American Express in the U.S. has brought back their promotion with 30% additional bonus for Membership Rewards Points transfers to Virgin Atlantic Flying Club until November 30th 2017..
While Flying Club isn’t the most popular program of them all there are still some sweet spots available for partner airline redemptions such as Air China and ANA.
During the promotional period the transfer ratio is 1:1.3 so for every 1000 Membership Rewards transferred you receive 1,300 Virgin Flying Club miles.
You can access the transfer option in your online account at Membership Rewards (see here).
I have emptied my MR account recently so I won’t participate in this promotion myself but there are certainly some really interesting redemption options why one would be interested.
You can access Virgin Flying Club Partner Airlines Redemption page here.
Air China for example can be booked on London-Beijing round trip (vice versa) for only 75,000 miles in First Class (63,000 in Business) :
We’re talking about 37,500 miles per way in First Class here which is amazing. Keep in mind though that a round trip needs to be booked, one way is not available.
A real hit is also Japan’s ANA where the premium cabins between Japan and the U.S. are also extremely attractive to book:
Same here: 55,000 miles one way (round trip award required) in First Class to/from the U.S. West Coast on ANA is simply amazing.
Keep in mind that all of this requires special availability that has to be checked with the Flying Club Team in advance and I wouldn’t count on availability being the same as for the general pool of Star Alliance members.
There are other partners such as Singapore Airlines which are also quite good but even though the chart displays First Class it’s well known that it’s hard to get Singapore Airlines First Class / Suites as partners. Business should be available though under the same availability limitation caveat as mentioned above.
Conclusion
If you have a large amount of Virgin Miles or in this case Amex Membership Rewards available you can certainly profit from this. Just make sure what you want to book is actually available and consider the actual transfer takes some time as well.
Should you play with the though of applying for a card such as the American Express Platinum that currently has a 60,000 Welcome Points Offer or the Premier Rewards Gold that comes with 25,000 Points you can certainly do so but consider that Amex let’s new account holders wait quite some time until these welcome MR points get credited (I waited two entire months from the time the account was opened). So even though this bonus campaign lasts until the end of November it might not be long enough. I heard (not confirmed) existing Amex cardholders get their bonus faster though.
