Transferring from Amex Membership Rewards to Avios

[PlaneyMcPlaneFace]

Hi, sorry if this is a dumb question.

To keep things simple can I transfer my wife’s sign up bonus from her Amex gold card directly to my executive account? Or does it have to go to hers? We do have a family joint account but figured spending the points will be easier if all in one account.

Thankyou.

[marks7389]

It will probably have to go to hers as Amex don’t allow points transfer to other people. Having said that it looks like Amex in US may allow transfers to accounts in the name of supplementary card holders (authorized users) – no idea if that is the case in the UK (I can’t see anything that says it is), though I’d be interested to know.

If you have a BA Household account, any redemption bookings made through BA will automatically be split across all members’ balances prorata according to the Avios that you have in each case. E.g. If you had 20K Avios and your wife had 10K Avios, a 15K redemption would be split 10K from your account and 5K from hers. If you’re fine with that then it really is no more complicated to have the Avios split across your accounts.

It gets more complicated if you’re looking to book redemptions direct with Iberia, Aer Lingus, Vueling or Qatar, but you can transfer Avios between accounts for £15 as per Rob’s recent article on the subject if you need to.

[PlaneyMcPlaneFace]

Thankyou very much, It seems it won’t make a difference then if it’s easy to book using joint account.

[memesweeper]

PlaneyMcPlaneFace wrote:

Thankyou very much, It seems it won’t make a difference then if it’s easy to book using joint account.

Note there are also disadvantages to pooling through a household account. The one to watch is you can only redeem for members of the account, and a limited number of named others, and adding/removing names cannot be done frequently.