US Airways is offering an excellent promotion for travelers looking to get the most value from their miles and points. Convert your hotel reward loyalty points to US Airways miles (for free), and earn a 25% bonus. US Airways Dividend Preferred members receive an additional 25% bonus on all transfers. Even better, if you have a US Airways-branded credit card, you get another 25% bonus. That’s a total bonus of 75% on your miles.
So why is this such a great deal? Let’s say you have 125,000 Marriott Rewards points, which you could convert to 50,000 US Airways Dividend Miles per the standard conversion. But with this promotion, you can get up to a 75% bonus. That’s 37,500 more miles, bringing you to a total of 87,500 miles! Remember US Airways has an excellent award chart. It costs only 90,000 miles for a roundtrip Business Class ticket to Japan, which has a value of anywhere from $4-8,000! Essentially, you are exchanging 120,000 Marriott points (which would net you three nights at the Marriott Marquis in New York’s Time Square/possibly a $600-$1,000 value) for something of much higher value. This offer is only valid until May 31, 2011, and the bonus only applies to the first transfer after registration.
If you don’t have the US Airways MasterCard or Visa, you can apply here. And, yes, there are bonus miles for applying. Perhaps you’d like to travel to Australia for 110,000 miles instead?!
If you aren’t a Dividend Miles Preferred Member, you can purchase a trial elite status valid for three months for $200. It’s certainly worth it if you are transferring a lot of hotel points to miles!
Keep in mind that every hotel program assigns a different value in the conversion to airline miles. Another excellent value is the Starwood Preferred Guest program, which gives a free 5,000 bonus miles for every 20,000 points transferred to an airline. So if you transferred 20,000 SPG points, you would get 25,000 Dividend Miles, plus a 75% bonus on top of that. That comes to 40,000 miles total, enough for a free ticket to Hawaii!
