The Offer
- Receive a 50% transfer bonus when you transfer American Express Membership Rewards points to Virgin America Elevate points. The standard rate is 2:1, so this means it would be 2:1.5. So if you transfer 2,000 Membership Rewards you’d receive 1,500 Virgin America Elevate points.
The Fine Print
- Valid until March 10th, 2016
- For each conversion of points into the Frequent Flyer program of a U.S. airline, a fee of $0.0006 per point, with a maximum fee of $99, will be charged to your Card account. We charge this fee to offset the federal excise tax we must pay on such conversions. The fee may be more or less than the actual amount of the excise tax we pay on any individual conversion. We may offer you the option to redeem points to cover this fee.
Our Verdict
They have offered transfer bonuses in the past on Virgin America Elevate, but the 50% bonus is the highest they have offered publicly. Below are a list of the previous transfer bonuses:
- September 8th – October 8th, 2015: 25% bonus + gold status when you transfer 80k or more MR points
- January 15th – February 15th, 2015: 35% bonus
- April 16th – April 30th, 2014: 30% bonus
- January 17th – January 31st, 2014: 40% bonus
- September 16th – September 30th, 2013: 40% bonus
- October 27th – September 2nd, 2012: 30% bonus
- March 19th – March 26th, 2012: 30% bonus
They also offered the following targeted bonuses:
- September 15th – October 15th, 2014: 50%
- November 7th – November 21st, 2012. 50%
People that transferred points over in September/October of last year will be kicking themselves unless they already used the points/valued gold status. Virgin America points have a fixed value of 2.2¢ when redeeming them for domestic Virgin America flights, that means you’d be getting a value of 1.65¢ per American Express point which isn’t that bad if you ask me. You can also redeem for partner flights, just be warned of the high fuel surcharges.
There are no other American Express transfer bonuses currently available, but you can view a history of all the bonuses for each travel partner here.
