Virgin Atlantic-35% Bonus on Membership Rewards Transfers

According to the American Express Membership Rewards website here, Virgin Atlantic is offering a 35% bonus when transferring Membership Rewards into Virgin Atlantic Flying Club miles.

This offer is available through December 29th. Transfers must be made in increments of 1,000 Membership Rewards. The minimum transfer will yield 1,350 Flying Club miles.

 Is this a good deal?
Unfortunately not. Virgin Atlantic features an incredible onboard product and great club lounges.

According to this blog post and this thread on FlyerTalk, Hilton has just announced their "Any Weekend, Anywhere Sale" where you receive between 15-40% off the best available room rate for weekend stays booked between now and January 31, 2013. Hotels in the Asia-Pacific region have an extended booking deadline of February 14, 2013.

Stays must be completed by December 31, 2013. Eligible weekend stays will also earn double stay credit towards Hilton elite status. With this promotion, you will be able to earn Hilton Silver status with only two weekend stays (a total of four weekend nights).

Four months ago I broke the news that you could redeem Hawaiian Miles for Virgin Atlantic Upper Class without fuel surcharges, thus saving thousands of dollars. See Redeem for Virgin Atlantic Upper Class without Surcharges.

You still can, but the party may be over. The old chart was a solid value and simple to figure out.

The new chart, hat tip to Gary, is much worse.

I don't have any information on what North America East and West are.

Orphaned points can be the bane of your miles collecting, or they can be a way to get an incredible multiple on future spending. The basic reasoning is that orphaned miles are worthless, but they might be close to something worthwhile.

Here's an example. I currently have 7,640 Virgin Atlantic miles. Those miles might go orphaned. But I still have my Virgin Atlantic credit card for the next few months that earns me one mile per dollar.

This is another post in my Anatomy of an Award series, in which I take a real award I’ve booked and break it down step-by-step to elucidate the award booking process. If you have a real award you’d like to write up in a similar post, please contact me, and you can write a guest post.

Yesterday, I talked about transferring 10,000 Hawaiian Miles to 20,000 Hilton points.

Warning: I'm only 90% confident in the information in this post. It took several calls and a few hours on the phone talking to incompetent agents to get this information, so I'll provide it without triple-checking. I invite commenters to check my work.

Virgin Atlantic Upper Class is an incredible business class product by all indications.

Fact: I check eight frequent flier blogs daily. (Just dropped a ninth...)

One of those eight is Mileage Saver by Paul Walia. I love it because his posts take, on average, 10 seconds to read, and he covers all the easy ways to earn miles. The other day, he had a post on how to earn 400,000 Hilton Points in Five Steps.

Some of the cards mentioned in his post are Hilton cards, but some just feature miles that can be transferred to Hilton points.