American Express Membership Rewards has launched a 20% transfer bonus to Marriott Bonvoy. With this bonus 1,000 American Express Membership Rewards points become 1,200 Marriott Bonvoy points. In most cases that’s a really poor deal that isn’t worth considering except perhaps to top off for a particularly valuable redemption.
The Deal
- American Express Membership Rewards is offering a 20% transfer bonus when members transfer points to Marriott Bonvoy through June 30, 2026. With this transfer bonus, 1,000 Amex Membership Rewards points become 1,200 Marriott Bonvoy points.
Key Terms
- Valid through June 30, 2026.
- Must transfer in increments of 1,000 points.
Quick Thoughts
Our Reasonable Redemption Value for Marriott Bonvoy points is only 0.77 cents per point. Further, Marriott frequently puts their points on sale for less than one cent per point. That means that even with a 20% transfer bonus, you’re likely to only get around one cent per point in value, give or take.
Our Reasonable Redemption Value for American Express Membership Rewards points is 1.5 cents per point. In most cases, you’ll do far better by transferring your points to airline partners and even perhaps to Hilton with a transfer bonus than you will with this Marriott Bonvoy transfer bonus. In fact, if you’ve got a Schwab Platinum card, you may even be better off cashing your points out and buying them when they go on sale if you ultimately want to turn your Membership Rewards points into Marriott points and you don’t need the Marriott points immediately. However, if you’re just looking to top off for a particularly valuable award redemption, there are surely some instances where this transfer bonus could make sense.
There surely are some outliers. If you see our full analysis post titled “What Are Marriott Bonvoy Points Worth?” you’ll see that at the 90th percentile, Marriott Bonvoy points are worth around 1.11c per point. Even at that 90th percentile with a 20% transfer bonus, you’d be looking at getting about 1.33 cents per membership reward point. That’s better than cashing out via Schwab, but not necessarily great value for Amex points. At the very top end, we saw some opportunities to get north of three cents per Marriott Bonvoy point, and obviously, if you find an outlier among outliers, you could find a situation where this might make sense. However, in general, we wouldn’t recommend transferring Membership Rewards points to Marriott Bonvoy.
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I think the best one can say about this is that it’s a back door way of converting Amex points into United miles. If you transfer 100k amex points to Marriott for 120k points, and then convert the 120k marriott points to united you’ll get 70k united miles (40k from the transfer, 2x extra 10k (10k per 60k transferred) plus united’s current promotion that you have to register for getting you an extra 25% on the 40k – although when those ‘bonus’ 10k miles post, who knows).
That’s… still not great, but if there is a targeted redemption at united you are looking at where you’re getting over 2.15cpp and are over 5/24 with chase and out of united miles… it’s a pathway.
That said, if you have the cash, still better to just buy Marriott points outright and then transfer those over. With the current Marriott points buying bonuses, will have to come out of pocket ~$1,100 to get the 120k points, but that’s still a better value than transferring 100k amex miles with a RRV suggesting they are worth ~$1,500.