Avianca Lifemiles is currently offering a 15% transfer bonus when you convert American Express Membership Rewards points to Lifemiles. This could make for a great stack with Lifemiles+ to get a nice discount on award tickets.
The Deal
- Avianca Lifemiles is offering a 15% transfer bonus when you transfer Amex Membership Rewards points to Avianca LifeMiles. Note that this bonus is offered by Avianca, not by Amex, so you will not see it reflected on the Amex website but rather it will be credited separately through Lifemiles (usually instantly, but it could take up to 24hrs).
Key Terms
- This Promotion is valid only for point transfers from American Express Membership Rewards to miles of the LifeMiles program from July 1st ,2025 (12:00 AM GMT-6) to July 31st , 2025 (11:59 PM GMT-6).
- A minimum transfer of 1000 points is required.
- Membership Rewards customers must be previously registered as a LifeMiles member in order to participate in this promotion, you can sign up as a member at lifemiles.com.
- During the offer, the member will receive a 15% bonus over the miles accrued on the member´s account as a product of the transfer. The bonus miles and the transferred miles may be accrued in separate transactions.
- LifeMiles earned by transferring and the bonus Miles earned with this promotion apply to obtain or maintain the LifeMiles Elite Status according to the rules of the Elite Program available at lifemiles.com.
- Transferred LifeMiles as well as the bonus miles will be accrued no later than 24 hours after the LifeMiles Partner reports the request of miles transfer.
- LifeMiles is not responsible for miles not accrued, accrued mistakenly or accrued late due to report errors or delays from the LifeMiles Partners.
- Once points or miles are transferred to LifeMiles, the transaction cannot be reversed.
- Upon completion of the transfer, Terms and Conditions of the LifeMiles Program apply, available at lifemiles.com.
- This offer is available for customers that make the transaction on the American Express Rewards site in the USA.
- Terms and Conditions for the Membership Rewards® program apply. Visit https://www.lifemiles.com/
terms-conditions for more information. The value of Membership Rewards® points varies according to how you choose to use them. To learn more, go to membershiprewards.com/ pointsinfo.
Quick Thoughts
While 15% isn’t an earth-shattering bonus percentage, it can nonetheless be quite useful. Avianca devalued awards a couple of times last year, but a number of best uses remain.
This promotion could be particularly useful for anyone who subscribes to Lifemiles+ since Lifemiles+ members receive a 10% discount on all award tickets. That is true even at the $20 monthly “Lite” subscription level (note that you need the $50 monthly “Basic” subscription or above to get free changes and cancellations). A 15% transfer bonus combined with a 10% discount on the cost of awards
For instance, some routes to Europe can be booked in business class for 69,000 miles one-way. With a 15% transfer bonus, you would only need to transfer 60,000 Amex points to end up with the 69K miles you need for those routes. If you are a LifeMiles+ subscriber, a flight that ordinarily costs 69,000 miles in business class would cost you 62,100 miles. With a 15% transfer bonus, that means that you would only need to transfer 54,000 Amex Membership Rewards points to book one-way business class to Europe. That could be a really good deal.
We always recommend keeping points transferable until you have a need to make a booking rather than speculatively transferring. That is particularly important for Avianca Lifemiles given that Lifemiles expire after just 12 months of inactivity unless you are a Lifemiles+ subscriber.
Personally, I find this deal really intriguing given our coming 100K Vacay challenge. I had intended to book that trip using Avios, but this bonus certainly gives me some food for thought.
H/T: One Mile at a Time
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Is there any chance we can see this opportunity sweetened by a bonus by the Amex side too? Does that ever happen?
I don’t think we’ve ever seen that. We have occasionally seen a transfer bonus from a card stacked with a transfer bonus that lifemiles offers for transferring miles to someone else. In other words, sometimes life miles will give you a bonus for paying the fee to transfer miles to another person. So there have been times when, for example, my wife could take advantage of a transfer bonus to transfer credit card points to Avianca lifemiles and then she can pay Lifemiles a fee to transfer those miles to me and we would end up with even more miles. But that’s really just a way of making it cheaper to buy miles, not a bonus in the way you’re thinking.