American Express Membership Rewards - Transferring LOTS of MR Points by EOY

Now that USAir will not be part of the MR program, I WAS planning to transfer my points to USAir by EOY and get the Starwood card. I'm having second thoughts about putting all my eggs into one basket. Does anyone have another stragegy? Do I "lose" points if I transfer them (or some of them) to Starwood? I'm not familiar with their transfer policies.

Thanks so much and Happy Holidays.

Not the greatest deal and I LOVE Starwood points. Basically, 999 MR points nets you only 333 Starwood points. Last year they ran a special where you got 500 for 1,000 - not great but better since the 500 was worth 625 airline miles after the conversion bonus with most airlines.

Thanks, Stevens. So, I assume that if you then want to transfer Starwood points to airline points, it's 1 to 1? Transferring them to USAir sounds better. I'll look at my options some more.

As mentioned before, the normal transfer rate (3 to 1) to Starwood from AMEX is not very good so I wouldn't chose that alternative either.

I was in a similar position and decided to transfer 205k points to US last week. I still have over 200k AMEX points left but I wanted to move a large portion to US since I hate CO (can't ever get an award on them with the miles I have) and am not too fond of DL (haven't tried getting an award on them lately but with all the points they are giving out with their DL AMEX card I just can't imagine that awards will be that easy to come by). Since I use mostly Star Alliance airlines and live in the north east, US was the best altenative for me. If the "NEW" US leaves the Star Alliance I will shoot myself for transferring all these points to my account. (Highly doubt they will leave unless UA forces them out.)

Thanks, Christian. I hear on you the Star Alliance thing.

I made a transfer (not as large as this one) years ago when USAir was supposedly leaving MR, only to find out that they renewed. I'm not too hopeful that will happen again, though.