Recently, I was trying to book a ticket to London for an upcoming trip to visit my daughter. I travel to London frequently and have used many different carriers and points for my trips. I am traveling at the start of 2024 and ended up using an airline transfer bonus to reduce my cost in miles and to save on the notorious high surcharges out of London.

 

Initial Plans

I initially looked at ANA since I had such a great redemption of 88K roundtrip in business class for a Europe trip this Fall. I tried multiple US cities to position to and couldn’t find a good deal. I’ve used United miles for those flights too, but recently depleted my stockpile of United miles, so that wasn’t an option. I don’t like using my treasured Ultimate Rewards to transfer to anything but Hyatt these days, so I decided to continue looking.

Recently, I booked a ticket home from London with Virgin Atlantic in their Upper Class, so I decided to check this out again. This was the ticket I found for a roundtrip to London with a positioning flight to Boston.

 

 

The 105K in points was a great deal but $2074 in surcharges – yikes. And then I remembered that I could book a Virgin Atlantic flight with Air France.

 

 

Paying $600 for business class seats to London doesn’t bother me, and remember, this took only a partial signup bonus on one of my cards, the American Express Platinum Business Card.  Not too shabby for what would have cost me $3500 to book in cash.

Okay, it’s more in points than booking on Virgin Atlantic but way less in surcharges. I could book it cheaper if I were willing to do a connecting flight. I’m already doing one positioning flight, so I wanted to avoid that.

Transfer Bonus

Transfer bonuses come and go, but at the time of this post, there is a transfer bonus of 25% when you transfer American Express Membership Rewards to Air France. With the transfer bonus going on of 25%, I only needed to transfer 111,000 points to get my 139,000 miles to book the flight. (I had an odd 1,500 in my account left over from a previous transfer and booking).

 

 

I am happy with my redemption as it decreased my surcharges considerably – in this instance, the miles for Air France are slightly higher, but the surcharges were considerably less. I am happy to pay 6,000 more in points to save $1400 in surcharges!

 

Another Transfer Bonus

There are countless ways to make transfer bonuses work for you. Want to go to Paris? Here is a one-way flight from Houston:

 

This is already a really good flight with points, but you can save 5,000 miles per ticket when you use the transfer bonus!

 

Bottom Line

When you think about making an award redemption for flights, be sure and check our monthly transfer bonus page. It can help you make the most of your hard-earned points/miles!