This’ll be a short post, but as I’m trying to dig deeper on various credit cards, I happened to find the following statement, which to me, seems like a red flag.
American Express Premier Rewards Gold Terms and Conditions
If you’re looking for the URL, I found it here
I’m no expert, but it seems to me like this significantly devalues the benefits for the few U.S. Airline frequent flier transfer programs, which are listed below.
AMEX Airline Transfer Partners
So if I read the terms correctly, that means that for transferring American Express Membership Rewards to Delta Skymiles, Frontier, JetBlue, or Virgin America’s Elevate. You run the risk of incurring up to a $99 fee.
Update: As many folks have commented (thanks to everyone by the way), this has been in place for quite some time. Still something to remember when transferring Membership Rewards points though!
hasnt this been in place for years?
Yes, your right, but it’s a maximum of $99. When I’ve transferred my MR to Delta, I did pay a transfer fee. With SPG, I didn’t pay a fee. Not such a great card after all, is it?
Huh? The fee is minuscule.
SPG can take up to a week to transfer. MRs are (mostly) instant. You’d be a fool to chose to transfer SPG vs MRs because of such a minuscule fee as you run big risk of having hard-to-find award space disappear.
This is the same as it has been for a few years at least. 100,000 points transferred costs $60, which is a little bit of a bummer but shouldn’t be a deal-breaker. Transfers to the most valuable partners in many cases, ANA and BA, are free.
yes this has been in place for years.
Not a major deal in my book. Much better value can be has with ANA anyways.
Yeah this has been around forever. It affects the value of MR, but I still will transfer to US carriers if I need a top off.
Whoops — guess this shows how often I transfer MR points to US Airlines.
It’s been like that forever… The fee is minuscule though, not that I want other points programs to implement it, but it is. 50k points will cost you $30 to transfer. Only for US airlines though. For foreign ones (like BA) there’s no fee.
This is not new. Amex essentially purchases the miles from the frequent flyer program in order to “transfer” them to your account. Purchasing miles in the U.S. requires paying a tax. Programs like Ultimate Rewards eat this tax themselves, but Amex prefers to pass it on to their members.
Thanks for the clarification Scott!
Not sure why this is worthy of a post. Literally been going on for years.
$11.10 for 18000 Avios, instant transfer. Happy to pay.
As others have said, this is nothing new. Just something to think about I suppose
$0.0006 per point is something to be considered, but it’s not a lot, well under 6% of the value of the points being transferred.
There are ways to recoup this cost….some ethical…some non-ethical…. Errr…I mean, non- standard.
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