Last week members of American Airlines’ AAdvantage program and US Airways’ Dividend Miles program received emails regarding the progress of the airlines’ merger in regards to the loyalty programs. For awhile we’d had word that the programs would merge during the second quarter of 2015 and it appears that not only are things on track for that, but that the merger will happen in April.

If you have miles in both programs and haven’t already done so, log into either your AAdvantage or Dividend Miles account and take note of the special banner inviting you to manually combine your accounts. It’s very simple and – speaking as an IT person myself – it will help out the IT folks if you take the reins and match up your accounts yourself. For this to work properly, your name must exactly match on both accounts and I suspect your address must match exactly as well. If the account data doesn’t match sufficiently, there will be instructions on how you can get the accounts to match.

Once the merger of loyalty programs is complete, your Dividend Miles will be transferred to your AAdvantage account on a 1-to-1 basis, per the recent communication from AA/US:

Moving to the AAdvantage program

Once we combine programs, we’ll begin transferring your Dividend Miles mileage balance, Preferred-qualifying activity and million mile balance into your AAdvantage account on a one-to-one ratio. We’ll determine your elite status level by looking at your combined elite-qualifying activity for 2014, and separately, your combined 2015 year-to-date elite-qualifying activity. It may take a few days to transfer everything, but we’ll email you once it’s completed.

As a member of the most rewarding airline loyalty program, you’ll continue earning miles when you fly on American, US Airways, oneworld^® and other participating airlines, as well as with over 1,000 partners. And, you’ll still be able to redeem miles for flights, upgrades on American and US Airways, car rentals, hotel stays and more.

If you want to book award travel using your Dividend Miles, do so quickly as a few days before the merger, the Dividend Miles award booking function will be disabled. This is your last chance to take advantage of some of the sweet spots of the US Airways award chart, like these top five ways described by Scott of MileValue.com.

Booking award travel

Dividend Miles award bookings and mileage upgrade requests will be disabled a few days before we combine programs to allow us to integrate your accounts. If you plan to redeem Dividend Miles for an upcoming trip, we encourage you to book now. Once our programs are combined, Dividend Miles will be converted into AAdvantage miles, and you’ll be able to redeem AAdvantage miles with American.

Change is coming and it’s good to be as prepared as we can be!