20%-30% Bonus For Transferring Starwood Starpoints To American; Get Up To A 62.5% Effective Bonus

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Earn Starpoints with the Starwood AMEX or the Chase Marriott Visa. You can view credit card offers by hovering over the “Credit Cards” tab. You can then click on “Credit Cards From All Banks“ to find card offers via the logo of the bank you’re looking for.

American is offering a 20-30% bonus for converting Starpoints into miles through 10/15.

You’ll get a 20% bonus from AA with each conversion. A transfer of 20K Starpoints normally converts into 25K AA miles, but will become 30K AA miles with this promotion, for an effective 1.5 miles per Starpoint.

Additionally, you’ll get a bonus 10K AA miles for each 100K AA miles received.

In other words if you convert 80K Starpoints you’ll normally get 100K AA miles. With this promotion you’ll get an additional 20% bonus and 10K bonus miles, for a total of 130K AA miles. That’s an effective 1.625 miles per Starpoint.

Note that there’s a limit of 79,999 Starpoints converted per transaction and a limit of one conversion per 24 hour period, so you would have to make that conversion in at least 2 transactions.

Back in 2010 when these SPG-AA bonuses started you were able to rack up hundreds of thousands of Starpoints thanks to the US Mint, miles transferred to AA counted for million miler status, and AA had an awesome round-the-world award chart. I took advantage of all of those, but they no longer exist.

During 2015’s bonus I cautioned that American’s award chart was “so much better than their competition’s award charts that you can’t help but wonder when the devaluation will come…”

The devaluation came and it made their award chart downright terrible. Then the other shoe fell when American made their saver awards far more difficult to find than on any other airline. I wrote last July that their lack of award space could even be construed as a scAAm and even some of the biggest AA AApologist bloggers are finally starting to call them out on it as well.

Doug Parker has gone from America West to ruin USAirways and now American. Even Jeff Smisek would blush at his actions.

So why would you transfer valuable Starpoints to American?

Despite the dearth and American award space and the fuel surcharges to redeem miles for travel on British Airways there are still some good uses. You’ll have to hunt for them as many partner awards are only bookable over the phone, such as Air Tahiti Nui, Cathay Pacific, Etihad, JAL, Qatar, and more.

For example I used 105K American miles to fly last month in an apartment on Etihad Shower Class from the Maldives to Cleveland via Abu Dhabi and JFK.

Though because of the #ElectronicsBan, I was stuck having to take pictures with my GoPro:

And my phone:

Just be sure to compare American’s requirements with other airlines before transferring.

In this post I compared how many miles are required to fly on every OneWorld route from JFK.

Just for example, I flew last August from JFK to Vancouver in Cathay Pacific First Class for 35K Alaska miles. That same flight would have cost 55K AA miles. Non-elites would also have paid American a $75 last-minute fee which Alaska doesn’t charge, so be sure to do your research before you transfer.

-The names on the Starwood account and the AA account must match or the transfer will be rejected. You are able to transfer Starpoints for free between people living at the same address, though if you are changing the address on one of the accounts you’ll have to wait 30 days before transferring Starpoints to someone else’s Starwood account.

-The 25% bonus miles fulfilled by American will be posted within 7 business days after the initial conversion activity has been posted by Starwood Preferred Guest. The initial transfer usually takes a couple of days. You can hold an AA award for 5 days which is enough time for the transfer to process.

HT: Azis Papa, via DDF