American Express is like Citi ThankYou points and Chase Ultimate Rewards in being called a “convertible” currency. The reason for that is that one of the most valuable uses of those points is that you can transfer them to a variety of airline, hotel and other travel partners.
I’ve transferred American Express Membership Rewards points to Air Canada to get around the close-in booking fee that United charges.
American Express frequently runs transfer bonuses to its transfer partners, and there has been a 30% bonus from American Express to 2 different airlines for the past couple of weeks. This 30% transfer bonus is ending shortly – in the case of Etihad on June 15th and in the case of Virgin Atlantic on May 31st (Tuesday), so I thought I would post a reminder in case you were meaning to transfer and had it slip your mind.
American Express 30% transfer to Etihad
Through June 15th, you can get 30% more when transferring your American Express points to Etihad (H/T Frequent Miler). That means 1000 American Express points becomes 1300 Etihad Guest points. Etihad might seem like not a great transfer partner, but they have some interesting airline partners.
Richard (aka The Points Jock) talked through some of the interesting redemptions with Etihad during his talk at the FT4RL conference (SEE: #FT4RL: All-inclusive Africa trip for 7 nights for 135,090 points including flights from the USA).
2 options that are intriguing are: 1) You can still book American Airlines flights at the pre-devaluation prices (so the “old” off-peak to Europe, for example) – similar to how you can also do that with Alaska miles. 2) They partner with Royal Air Maroc, which means you can get a business class flight to Africa for only 44K Etihad miles (only 34K American Express points during this transfer)
American Express 30% transfer to Virgin Atlantic
You can also get a 30% bonus transferring American Express Membership Rewards to Virgin Atlantic (H/T: One Mile at a Time). This deal is through May 31st, which is this Tuesday. Virgin Atlantic DOES charge fuel surcharges on their flights, which to me makes them not really worth flying (except in certain rare cases), but they do have a few partners, including Delta, Hawaiian, Virgin America and Singapore Airlines
Note that this is NOT Virgin America, which has been in the news lately by virtue of being bought out by Alaska Airlines.
(SEE ALSO: Get Virgin America Elevate Gold status for 92% off!)
(SEE ALSO: Reminder: up to 2500 Virgin America Elevate points for signing up (convert to Alaska miles?))
If you’re planning on transferring American Express points to either Virgin Atlantic or Etihad, better do it soon!
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Dan Miller travels with his wife and 6 (SIX!) children. He loves to help families travel for free / cheap, especially larger families. If you are looking for help, drop him an email at 
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