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American Express Membership Rewards Points are one of my favourite types of points/miles – largely due to their flexibility. Being able to transfer to a wide range of different hotel and airline partners is great, but knowing how long each of those transfers actually takes in practice is also important, particularly for booking airline award space that can get snapped up very quickly. I’ve therefore been running some experiments to see what the transfer times to Amex’s various partners really are. So far, I’ve looked at British Airways Avios, Virgin Atlantic Flying Club, Delta SkyMiles, and now it’s time for Singapore Airlines – so if you’re wondering how long it takes to transfer American Express Membership Rewards Points to Singapore Airlines KrisFlyer, you’ve come to the right place!
How long does it take to transfer American Express Membership Rewards Points to Singapore Airlines KrisFlyer?
The official line on the Amex site states an “estimated transfer time” of “3 working days”.
To get a range of real data points, I made a number of transfers on different days of the week. In practice, the transfers were completed within 24 hours – taking place at some point overnight.
If you have any issues making the transfer online, don’t waste your time trying to sort it out yourself (the Amex Membership Rewards site isn’t great) – just give Amex a ring and they will resolve it straight away.
It’s important to note that these results are currently based on a relatively small number of data points. Please share your own transfer times (including the day/time you made the transfer) in the comments and I will use the info to produce a more reliable average and range.
My wife flies to NZ fairly regularly. Before we started on avios she mainly flew with SQ economy. Last time was on a great deal with Qatar business (where is the sale).
She would like to use SQ again using Krisflyer points and we could collect more avios by switching to Amex gold rather than BA Amex.
But what is availability like on SQ business class and how many krys points do you need for a return flight.
Thanks, Ian.
Availability is normally pretty good on SQ when using KrisFlyer Miles, particularly if you are able/willing to fly to/from Manchester or ex EU as a backup option. Award chart is here: https://www.singaporeair.com/saar5/pdf/ppsclub_krisflyer/charts/SQMI_AwardChart.pdf
It’s definitely pricey to NZ these days – 232,000 return in biz class, but no surcharges at least.
Thanks very much indeed Joe for your experiments and for this information – it’s really useful to know.
No worries! – I did the draw the line at wasting points by sending them to alitalia though, so that one will remain a mystery. I’ve genuinely never heard of anyone wanting to transfer to Alitalia though, so I doubt there would have been huge demand for that…