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.
If you are bidding then how can points have fixed value?
It determines the winner between the highest points bid and the highest cash bid.
Site is down right now. Recall any big airlines of note? Just MR transfer partner airlines?
well if it’s an auction you may still get a good value if you are lucky
Value is still always 1¢ per point as you can always just pay cash
ah OK, if you can pay cash for the same it makes little sense to redeem for 1c
The links don’t seem to be working.