Travel With Grant noticed on a recent statement balance that starting December 31st, 2015 it will no longer be possible to transfer your American Express Membership Rewards (MR) points to Best Western. What’s likely happened is that contract was due to expire at the end of this year and when FNBO took over from Barclaycard in issuing the Best Western credit card they had a stipulation saying flexible point transfers were not allowed.
For most with credit cards that earn Membership Rewards, this won’t be a big loss but Best Western properties in Europe are significantly nicer than those in the United States so some might be hit hard by this change – although they will have more than four months to execute any transfers they like. This is another negative change for the Membership Rewards program, the transfer rate for Avios is also being dropped to 1,000 MR to 800 Avios starting on October 1st. MR transfer bonuses have also been drying up recently as well.
American Express seems to be in a bit of a rutt recently and focusing on maximizing profits (by disallowing things like gift card purchases for airline incidentals) rather than increasing market share and customer satisfaction. This is bad news for people like us, but thankfully other card issuers like Citi have been on a rampage recently trying to acquire customers and it’s only a matter of time before American Express stakeholders want to see increased customer numbers as well.
