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.
Hat tip to ruxpin810 on Flyertalk
I have about 52k MR points (=39k Elevate). How far would 39k take me? I am based out of LAX. Honolulu would be nice. Could I score 2 RTs?
It’s based on the fare, each point is worth 2.2 cent for domestic flights. Have a look at where you want to go and see how far 39k elevate would get you.
Will, this offer is equivalent to a1.65% cash back. Why use this when 2% cb cards exist?
Because some people have points from sign up bonuses and also some cards offer category bonuses. It’s obviously not a good idea if you’re putting non bonused spend through.
Have there ever been transfer offers giving more than 2cpp?
Depends on how you value different airline miles/hotel points I guess. You can view all the previous transfer bonuses in the link in this post.
I didn’t see a cpp value in the historical table. Could you possibly add that?
What do you mean?
The table in the link doesn’t have the underlying value per MR point. Like 1.65 cpp for the offer on this page
That’s because other airline miles don’t have a fixed value when you’re redeeming them.
Are there any particular sweet spots in the program from west coast (LAX)? I see LAX to Cancun for 8,500 miles round trip in April…. Anything else that makes sense? thanks.
It’s revenue based on domestic. You’ll get 2.2 cents per point regardless of where you go. So sweet spots are wherever fares are already lowest, which tend to be off-peak and certain days of the week. It won’t be great for flying peak.
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It’s not quite aspirational, but I’ve found (based in SEA) that Virgin actually made the best redemption for me for SEA-SFO and SEA-LAX short-haul trips, especially during off-peak times. Because cash prices for these commuter routes are already so low, even Avios redemptions (15K rt) don’t get much more than 1 cent/mile. In light of this (and because I wanted to save my Avios for better redemptions), I recently transferred 13,400 MR points to Virgin to book a SEA-SFO flight.
With the new 50% transfer bonus, this would come out to only 9,000 MR points needed now for the same flight, which in my mind is a double win because of the increased MR point value (nearly 2 cents/pp value now even after factoring in the transfer excise tax and airport taxes) and the fact that it’s hard for me to get my MR value above 1 cent/pp in any other typical redemption, so these points would just be sitting anyway.
Brief research I’ve done indicates that SEA-LAX and SEA-SAN offer similar semi-sweet spots for my usage under the typical transfer rate of MR : Virgin Elevate points. With this 50% bonus, I’m probably going to transfer a good chunk of MR points over to Elevate to use for the flights down to California that I would have been making anyway.
great post, Will. really appreciate you breakin’ down the historical bonus offers as it relates to MR transfers to VX. as well as other considerations, really well rounded post. best part about this site – the analysis!
I have the same Q, can you still get Gold status via transferring a certain amount of points here?
Nope, that was only part of the last deal unfortunately.
Do the points transfer count towards status?
Nope, that was only the last 25% offer.