American Express has partnered with Expedia to allow you to be able to pay using American Express Membership Rewards points. To use points you need to do the following:
- First sign in or create your Expedia account so you can see your Member Pricing discounts.
- Once you are signed in, you can link your eligible Card to the Program. Please know that this action must be taken prior to making a purchase in order to use Membership Rewards points. Only one eligible Card can be linked per Expedia account.
- After you link your eligible Card, you can view the point balance and its associated dollar value for use on Expedia.com.
- At checkout, select the Membership Rewards option and enter the dollar amount you would like applied to all or part of a Prepaid Hotel and Flight purchase. Membership Rewards points cannot be used toward bundled packages.
American Express seem to think that it’s ground breaking that their partnership with Expedia allows users to pay with points on flight bookings (Citi allows you pay for hotels using points but not flights) the problem is that the whole partnership is completely worthless because points are only worth 0.7¢ each when redeeming them on Expedia. I don’t really see any reason for card issuers to focus on these partnerships apart from trying to sucker cardholders into making sub optimal redemption. I think of these as the new reward catalogs for items that have always presented awful value but there must be enough people redeeming through these channels that American Express decide it’s worth spending time and energy securing these ‘deals’.
