American Express Membership Rewards - Can you link MRs on corporate card to BA miles?

I have a Corporate Amex from my employer. My main interest is in collecting BA Miles to redeem on British Airways flights.

I've never registered for the Amex Membership Rewards but would if there was a way of ultimately converting them to BA Miles. Someone suggested that there was a way to do this that involved getting a personal Amex, linking the rewards and then converting the combined awards on the personal card in some way. Does anyone know if this is true and if yes could they give me some guidance on how to do it in pratice. (The Amex web site, which would be my starting point, keeps timing out on me so no help there.)

Thanks.

I have a Corporate Amex from my employer. My main interest is in collecting BA Miles to redeem on British Airways flights.
The only even vaguely useful conversion I'm aware of is from MR to SPG to BA. It's a 2:1 conversion or slightly better if you transfer a large chunk of SPG points to BA, or do it during a promotion.

I've never heard of earning BA miles directly on a non-BA card.

On this page....

http://www99.americanexpress.com/myca/loyalty/catalog/action?request_type=un_intlCatalog&action=ParticipantsSearch&Face=en_GB

...you can see the list of Membership Rewards redemption partners in the UK, and British Airways is not included. In principle you could convert to one of the hotel programs and then to BA miles, but typically this is not good value.

Caveat: I do not have a UK Membership Rewards account and someone who does may know a solution that I do not see because there is a relationship between Amex and BA, but it does not involve Membership Rewards.

dennis

You need to be in the Membership Rewards Classic scheme to convert to ANY mileage or points scheme. If you only have a corporate Amex, you have to pay £20 + VAT to upgrade to MR Classic. (If you have a Plat Amex charge card of your own, then MR Classic comes free.)

You CANNOT transfer MR directly to BA. The best alternative is to join Starwood Preferred Guest. 2 MR points get you 1 SPG point, which you can transfer across (when you have 2,500) to 1 BA Mile. If you transfer 20,000 at once you get a 5,000 mile bonus, so 40,000 MR gets you 25,000 BA.

There is a poorer rate if you transfer through Priority Club. 1 MR = 2 PC points. 10,000 PC points can be transferred to 2,000 BA Miles. 40,000 MR points would therefore get you 16,000 BA Miles.

HOWEVER ....

Stop for a minute. The BMI Diamond Club scheme is SUBSTANTIALLY more generous than BA. Plus, you can convert 1:1 from Membership Rewards to Diamond Club. BMI may not fly far, but you can redeem across Star Alliance so you can choose from Lufthansa, ANA, Air New Zealand, Thai, Singapore, United etc etc.

BMI has something called 'cash and miles' which is very generous indeed. A business class reward flight to the US, for example, needs 37,500 BMI miles plus £255 plus tax. Compare that to the 100,000 BA Miles required for a business class flight to the US!

Now look at the MR points required for the same flight! You would need 160,000 MR points to get 100,000 BA Miles for a business class flight to the US. You only need 37,500 MR points plus £255 for a BMI / Star Alliance business class flight to the US. Similar benefits apply for other routes.

Even better .... if you apply for a BMI Mastercard for your own personal use, BMI throw in a further 20,000 BMI miles for free. Look at the BMI board for more info.

Hope this helps. Please post if you have any more queries.

Readers should note that everything posted here relates to the UK MR scheme. The US and European schemes have different conversion rates, and the US card cannot be converted to BMI.

Thank you everyone for these useful replies.