One of the transfer partners of American Express Membership Rewards is the Etihad Guest program. For at least the last few days, it’s not been possible to transfer points over to Etihad.
This is unlikely to have an impact on most people right now seeing as Etihad Guest wasn’t a particularly enticing transfer partner even before the pandemic, but it’s worth bearing in mind in case you were needing to make a transfer to keep your miles alive. In the past transferring points didn’t extend the life of miles in Etihad’s program, but that changed just over a year ago.
It’s not clear what the cause of this transfer issue is. It doesn’t seem like Amex will be dropping Etihad Guest as a transfer partner because they’d presumably have removed the program from the list of transfer partners rather than simply adding a note stating that transfers are temporarily unavailable.
If you’re needing to make a transfer in order to keep your miles from expiring, Etihad Guest is a transfer partner of Citi ThankYou, Capital One and Marriott Bonvoy. All of those programs are still offering the ability to transfer points to Etihad, so hopefully the ability to transfer from Membership Rewards will be back up and running flying soon enough.
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“This is unlikely to have an impact on most people right now seeing as Etihad Guest wasn’t a particularly enticing transfer partner even before the pandemic”
You need to read up a bit on what others have posted about VA and trans-pacific flights—you will find some value, I’m sure