Starting January 1, 2015 American Express Membership Rewards will begin capping transfers to Delta Skymiles at 250,000 miles per calendar year. This means in a single calendar year, no more than 250,000 Membership Rewards points can be transferred into any number of Delta Skymiles accounts.
With the difficulty of finding reasonable award space with Delta, this new limit isn’t really a huge blow. However, if you find yourself in need of more than 250,000 Skymiles per year, simply get a spouse or family member involved in earning Membership Rewards and you can double your transfer power. Or pick up one of the many Delta Skymiles credit cards to top off your mileage balance if necessary.
If you’re earning more than 250,000 Membership Rewards, there are still at least half a dozen decent transfer partners you can unload your extra points with:
- Aeroplan
- British Airways
- Frontier Airlines
- Hawaiian Airlines
- Virgin America
- Virgin Atlantic
- Jet Blue
The bottom line is, this isn’t a huge blow since we can still earn Skymiles in other ways and have some options to unload excess Membership Rewards points. It’s still worth noting so that those who do need additional Skymiles can make alternate plans for earning them.
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My roommate’s dad has a ton of Membership Rewards points. Let’s say he wants to transfer more than 250,000 points per year from his own Membership Rewards account to Skymiles. Will it be possible to transfer Membership Rewards points from his own account to the Skymiles accounts of his family and friends?
Unfortunately you can only transfer out 250k per year, no matter how many different accounts you’re transferring to.
This would be something my mom my want to know, me on the other hand….i dont know how i would ever obtain that many airline miles :'(