American Express has an amazing portfolio of travel credit cards. I’m a huge fan of their Membership Rewards program, due to its points transfer options. The programs can provide some amazing value when you transfer your Amex points to their airline and hotel partners.
Transferring Amex Points
Every now and then, American Express runs transfer bonuses to their Airline and Hotel partners. Currently, they’re running a bonus when you transfer Membership Rewards points to British Airways Avios. Instead of getting the standard 1:1, you’ll earn 1.4 Avios for every 1 point that you transfer. I was looking to transfer Membership Rewards points from my Platinum Card.
Error Messages
Over the weekend, I was looking to transfer points to British Airways Avios in order to make use of the lucrative transfer bonus. However, I kept running into one error. One one of the pages, the ratio seemed to reset back to 1:1.
The landing page showed up correctly, but…
All good so far. It was the next page that was causing trouble. After I clicked on British Airways Avios, I was almost about to enter the points to transfer when I realized that the ratio was resetting to 1:1. I was looking to transfer 9,000 Membership Rewards points. Ideally, those should have converted to 12,000 British Airways Avios. However, the amount kept resetting to 9,000 Avios.
The website kept getting stuck every now and then
Amex’s Customer Service
I called up Amex’s customer service to get help with this issue. I described the issue to them in detail. The rep acknowledged that there was probably some issue and said he would put in a note about this issue. He then offered complete the transaction over the phone. After verifying the necessary details, I initiated a transfer of 9,000 points over the phone.
Phew! Transfer went thru finally!
The transfer was instant and most importantly, at the correct ratio of 1:1.4.
The Pundit’s Mantra
Given that this was indeed a tech glitch while transferring online, I’m sure this may have shown up as an issue on some other accounts. Like me, if you’ve transferred points with the 40% bonus in the last few days, it would be prudent to check your Avios accounts to ensure that the correct amounts went through. If not, you can contact American Express and they should be able to resolve the issue over the phone.
Have you run into issues with this 40% bonus? Let us know in the comments section.
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