Don't Transfer Your Points!

You have to do more postings like this one. Many bloggers are quite reckless in their pursuit of referral fees by pushing people to credit card offers without explaining how to properly use the miles earned. I know it might hurt your award booking service to explain the ins and outs of the most efficient ways to use miles, but never doubt how lazy people are when it comes to looking for reward flights!

While most transfers are instant, with AMEX at least, if you're even just thinking about transferring points to an airline frequent flyer program, you should "link" your Membership Rewards account with that program. The linking process itself can take a day or two sometimes, but once they're linked you should be able to make almost instant transfers.

It might be worth considering the risk of banks (especially Chase) shutting down your accounts and seizing all of your transferable miles in the process. Once they are transferred out out, they are safe. I like to periodically diminish the balance to likely destinations (e.g. UR -> United) to keep the balance large enough so I have options, but not so large that I'd be devastated if they disappeared.

Really helpful one here. Thanks. And great tip, @KevininRI. I'm going to do that this weekend.

Basically, if you do -any- kind of manufactured spending with Chase, even the occasional gift card, you should think about not heeding this advice. Flyertalk is littered with threads where people have had their UR points frozen and seized by Chase. I transfer out all of my UR points every statement period.

Great post, wish I knew this when I started as it still haunts me that I transferred AMEX MR into Continental with Hawaii in mind and redeemed for merchandise (eek!) and then life got in the way and mergers happen, now I have those miles in United and have paid to keep them alive as I've never flown United from PHL. A very costly error on my part - lesson learned.

This is a great post. I just almost experienced this issue. I called AmEx Membership Rewards to have them process a payment for me and push through the Rewards points immediately, so I could use them to book a FlyingBlue Promo that was ending that day. AmEx MR rep very nice, said she'd call me at 4:00 pm so I could have Flying Blue on other line and I'd know flight availability was there. (Rewards rep didn't call back, but that wasn't the main problem; she misunderstood and pushed through points but not payment (I didn't know they could do that.). So I thought AmEx bill was paid ahead of time, but it wasn't, as I found out night before last, and they froze my card, although I've been a cardholder since 1976 and I had Membership Rewards pulling the tape of the call.)

But, Flying Blue discontinued promo early on last day, despite documented problems on their web site (cityname vs citycode pulled diff results). Wouldn't book it when I called, said I had to do so online, but I couldn't. Very poor customer service from Flying Blue (I sent them screenshots, they sent me form letter, I countered points in form letter, they sent me SAME form letter). KLM and Air France and Air France US Twitter accounts tried to help, told me that half of promo seats were taken, so half were still available! but they ended promo early. (And they weren't aware that Membership Rewards transfer can go through quickly.)

I was REALLY glad I hadn't transferred the Rewards points, because I'd have been out of luck. (By the way, AmEx customer service doesn't know Membership Rewards can process current payment.)

So, another lesson is, take advantage of Flying Blue Promo offer BEFORE last day. I've seen post that indicated same thing happened to him on last day. (It was still before end of day on French or Holland time, by the way.)

I did deal with one Membership Rewards rep who was fantastic, but couldn't really fix things. I wasted a day and a half on this and was worse off than when I had started.

Does this make Chase Ultimate Rewards points more valuable than AMEX SPG points because of the ease of transfer even though the earnings rates are not as good?

This is a great post. I was under the impression that hoarding miles in one account would be a good idea, but you gave me a better idea. Thanks Lucky.

Yawn....just another post in order to push more affiliate credit card links.

Remember that if you move Starwood points to United, you only get half the miles of moving to another airline.

Don't forget Amex MR points are transferable to Emirates as well.

@ WhatWdJamesDo -- Yes and no. For instant transfers they definitely are, but at the end of the day you essentially earn 1.25 miles per Starpoint when transferring in the right increments, so Starpoints can be worth more. And they can also be useful for hotel redemptions.