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Until 30th October 2019, American Airlines AAdvantage is offering 25% bonus Miles when you transfer hotel points across – including from Marriott Bonvoy. You must register for the bonus on your AA account.
What’s the deal?
- Transfer 60,000 Marriott Points = 25,000 American Miles (because you get an extra 5,000 when transferring in blocks of 60,000)
- AA then applies the 25% transfer bonus to the full 25,000 Miles, which means you will actually receive 31,250 AA Miles.
Unless you stay a lot with Marriott for work though, you’re probably wondering how to get hold of large amounts of Marriott Points. In the UK, the best option is probably transferring American Express Membership Rewards Points across. The transfer rate is 2:3 – so to get 60,000 Marriott Points, you’d need to transfer 40,000 Amex MR Points.
In other words, you can indirectly swap 40,000 Amex MR Points for 31,250 American AAdvantage Miles.
That might not sound like a particularly impressive deal, when you consider that 40,000 Amex MR Points could otherwise be converted into 40,000 BA Avios or Virgin Flying Club Miles (etc) – but not all Miles are created equal.
AA Miles can be extremely valuable when used smartly. Take a look at some of the reasons why we rate them so highly here and here.
Bottom line
If you are interested in AA Miles, this is definitely an offer worth considering.
It does seem to crop up at least once or twice a year though, so unless you’ve got firm plans for using the AA Miles, you might be better off waiting and keeping your Amex transfer options open.
Isn’t AA a transfer partner of Amex anyway?
Sadly not!
Ahh I see. Worth noting that combining this offer (or valuing the offer) with the current 30% discount on Marriott bonvoy points will get you AA miles for 1.34p per mile, the 31,250 miles would cost £420 compared to £577 in the last AAdvantage purchase offer (or £474.46 pro rata if purchasing the largest amount of AA miles possible)
Great point – and the subject of a post scheduled for tomorrow re ‘cheap’ Etihad First Class 🙂
I know this article came out a while ago. But how long does it take for points to transfer? Both AMEX to Marriott and then Marriott to AA? Has anyone done this yet?
Amex to Marriott shouldn’t take more than a few days. Historically, transferring to airlines form Marriott didn’t take much longer, but since Bonvoy things have been different for a lot of members. I haven’t personally tried a transfer to AA in quite a while, so can’t offer concrete info unfortunately. If things went to plan, I’d expect the whole transaction to be done in about a week from start to finish though.
Great stuff. Also if I transfer 240k marriott points to AA would I get equivalent points as mentioned in the article or am I better doing it in seperate chunks of 60k?
Good question. I can’t recall if you have to break it up into 60k chunks with Marriott. But 4 separate transfers = 4 things that could go wrong!
Perhaps 2 x 120k if you can…