MilesBuzz! - Transferring miles from AX Membership Rewards to Starwood Preferred?

Hi. If this has previously been discussed forgive me.

I just activated a Starwood Preferred Guest AX card. I was told that I can combine my AX Membership Reward account into this Starwood account. That seems logical -- I could use the combined points on more airlines than with Membership Rewards and I would not have to build this new Starwood account from scratch.

However, I was also told that to transfer it's 2:1 Membership Rewards to Starwood until Sept. 30 and, thereafter, it's 3:1. That stopped me dead in my tracks.

Maybe I'm missing something obvious, but aside from more flexibility in choosing air carriers (nice but certainly not essential for me), what benefit is there in combining the accounts that would make taking such a hit worthwhile? Why would you give up 1/2 the value of a Membership Rewards account now, or 2/3 of the value after Sept. 30th?

Your advice and reasoning are appreciated! http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/cool.gif

There are countless threads in both the Starwood and Amex forums debating the merits of MR v. SPG Amex.

As to why you might want to do the transfer see:
http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/Forum74/HTML/004644.html

UpgradeMe: http://makeashorterlink.com/?G226525D1

http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/biggrin.gif

because MR points have this devaluation issue, where *wood points really don't.

one MR point equals one mile. if you fly CO, DL, or, uh, US.

one *wood point equals one mile PLUS if you transfer in blocks of 20k, one *wood point is 1.25 miles. on almost any airline. maybe not TAROM, but hey. http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/smile.gif

so it's really not as bad as it looks, you see. and besides, miles on AA are worth way heaps lots more to me than miles on CO.

yeah, but 1,000 MR points = 500 Starwood points.

My point- I don't think you should transfer your points to SPG, it's not worth the 50% devaluation specially if you have lots of points which you can transfer to another airline. Since you're not planning to use this option, perhaps you can use your points for GF, merchandise, or for the future.. consider flights with a partner airline. There are many options !

For people who have a low balance in MR points, then I would agree with a transfer.



[This message has been edited by eperaltaotero (edited 09-18-2002).]

Since it seems your objective is to accumulate hotel points, you might convert MR points 1-1 to CO or DL and then 1-2 to Hilton. It's not Starwood but they do have a lot of nice hotels and I suspect 2 Hilton points are worth more than .5 Starwood.

I just did it. Transferred 200,000 AMEX MR points to Starwood online. They posted the same day.

Then I created a Qantas account and transferred 100,000 Starwood points to Qantas in batches of 20,000 / day. Starwood threw in 5,000 bonus points each day.

The 125,000 Starwood points converted to 250,000 Qantas points, a 1 - 1.25 ratio to AMEX MR points.

Most importantly, those 250,000 points are good for two 1st class roundtrip awards North America - Europe up to 10,000 miles RT on BA and can include travel on Concorde.

Conservatively guesstimating the value of Concorde travel at $10,000 RT just between JFK and London, that's $0.10 / AMEX MR point, about 5 times the accepted worthwhile value of of an FF point.

This seems worthwhile to me....