American Express is currently running a 40% transfer bonus when you transfer American Express Membership Rewards points to British Airways avios. This is one of the biggest transfer bonuses to British Airways that I can remember, so if you are looking to transfer, now is the time.
Normally short-haul flights are 4,500 Avios each way thanks to their distance based awards, but with this transfer bonus it brings the price down to only 3,200 points each way.
That means if you’re looking to fly short-haul flights like Miami to Turks & Caicos, New York to Montreal, Phoenix to Los Angeles etc, these become reachable with only 3,215 American Express Membership Rewards transferred to British Airways for a one-way award ticket. But you have to transfer the points using the 40% transfer bonus before you can book at the lower rate.
And of course you can simply earn British Airways bonus points by signing up for the British Airways Visa Signature® Card which gives you 50,000 bonus Avios after you make $2,000 in purchases within the first 3 months of account opening.
Then you can take advantage of the 40% British Airways American Express Transfer Bonus.
Bottom Line
This promotion won’t last long, only until January 31, 2015. So there is still plenty of time to earn American Express Membership Rewards points with new or existing cards and be able to transfer to British Airways Avios points with a 40% bonus.
Points can only transfer in multiples of 1,000 and it’s impossible for anyone who applies for a card today to accrue points in time for this promotion.
Don’t know about all MR cards, but for Business Gold:
so there’s no way “there is still plenty of time to earn”.
@JEM: pending points can be “expedited” by customer service and made available immediately, even before the bill closing date, (I’so that’s definitely possible. By this point, it’s too tight though, you’re unlikely to see the points even pending before January 31… However for those people who alreadyhave an AMEX lying around, this could be good information.