Can you transfer Amex Membership Rewards to someone when you cancel? Er, ‘Yes’.

This article is closed to new comments. Feel free to ask your question in the HfP forums.

• Rolfe says:

  5 Mar5 March 06:50

  “It simply wasn’t worth, in my view, going down the road of pushing it with Amex, wrecking your reputation with them”. Often wondered whether doing something like this would have any effect on your reputation with someone like Amex – does anyone have any evidence/experience one way or the other?

  • Lewis Watson says:

    5 Mar5 March 13:22

    Wouldn’t think Amex care about your reputation as long you pay your bills they will be happy.

    • Mr Dee says:

      5 Mar5 March 16:20

      They do care an have internal scoring systems to determine profitable customers, those that file complaints are likely to be flagged on their internal system for future cards.

      • Andy says:

        5 Mar5 March 18:17

        Do just CC companies have an internal scoring system for file complaints etc or also Hotel, Airline companies?

      • RIcatti says:

        6 Mar6 March 20:56

        While AMEX is a business and aims to make a profit, scoring against people who exercised legislated rights can get amex in so much trouble — there is a full computerised record of what was done.

        There is cost but the company would be worse off from shutting down the negative feedback loop.

• Alastair Harries says:

  5 Mar5 March 07:00

  Not wanting to burst the bubble but … About 2-3 weeks ago I received an updated set of T&Cs and I checked the relevant section as I had read the old article about this. They have now removed the wording allowing you to transfer points on closure. I think the change happens from early May IIRC. I checked because I am about to close having referred my wife for her own card and got the 9000 + 22000 bonuses, so will close for six months and reopen etc. I can’t check the exact terms right now as we are both at Gatwick about to travel Virgin UC to St Lucia using virgin points partly derived from Amex transfers.

  I may well try to transfer my remaining MR points to her account before I close mine and before early May. I then need to decide what the long term strategy is. Does anyone know if she can transfer he MRpoints to my Virgin account in any way? As we live in York I tend to collect Virgin rather than Avios as BA doesn’t really work for us being so far from Heathrow, and prefer Virgin UC to Club World anyway. Or is there an effective way of sharing Avios between family members? Is there a family account of any sort?

  • Nate1309 says:

    5 Mar5 March 07:30

    You can link BAEC accounts into a household account. All parties in the account can then use the total balance.

    • Dave R says:

      5 Mar5 March 09:03

      You lose flexibility though, only thrn able to book flights for people in you HH account.

      Also, many people redeem Amex MR points for schemes other than avios.

      • Genghis says:

        5 Mar5 March 09:09

        You can also book flights for those in your friends and family list. Ie. Anyone.

      • Will says:

        5 Mar5 March 14:31

        I personally find the best solution to have a household BA account and regular avios account. Use BA to pool points, use avios account to book for anyone who’s outside of household account (though in reality I don’t do a lot of this).

  • Genghis says:

    5 Mar5 March 08:48

    Do a 1k test transfer to your Virgin. Such transfers have been known to go through

  • Rob says:

    5 Mar5 March 10:27

    The T&C’s on the website are the ones I would stick with.

    • RussellH says:

      5 Mar5 March 13:00

      That makes complete sense.

      I just got a mailshot from Amex Gold reminding me of all the benefits, with the back page listing the Ts+Cs. However, buried in this small print is the line “See website for full Ts+Cs”.

• Nick says:

  5 Mar5 March 07:53

  Wierdly I’ve got this issue this week! New to Amex gold I didn’t know that you can only transfer in multiples of 500 to baec.

  So am I right in thinking if you say had 55499 you could only transfer 5500 and the 499 would have been lost on closure? I have just this issue so when I’ve received my bonus 10k MR I’m going to cancel in the next week or so.

  However I did ring amex the other night about my lounge club card as I completely forgot it’s two complimentary passes every membership year. So as I’m just waiting for my bonus 10k to post I ring and said I assume I’ll get my passes added on. I was told it goes on renewal of the lunge club activation date not the Amex activation date which are usually around the same date (mine was a day different). Anyway worth remembering if you’re just holding until you get your bonus 10k you get a further two passes. Great timing for me as I’m off to the Geneva motor show with a friend!!

  • Anna says:

    5 Mar5 March 08:05

    I’m in that position, just going to make a few purchases to round it up to the nearest 500, then transfer them.

    • Jonathan says:

      5 Mar5 March 08:31

      You certainly used to be able to do a nectar point transfer for the final residual sum so you don’t lose it

      • Charlie Whiskey says:

        5 Mar5 March 10:25

        You still can transfer any leftover MR Points to Nectar – just done it.

        The joy of being able to transfer points on cancellation to your spouse/partner on closure (perhaps because you want to recover your own subscription fee / avoid paying the Gold fee in the second year) is that you still have time to decide where you want to use them: you are not forced into choosing, say, Avios on closure when a few weeks later you may wish you had moved them to Virgin

        • the real harry1 says:

          5 Mar5 March 11:02

          and it’s very easy to make a purchase to get you exactly on or just over the 500 increment, particularly as most of us can pay council tax or utility bills with Amex (through Paypoint if necessary)

        • Roger says:

          5 Mar5 March 11:14

          Wish that was possible for me. My council is Post office and Payzone + Online of course.
          It is difficult to make use of Amex for any of these options for CT for me.
          I can of course get free MBNA VA card for 10000 VS miles, but cannot see good use of this.
          I would much rather have liked to use PRGC for Mrs Roger to pay off council tax but does not seem it is possible to exploit that route.

        • Alan says:

          5 Mar5 March 15:04

          Remember you can still save 3% on your council tax via RBS/NatWest rewards account at £3/month – if you don’t rely on your CT spend to hit a sign-up target then potentially better return this way 😉

        • Michael says:

          5 Mar5 March 21:38

          When I closed my Amex Gold account the agent proactively offered to top up my MR balance to the nearest 500 to allow a transfer to Virgin as they saw I had transferred to them before.

  • Ro says:

    5 Mar5 March 08:16

    Last time i cancelled my amex gold i had rpughly 38k MR points (not exact). The agent kindly rounded up to 40k before transferring across, without me asking or prompting… so im sure they will rpund up to 55k for you

    • Sundar says:

      5 Mar5 March 09:02

      +1
      Yes, if you get a good agent, they round it up to possible transfer amount as Goodwill gesture and will transfer it.

      • Ben says:

        7 Mar7 March 13:11

        I closed mine yesterday with just over 400 points left on my account. The agent told me the minimum I could transfer to BAEC was 1000, so kindly topped me up to that level ‘as a thank you for taking good care of the account’ before making the transfer.

  • Liz says:

    5 Mar5 March 08:20

    I top up my Amazon account with odd pounds to round off any spend – remember when you cancel your cards you lose the lounge club pass access as they are only valid when the Amex card is active.

  • AndyR says:

    5 Mar5 March 08:40

    I think Hilton is 200 point minimum, Club Carlson is 3 and Nectar is 1 so you could put the remaining balance in those.

• Nick says:

  5 Mar5 March 08:06

  In addition to the above my MR account now says this

  PRG MR Message Bonus – 12 months + 10 grace days statement

  Any ideas what this means anyone?

• AndyR says:

  5 Mar5 March 08:21

  My partner and I have transferred points to each other in the past without making any complaints. They usually say it’s not allowed but then we just refer them to the T&C’s and they then agree.

  • AndyR says:

    5 Mar5 March 08:37

    We ended up transferring them all to Avios so it was all a bit pointless :-).

• mark2 says:

  5 Mar5 March 08:53

  On the subject of cancelling Amex cards:
  How do people deal with the refund of part of annual fee?
  Do you make sure that you owe more than your estimate of the refund and then pay the balance?

  • Dev says:

    5 Mar5 March 09:06

    Just ask to cancel and then a few days later your account will show a -£X figure. At that point, you can offset against another Amex card where you owe them money or ask for a cheque in the post.

    • Nick says:

      5 Mar5 March 10:59

      Can I ask the refund is credited against my wife’s gold card (I’m a supplementary card holder) balance?

  • Genghis says:

    5 Mar5 March 09:16

    I try to make it so I owe them money. However, mucked up the calcs on my last one so they owed me. When called up again day after cancellation they said they had a system change and so couldn’t do a bank transfer. That was almost 10 days ago and still waiting for my cheque.

  • vish says:

    5 Mar5 March 10:18

    i am due a partial refund from amex. they asked for my bank details and said they will transfer the money to my bank account

  • Nate1309 says:

    5 Mar5 March 13:34

    I normally end on a -£x and get it moved to the next active card on my account.

• Roger says:

  5 Mar5 March 10:41

  Although I never needed to do this, but I thought this was always possible, as per FAQs
  Go here
  https://travel.americanexpress.co.uk/service/static_page.cfm?PAGE=faq

  Can I combine both my partner’s points with mine to book travel?
  You must combine your points prior to booking. This is done by pooling your points with your partner/friend through our “gifting” facility – it costs £15 per transaction but there is no limit to the number of points you can “gift”. Call the Membership Rewards team to find out more.

  So if you have large chunk of points to transfer paying £15 is not a big deal if you want to consolidate points in one account.

  • Roger says:

    5 Mar5 March 10:45

    I am assuming that once on pretext of combining MR points to book travel you can always divert it to wherever you would send the points too. Amex is not going to be fussy about it, or will they?

  • Rob says:

    5 Mar5 March 12:47

    But that is the ‘gifting’ facility closed in 2013!

• squall says:

  5 Mar5 March 10:58

  I’ve closed my account in October last year and requested to transfer the remaining points to my wife’s account without even realising it wasn’t potentially allowed – points were transferred straight away without any problems (exact wording from the online customer service was something like “of course we can arrange to transfer your points to your wife’s account”). The amount of points wasn’t huge though, around 11k leftover from redemptions, so perhaps they only refuse to transfer large balances rather than a few genuinely unused points?

This article is closed to new comments. Feel free to ask your question in the HfP forums.