American Express Membership Rewards - best way to get from NYC to Taipei, Taiwan with MR points (next week)

I need to travel from NYC to Taipei, Taiwan next week to pick up our adopted baby. I have 300,000+ AmEx points (and 800,00+ Hilton points). I am assuming that since I have to go next week, I don't have time to transfer to an airline program? There are 5 people who need to travel.

How does pay with points work? I can't figure out how many points it will cost me per dollar?

thanks in advance for any help anyone can give me with this.

Karen

Pay with points is a 1 point = 1 penny proposition. Are you looking to fly in coach or a front cabin? How long do you need to stay? Have you even looked to see if there are reward tickets available?

CO, DL and a couple other programs transfer instantly and CO partners with BR so you could conceivably fly the direct flight to TPE and do it on points, albeit with a rush ticketing fee since you are so close to the date of departure. I wouldn't give up on that option until you confirm that it really is not available.

What are your actual travel dates? Is one of the five passengers the baby?

You have a very slim chance of being able to do this. You probably could do a transfer to an airline program almost immediately (I know VS works this way) but there are several problems:

1. You will not have enough points for 5 people
2. You will find it almost impossible to get availability for 1 reward ticket, never mind 5 at such short notice

You may have to just buy the tickets normally I'm afraid - unless anyone else has some ideas?

on the way back we will have 6 passengers with one of them being the baby. On the way out, we have four adults (one is a senior) and one child, age 6.

we are hoping to travel April 1 - 11, but that is flexible by a few days on either side.

we each have about 16000 Continental points if that helps. And a total of about 300,000 USAir points between us. I see that EVA Air partners with Continental, maybe that would work?

Karen

Note that you can't pool miles among separate people to buy a single ticket (without exorbitant transfer fees).

can I transfer some of my Amex points to each person so that we each have enough for one ticket?

First congratulations on the adoption, and second you would have a difficult time transferring between the partners because you would have to unlink each account and relink them one at a time. You can only transfer to one airline account of the same type at a time; i.e. Continental can only have 1 linked account to your Amex account. That being said you could probably get two to three tickets in economy possibly in business, but would have to buy the rest last minute.

What you can do is setup account at both Delta and Northwest and link the two accounts to get the transfer bonus promotion. Then register at Delta for the 20% transfer promotion from AE. After that, transfer your 300k to Delta, then to NW. You won't get your bonus soon enough for this trip but you get them for later travel. NW has seats for 5 available through KE for the next week and some return dates available as well. However, to book ticket within 7 days, there is a $100 per ticket fee at Northwest. In addition, you can try to book China Airlines which fly direct into Taipei, which cannot be booked online. You will have to also pay call center fee as this has to be done by an NW agent. If you really have trouble finding seats, try to contact an agent at Chinatown. They can get consolidator fare that books into H class (for NW) for low price, so you can ticket it 3 days out for a reasonable price. As to your last ticket return, try to get it through a travel agent in Taiwan. The one-way fare is probably NTD $25k to $30k, which isn't too bad.

I disagree that he will not get bonus points in time for a Delta 20% transfer since they recently changed how long bonus points take and they now are almost instant. I do agree Northwest via Delta is a good choice and they seem to have a lot of availability lately to Asia if you go through SEA,PDX and then on to Taipei via Tokyo.

You can call Delta and have them check but depending on the rep you get they may want to charge you just to hold. Once again depending on who answers the phone you will get a different answer so you may want to hangup if they want to charge you.

Thank you all for your patience in explaining this for me. I am not so savvy about redeeming points, we've been saving them up for years and years planning to do this trip.

Can I get the transfer from AmEx to Delta and then Delta to NW done in time to book for next week? And if I have all the points in my name, can I book the whole party with that? Can my Continental points be transferred to NW too? If I can do all of that and get the bonus credited in time, I would have almost enough for 5 first class award tickets, if I am reading the website right. That would be very awesome.

another option I can do is to use my AmEx points to pay for the hotel in Taipei and pay cash for the flights. Coach class is under $900 per person right now, but we are hoping to at least be in EVA Air Deluxe class.

Karen

Transfer to DL and to NW are all instant. As to Bonus, I did 2 transfers today, 1 took 2hrs, the other still hasn't gotten it after 9 hrs.

You cannot transfer CO to NW, and I haven't seen 5 Business Class seats available for next week online. You might need to check with agents first before you try to do that.

Whatever you want to do, you need to act fast as the purchase option gets really expensive if it gets too close to departure.

Thank you all for your patience in explaining this for me. I am not so savvy about redeeming points, we've been saving them up for years and years planning to do this trip.

Can I get the transfer from AmEx to Delta and then Delta to NW done in time to book for next week? And if I have all the points in my name, can I book the whole party with that? Can my Continental points be transferred to NW too? If I can do all of that and get the bonus credited in time, I would have almost enough for 5 first class award tickets, if I am reading the website right. That would be very awesome.

another option I can do is to use my AmEx points to pay for the hotel in Taipei and pay cash for the flights. Coach class is under $900 per person right now, but we are hoping to at least be in EVA Air Deluxe class.

Karen

I have 2 delta account link to my MR account and I transfered to both of them no problem.

Did you tried to create a 2nd link on MR for CO? I like CO the best because they are instant transfer.

First find yourself the award flight you need and then during booking, they will ask for you to either buy miles to pay or transfer MR point. Choose the transfer MR point, within 5sec (at least for me), everything done, got my ticket and seat assignment.

Is Delta instant like CO?

Cindy

Is Delta instant like CO?

Yes, as long as the accounts are linked up correctly in advance.

Just to update everyone with what I heard from Delta. I still haven't received the bonus miles on my second transfer after 1.5 day, and the answer I got was the fine print says that it can take up to 6-8 weeks to get these bonus miles. Of course, there is nothing that they can do to speed up this process, and suggest me to purchase miles if I need them soon. So, do not count on it!!

the answer I got was the fine print says that it can take up to 6-8 weeks to get these bonus miles.

Actually the T&Cs say 1 week.

Members will receive a 20% mileage bonus on all miles transferred from the date you register through March 31. Bonus miles will be posted one (1) week from the transfer receipt by Delta

https://www.delta.com/marketing/mrquarterlymarketing0109/index.jsp?soac=0309LTO

I got it after 4 days. I guess the customer service at DL really wanted me to purchase the miles then.