Diners Club Club Rewards - BA 50% bonus is coming back Dec. 1/ 2007

...until Feb. 29/ 2008 IIRC. A DC rep just told me so!
So think twice before converting to Midwest @ 50% bonus which exp. Nov. 30, which is itself an excellent deal for conversion onward to AGR & Choice; a good deal for onward to HHonors.

Decisions, decisions!

...until Feb. 29/ 2008 IIRC. A DC rep just told me so!
So think twice before converting to Midwest @ 50% bonus which exp. Nov. 30, which is itself an excellent deal for conversion onward to AGR & Choice; a good deal for onward to HHonors.

Decisions, decisions!
One way to look at it is that with a signup bonus or a retention bonus, the DC annual fee pays for itself if you use the Midwest->AGR->Choice transfer:

A good retention bonus that a number of people here have gotten is 10k (2k per each of 5 months with modest minimum spend). 10k converts to 15k Midwest miles this month. 15k Midwest miles converts to 15k AGR points. 15k AGR points converts to 75k Choice points.

Anytime at all, 75k Choice points gets you at least one night at a Preferred or Summit luxury hotel, which typically costs $300ish+ a night in many locations.

If they repeat the winter sale, 75k Choice points will get you 2, quite likely 3 such nights during the winter to early spring (depending on locaiton and your Choice status as to how for out you can use it). That's $600++ in value.

Or anytime at all, 75k Choice points will get you at least 3 nights at many nice Clairion or Quality Resort locations in Europe, which with the rising cost of Euro relative to USD, would likely cost you $200++ a night. And thus again $600+++ in value.

Or, you can move the 75k Choice onwards to Southwest, and get 30 RR credits, which is 2 RR short of 2 restricted round-trip awards or (new) 2 RR short of an unrestricted (holiday blackout dates only) "freedrom" award. Either way of looking at it it's at least several hundred dollars of value.

Now, take 10k DC points and add the 50% bonus and turn them into 15k BA miles, and do you get the same value? It costs 100k BA miles to fly business ("Club") US<->UK (and even more for just an hour or two beyond the UK, unless AA which charges the same to anywhere in Europe as to London). 100k is about 6 times 15k, and so you'd need to get at least 6*600 = 3600 value out of that to match it. I guess it might depend in which departure city you're living in as to whether that's competitive with BA's sale prices.

By my recent comparisons, BA is almost 50% more expensive than AA to Europe, so this 50% bonus may kinda result in a wash if that's where you're going!

Also, beware taxes on BA awards are way way higher than AA awrads. For example, I was pricing LAX to some onward European cities, and AA only wanted 90k + way under $100 in taxes, while BA wanted 120k and $299 in taxes for the same class of travel!!! Yikes!

However, BA gives some Asian partner rewards cheaper, OTOH. It prices LAX to HKG on Cathey at 100k, for examplek, while AA charges 110k on to "Asia 2".

Having said all that: The most you can transfer through AGR (unless you're elite there) is 25k per calendar year, which implies that 17k is the most that it would make sense to transfer from DC to Midwest this month (or 16k and buy 1k Midwest miles for $30). So if you have a lot more than that, you could do that and then do the rest of them to BA. (It's not clear how long this good AGR->Choice transfer ratio will stay, so it might be a little risky to transfer more now in the hopes of doing another Choice transfer after 1 Jan 2008.)

BA transfer bonus is now online...

https://www.citibank.com/dinersus/jsp/clubrewards/catalog/english/staticpage.jsp?pg=airlinepro

Exchange Club Rewards® points for 50% more BA Miles This offer is available only to Diner’s Club cardmembers residing in the US who are members of the British Airways Executive Club and have an Executive Club account with a registered US address. Club Rewards points issued for BA Miles may be redeemed in increments of 1,000 points (1,000 Club Rewards points equals 1,500 BA Miles with bonus).

Also, Amtrak Guest Rewards has changed the transfer ratio to Choice Hotels. Now AGR 5000 = 15000 Choice.

Wow. I remember in years past when the BA bonus would garner a huge thread response. I suspect the number of Flyertalkers using Diners Club has dropped substantially.

Wow. I remember in years past when the BA bonus would garner a huge thread response. I suspect the number of Flyertalkers using Diners Club has dropped substantially.

Agree...If it were not for my organization having the fee waived every year for us...we would all be somewhere else...that being said, the BA bonus is a very valuable perk that I have used 4 or 5 times now that allows me to get C class award seats instead of Y!!...and I will be using it again this month!

Wow. I remember in years past when the BA bonus would garner a huge thread response. I suspect the number of Flyertalkers using Diners Club has dropped substantially.BA has also devalued it from 1:2 to 1:1.5, and even more significantly, they've been running this promotion twice a year for three months at a time, meaning that it's not exactly news when it is running anymore ... if they're not running it at a given time, just wait three months at the most and they'll be running it again.