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Between now and 31 October, 2017, British Airways Executive Club is offering a 35% bonus when converting hotel points to Avios. These are the hotel programmes that qualify and the minimum conversions required:

• Club Carlson  (MIN 2,000)
• Hilton Honors  (MIN 10,000)
• Hyatt Gold Passport  (MIN 5,000)
• IHG Rewards Club (MIN 10,000)
• Marriott Rewards (MIN 10,000)
• Shangri-La Golden Circle (MIN 2,500)

You can find details on the BA website here. Beware! Starwood Preferred Guest is not included in this promotion!

It is important to remember that, most of the time, it doesn’t make sense to convert hotel points into Avios. The major hotel chains prefer you to spend those points on a hotel room night that almost certainly would be empty – rather than generate a cost to them from buying miles from the airline.  Hilton Honors 10:1 ratio is shockingly bad, and a 35% bonus makes that little better.  IHG Rewards Club’s 5:1 ratio is a bit better, but a 35% bonus only improves that to 3.7:1.  Hyatt? Please spend 30,000 Hyatt points on a free night at the Park Hyatt Tokyo, rather than converting them into 16,200 Avios that will barely get you to Europe and back. In almost every case therefore, a 35% bonus just turns “shockingly bad” into “rather poor”.

Of course, if you have a handful of hotel points that are close to expiring, then by all means take this opportunity to convert them to Avios.

With Starwood Preferred Guest excluded from the promotion, there is only one possibility that might tempt me…  Marriott Rewards Hotel + Air Travel Packages. I wrote about them earlier this year – you can find that post by clicking here.

Instead of receiving 120,000 Avios with the best-value Travel Package, you would receive 162,000 Avios, thanks to the bonus. Personally I would still prefer 120,000 miles from Alaska Airlines, but I’ve come to realise that there are lots of American Express cardholders desperate for Avios in order to use that 2-for-1 certificate!

Anyhow, if you typically convert your hotel points into Avios, regardless of what we might have to say about their relative value, now is definitely the time.