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A friend forwarded me an email they had received from American Express yesterday, advertising a 50% bonus when transferring Amex Membership Rewards Points to Hilton Honors.

I haven’t received anything similar in my inbox yet and can’t find anything out about the offer on the Amex website (or via the online chat agents), so it could well be targeted at specific cardholders. Here are the details:

In order to test whether the promotion is more widely accessible, I made a transfer last night and will hopefully have a definitive answer relatively soon. Unfortunately, the terms state that the bonus may take up to 8 weeks, so it could potentially be a long wait.

Good deal?

A 50% bonus means you would receive 3 Hilton Points for each Amex MR Point, rather than the usual 2.

I personally value Hilton Points at about 0.4p each (although others, including my InsideFlyer colleague Craig value them at more like 0.33p each). If you are eligible for the bonus, you would therefore be getting roughly 1p-1.2p of value per Amex Point.

Given that I recently made a transfer to Nectar, where I got 1p of value per Amex Point, there’s definitely potential value here if the 50% bonus is open to all.

That said, it’s certainly not a ‘no brainer’. It’s possible to get much, much, better value from your Amex Points in some circumstances, so whether this is a good deal really depends on what your travel plans are, how many points you have, and how long it will take you to replace the points you transfer (etc).

Bottom line

If you were considering making an Amex transfer to Hilton in the next week, you might want to hold off for a few days first to see how this plays out.

I’ll post an update as soon as the test transfer hits my Hilton account, but in the meantime, let me know in the comments if you’ve also received an email advertising the offer!