some of that helps. Good luck.

Helen - you ask about a way to compare the two systems... I get very nervous with technology glitches and questions regarding my online accounts. I have a laptop and a desktop computer. I have, on numerous occasions, opened 2 different web pages or web sites to compare. If you have secure/safe access to open your accounts on 2 devices... tablet & laptop or tablet and desk computer etc... you might try that to compare your Capital One account information with your BA Executive Club profile information