Through June 15, 2017, American Airlines is offering a 25% bonus when you convert your hotel points to AAdvantage miles.
There are a number of participating hotel partners, all listed on the promotion page, but some partners will offer a significantly better deal than others.
You can earn the bonus on transfers from any of the following:
- Best Western Rewards
- Club Carlson
- Choice Privileges
- Hilton Honors
- World of Hyatt
- IHG Rewards Club
- Marriott Rewards
- Starwood Preferred Guest
- Wyndham Rewards
Is This a Good Deal?
As a general rule of thumb, it’s not a good ideal to transfer hotel points to airline miles – even when there’s a bonus involved. Fortunately, there are exceptions. Here are a few cases where it might make sense to take AAdvantage of this promotion.
Starwood points are generally a good option to transfer to airline miles because they transfer to most airlines at a 1:1 ratio. Even better, if you transfer in increments of 20,000 SPG points, you receive a bonus of 5,000 miles into the airline you are transferring to – effectively a 1:1.25 transfer ratio. This bonus from American Airlines only sweetens the deal.
The second hotel program that can make this deal make sense is Marriott Rewards. Marriott Rewards has special Hotel + Air packages that offer a pretty reasonable transfer rate, if you have enough miles to make it happen. Redemptions start at 200,000 Marriott points for 50,000 American Airlines miles (+12,500 bonus miles) and a certificate for a seven night stay at a Category 1-5 Marriott Property. A better deal is to redeem 270,000 Marriott points for 120,000 American Airlines miles (+30,000 bonus miles) and a certificate for a seven night stay at a Category 1-5 Marriott Property.
If you know that you’re going to want American Airlines miles for an upcoming redemption, both of these options present good opportunities to earn a few bonus miles with an already decent transfer rate. I have transferred quite a few SPG points to American Airlines in the past just because American Airlines miles are otherwise a little challenging to get my hands on since they aren’t transfer partners of Chase, American Express, or Citi.
The only other way I would consider taking advantage of this promotion is if I had a few orphaned hotel points in a program that I otherwise was not going to be able to use.
