Originally Posted by
lronglien
I have about 500K MR points. Wife and I are planning a two week trip to Hawaii early next year. We fly out of MSP, but am open to driving to Chicago and going out of ORD or MDW. We are Platinum card holders. Is it better to transfer these points to say Delta for the airfare or use Amex Travel and get the 30% return after flying?
I just did the latter -- booked J fares out of PHL on AA, good routes, the lie-flat 777 service connecting in DFW. The fare using insider-whatever at Amex website gave something like 5% off of the ~$2300 fare; and then 35% of those points will come back in 30 days if you have the Amex Platinum
Business card. So basically getting a bit over 1.6 cents per MR point relative to the cash price. This said, I also called in first to Amex because sometimes they can give you lower fares (if flying J/F). Year before last this saved another $200/ticket; this year no such luck.
This said, I'm reminded how 20 years ago we used to buy F tickets RT from a consolidator at about $1550/apiece, on NW connecting for the non-stop MSP-HNL on a great DC10.