Last chance to transfer Amex points to Virgin / BA / Carlson for a bonus – and what I did

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• Sonia says:

  29 Sep29 September 14:33

  As I didn’t get the email I just called to check if I would get the bonus but was told no! She said once I’d had my card for a year I’d start getting them. Boooo.

• GlennM says:

  29 Sep29 September 14:36

  For info, I didn’t receive an email, but did transfer points earlier in the month, they posted straight away, the bonus points posted at the end of last week. Circa. 50000 from MR to BA Avios. So this doesn’t seem to have been targeted, I have Gold Amex and received 20%.

• Sonia says:

  29 Sep29 September 15:28

  I just tried again via secure messaging and got an immediate YES! Just gotta get the right person in customer services I guess.

  • M says:

    29 Sep29 September 15:44

    Talking about great CS. They’ve replied within an hour via secure message on a Sunday morning.
    “As you are a valued Cardmember, I have discussed this concern with my Manager and managed to get approval to manually enrol your account into this offer.”
    Now have to decide if to transfer MR to CC as I don’t have any plans of using them.

    • David L says:

      30 Sep30 September 17:30

      Exactly the same happened for me – great outcome for all.

• Michelle says:

  29 Sep29 September 19:15

  Hi

  I’m fairly new to all of this and have found myself unable to make a decision as to what to do with my MR points as the 20% bonus deadline looms!

  I have 52,000 MR points, 26,000 BAEC points and about 7, 000 Avios and virgin miles each. I have an AMEX gold card which I plan to cancel as soon as my bonus points clear as my year is nearly up and have been using my diamond club AMEX again since hearing I get double points from it! Common sense tells me I ought to transfer it all to BAEC, however with recent posts discussing better availability and lower taxes with virgin, I can’t quite decide which to plump for!

  I have no travel plans and can’t travel until October 2014 but we were considering a trip for two big kids to Orlando one way and then an internal flight somewhere else in the US before flying home from there.

  We’ve moved house today and our brains are fried so any help would be especially appreciated! Thank you

  • CV says:

    29 Sep29 September 20:14

    I have a similar dilemma, splitting points between different schemes dilutes the ability to spend on rewards so it does really depend on what your travel plans are and whether thats going to be in economy or Biz (or BA First).

    With the recent, and perhaps regular, Virgin redemption sales in economy along with tesco clubcard conversion bonus i have a small stack of Virgin points now – enough to redeem during a future redemption sale (assuming it happens again). But also look at the other airlines which you can redeem virgin miles with, the list is on flying club website. In the case of Malaysian airlines i can redeem for the same seat with Virgin as i could with avios and one world but use less miles and pay less taxes, which is bizarre, but i am cautious about this changing in the near future.

    Orlando is a big Virgin destination, Virgin even fly to Orlando from regional airlines too (Glasgow and Manchester) as they can fill them. In terms of an internal flight you will soon be able to use miles with Delta.

    So the question is can you get enough redemption seats in the class you want on the airline of your choice (Virgin or BA), i’d try a few dummy bookings for your family to see what reward availability is like and on what flights (recent dummy bookings on Virgin have been on the daytime return flights from US rather than the evening overnight flight which is preferred).

    After saying all that, wait and see what BA come up with – Raffles advises that the Avios scheme is due a bit of a reshuffle, probably in the next month or two and i am hoping there will be an improvement in the scheme in response to Virgin’s improvements.

  • Sideysid says:

    29 Sep29 September 20:54

    I would weigh up current bonuses/Virgin again vs Avios booking Aer Lingus through BA to the USA, as taxes are much lower and make economy a valid option.

• naf says:

  30 Sep30 September 13:27

  I didn’t receive the email offer on my Plat card,i emailed them yesterday asking to be added on, just got a reply that they r sorry to have left me out so they added 5000 MR points to my account. being 25% on my already 40k MR.

• Mark says:

  2 Oct2 October 12:52

  I emailed them on Monday to be put on the eligible list but they only managed to reply to me yesterday when the deal had expired. The kind lady just asked me to make my transfer to my BAEC account and she will just manually add 20% to my MR account. All done and dusted in 5 mins, the 20% bonus is already in my account. If anyone feels is yet to do the transfer but feels too late then it may not be, worth a go.

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