American Express is out with a new transfer bonus today and it’s a good one. Through the end of this year, you can get a 40% bonus when transferring Membership Rewards to Virgin Atlantic Flying Club.
The Deal
- Get a 40% bonus when transferring American Express Membership Rewards to Virgin Atlantic.
Key Terms
- Expires December 31, 2025.
Quick Thoughts
We’ve only ever seen two transfer bonuses as high as 40% from transferable currencies to Virgin (other than status-based bonuses from Bilt). One of those was from Chase last fall, while the other was from American Express in the final month of last year.
It’s therefore great to see Amex offering the same deal again this year because 40% is a superb bonus. In fact, it’s high enough – and I have a large enough Membership Rewards balance – that I’m very tempted to speculatively transfer some of my points over.
There is one thing giving me pause though: Virgin’s history of overnight devaluations – in more ways than one. There’s been more than one occasion where Virgin Atlantic has conducted an unannounced, overnight devaluation of one or more of its award pricing sweet spots (e.g. ANA first class).
Award pricing isn’t the only way they’ve devalued though in recent years. For example, a few months ago they increased the associated fees payable when booking award flights to Europe. Economy went up from ~$75 to ~$110 when flying from the US to London which wasn’t great, but wasn’t completely awful. What was much worse was premium economy fees going up from ~$100 to ~$250 and business class from ~$250 to ~$600.
I’ll likely still transfer some of my Membership Rewards over speculatively as I imagine I’ll still get decent value from the 40% transfer bonus even if there were to be some further devaluation, but I’d be very cautious about transferring a substantial sum unless you have plans to redeem them immediately, especially seeing as this transfer bonus will be around for almost six whole weeks.
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