There are four major transferrable point currencies: American Express Membership Rewards, Citi ThankYou Points, Capital One miles, and Chase Ultimate Rewards. The first three types of points periodically run transfer bonuses to airline mileage partners. Chase Ultimate Rewards recently offered their first transfer bonus ever in May to British Airways Avios.

Why You Should Care

If you have the flexibility to wait to book your award, and you have an idea of when the next transfer bonus is, you could wait to save points.

American Express Membership Rewards, Citi ThankYou Points, and Capital One Miles, three of the four major transferrable point currencies, periodically run transfer bonuses to airline mileage partners. Chase Ultimate Rewards offered their first transfer bonus ever in May of this year to British Airways Avios.

To be clear, sometimes the transfer bonus is offered by the bank, and sometimes the transfer bonus is offered by the mileage program.

Update 8/19: This offer is expected to drop on September 4, 2019, according to Doctor of Credit.

Barclays issues a Hawaiian Airlines co-branded credit card called the Hawaiian Airlines World Elite MasterCard that comes with 60,000 miles for spending $2,000 within 90 days of account opening.

Ugh. American Airlines' new tool for searching award space is super annoying. The results are in no way displayed in a way that makes it efficient for us to see what's available.

It gives you no easy option to filter number of stops or cabin. On the week view, it says a filter function is coming soon... but it's said that for a while now. (Edit 7/18: There are some filter options on the mobile version.

I just applied for the Chase Ink Business Unlimited® Credit Card.

This is a living post, continuously updated over time as the miles and points hobby evolves. They change the rules and we have to stay on top of them.
Today I've updated the section about Citi cards to reflect the new sign up bonus eligibility timelines for their AAdvantage co-branded credit cards. If I've left something important out please feel free to let me know in the comments.

At the beginning of the week I wrote about how I recently redeemed 45,000 Virgin Atlantic Flying Club miles, transferred from Ultimate Rewards, to fly Delta One between Atlanta, Georgia and Buenos Aires, Argentina. Virgin Atlantic is not in an airline alliance, but one of its partners is Delta.

That is a competitive price to fly to Southern South America in Business Class, with a type of mile that is also very easy to accrue as four out of the five major transferrable points--Ultimate Rewards, Membership Rewards, ThankYou Points, and Marriott Rewards---transfer to Virgin Atlantic.

Over a month ago I wrote about the impending devaluation of the British Airways Avios program's prices to fly partner airlines. Since then, the speculated award prices have all been confirmed.

Here is the speculative chart I included in that original post:

Note those are just the most commonly booked BA Avios partner awards.

In May I flew from Atlanta to Buenos Aires in Delta One, and only had to spend 45,000 Ultimate Rewards--transferred to Virgin Atlantic Flying Club-- to do so.

In the spring of 2017 I opened a Starwood Preferred Guest Credit Card from American Express. At the beginning of this year, that card was product changed to the Marriott Bonvoy Amex Card.

The Mariott Bonvoy Amex Card is not open for applications. Those that have one were all product changed from a Starwood Preferred Guest Credit Card.