British Airways is offering a 25% bonus on hotel points converted into Avios through January 13.
Eligible partners are Starwood, Club Carlson, Marriott, Hilton, Priority Club, Hyatt, and Shangri-La and no registration is required, the bonus is automatic.
This bonus will get plenty of coverage, and is already getting coverage, the usual take is that it’s a good deal to transfer Starwood points. SPG certainly provides the most dramatic points into miles examples, because Starwood points are usually the best for transfers to miles anyway. 20,000 Starpoints normally yield 25,000 miles. With this bonus that’s 31,250 miles. So the illustration is 20,000 Starpoints to 31,250 miles — it looks like a bigger bonus than it is. Remember it’s just a 6250 point bonus.
And 6250 BA points aren’t enough to get me to give up the flexibility of Starpoints, which can otherwise be used for hotel stays or for transfers to most other major frequent flyer programs.
And I value 25,000 American or US Airways miles more than 31,250 BA points in any case.
Plus other airline programs do offer transfer bonuses from time to time, such as bonuses as high as 50% in the past with US Airways.
Sure, there are some good values in the Avios award chart — short-haul non-stop flights especially — and if that’s how you want to use your points then this is a reasonable opportunity to do so. But it isn’t the value I’m looking for (and short-haul non-stops can also be effectively redeemed on the same airlines as you get with BA points by transferring Starwood points to LAN at a 1:2 ratio without any bonus whatsoever).
90% Agreed.
But I like to keep some Avios in my corral for short haul AA redemptions, and I need them alongside my LAN kilometers because LAN does not permit one way redemptions. Plus, redeeming LAN kilometers for partners is a frustrating experience. If its just a single DCA-ORD R/T, I’ll happily opt for the lower value Avios transaction over LAN kilometers.
I might bite.
SPG had that 75% bonus to US last year if you had the credit card and had status. 20,000 into 43,750 US miles was real nice.
My wife and I recieved the 80,000 point Priority Club bonuses this fall for a single purchase. These points have very little value in most cases.
Seems like a decent value(80,000)x1.2=96,000 Avios each.
Thoughts?
Nevermind. Ratio is dreadful. 10,000 Priority Club points translates to 2000 Avios. Even with “bonus” the exchange is bad.
I might bite on this one because I’d find the Avios useful for domestic flights and the Lan reservations on the website doesn’t recognize TUL or anything closer than DFW, which seems weird for a Oneworld airline. My wife and I have 75k starpoints from our SPG Amex churn. My impression of SPG is that with the week or so it takes to transfer the points from SPG to other programs, it would be better to take advantage of a bonus and transfer to a program that I know I’ll eventually use. Is there a flaw in my reasoning?
This can have good uses. I’ve used the previous similar offer to get rid of orphaned hotel points – proably will use this one, too. As for converting larger amounts of my main hotel progs – simply makes no sense.