Should You Transfer Points Before You Need Them?
Tl;dr: Transfer bonuses can stretch your points, but at the price of flexibility. Speculative transfers make the most sense when you have points to spare and a realistic use for the miles.
If you follow the points world (e.g. via the LazyPoints newsletter), you’ve probably heard about transfer bonuses: opportunities to take transferable points like Amex Membership Rewards and convert them into airline or hotel points at an increased transfer ratio. Points normally transfer 1:1 but now there’s a 30% bonus? Great! Now your 1,000 points can become 1,300.
Free points sound great, but you generally can’t reverse these transfers, so you’ll want to make sure you can actually use those points well. And if you’re not actively planning a trip, it can be hard to predict whether you’ll actually get the best value from them, or whether keeping the points flexible for later use will end up delivering more value.
Moving points before you have a specific redemption ready to book is called a speculative transfer. I do it sometimes—but it’s pretty far down my points priority list.
What Are You Actually Saving?
Suppose a flight costs 60,000 miles. Here’s roughly how many credit card points you’d need:
| Transfer bonus | Points to transfer* |
|---|---|
| None | 60,000 |
| 20% | 50,000 |
| 30% | 47,000 |
| 40% | 43,000 |
*Rounded up to the nearest 1,000 points.
If you eventually book that flight at that price, a 30% bonus saves you 13,000 credit card points—assuming that redemption is still available when you’re ready to book and you don’t find a better use for the flexible points in the meantime.
There are risks. That flight might be a rare deal that you can’t find or replicate later, or the airline could raise redemption rates or availability could become scarce.
Even if you can find a similar booking, you might not be able to transfer the exact correct amount of points, leaving you with leftovers that might either go to waste (especially if they expire) or tempt you into transferring more.
And before transferring, check expiration rules, cash fees, and the change or cancellation policy for the award you’d likely book. Even if the points cost of a redemption looks solid, you still might be better off transferring to a different partner whose policies on things like changes or baggage are a better fit for your travel habits.
Where I’d Consider It
The programs I value most very rarely have transfer bonuses. That tends to leave programs that I call situational: ones that have their moments, but can be hard to build a strategy around if you are a lazy, economy flyer. Of these, a few stand out as candidates for a speculative transfer under the right circumstances.
Virgin Atlantic is one. Virgin Points don’t expire, so you won’t need to scramble to book something. Their flights to London offer pretty reliable value even despite high fees (flights back across the pond, not so much). But beyond that, economy value is hit or miss—I used Virgin Points to get to Portugal recently and it was… fine.
Air France–KLM Flying Blue is another. Although the miles do expire, it’s fairly easy to prevent that. There’s always the chance of stacking a transfer bonus with their monthly Promo Awards, though I’ve never found one of these in the wild from wherever I’ve lived. While I find manual Flying Blue searches pretty frustrating, they can be fairly easy to search with a tool like Roame, and decent deals do exist in my experience.
Air Canada Aeroplan and Avios would take more convincing for my travel patterns. I often find award searches difficult with these programs (Roame helps with Air Canada, less so with Avios programs). Aeroplan can offer solid business class awards, but the economy pricing is rarely competitive, in my experience. Avios offers some genuine sweet spots, like business class to Spain (I have actually replicated this in the wild), and with the ability to transfer points between multiple loyalty programs, there’s a little more flexibility than with single-airline points. But, like Air Canada, I have struggled to find economy flights at decent value with Avios.
My Strategy
My go-to programs are Alaska Atmos and Delta SkyMiles. In my booking experience, I typically book Japan flights via Atmos for 75k points round-trip and SkyMiles trips to Europe for around 45k. So I try to keep enough points across Atmos/Bilt and SkyMiles/Amex to cover those typical redemptions.
I also like to keep a reserve of flexible credit card points. Those give me options when it’s time to book.
But if I have a surplus? At that point I will consider a speculative transfer. I’ve slowly built up my Virgin balance with bonuses from programs like Capital One that I otherwise don’t use that often. Now I have enough for two one-way tickets to London, just by skimming some points off the top of my less-important rewards programs.
Lazy Take 🦥
Personally, I like to prioritize easy, high-value points and programs rather than hoping a transfer bonus can help a trickier program deliver value. But if you’re sitting on a surplus of points, building a balance in a program like Virgin or Flying Blue could potentially be worth a little speculation.
Just decide how many miles you can use before deciding how many bonus miles you want.