American Express has partnered with Plusgrade to allow cardholders to upgrade seats to first, business or premium economy with Membership Rewards points (or Membership Rewards points and cash). You can upgrade flights with a total of 20 airlines currently. When using this feature, keep in mind the following:
- Your bidding for an upgrade, generally you won’t know if you’ve won the ‘auction’ until a few days before the flight
- Not all fare classes are eligible to bid for an upgrade
The real thing everybody wants to know is: how much are points worth when using this feature? For most cards points are worth 1,000 = $10 (1¢ per point), although some cards have a redemption value of 1,000 = $5 (0.5¢ per point). A full list of cards with the lower rate can be found here. Most people will be able to get more than 1¢ per point by transferring points to an American Express travel partner, but I was actually expecting the value of points to be worse than this. Still not useful, but less bad than I expected.
