You may be seeing references to transfer bonuses and wonder what those are or how you could benefit from them. By the end of reading this, you’ll know exactly what two things you’ll need to do to make sure you will be ready to take advantage of them the next time one comes around.

Let’s talk about transferring points. The different major banks’ points currencies (i.e., Chase Ultimate Rewards, AmEx Membership Rewards, Citi ThankYou Points, and Capital One Venture miles) are all transferable to airline and hotel partners. Transferring your points from your credit-card account to an airline or hotel program is usually going to be the absolute best way to maximize what you can get out of your points because you can use the points to book award flights or award nights and target which programs will give you the most bang for your buck. (When you book travel using points through a credit card travel portal, you’re only getting the value of whatever the market price for the flight or night is. Which is good—but transferring the points to a travel partner can be even better.)

How transfer bonuses work. Periodically, different banks will offer transfer bonuses from their points program to different travel partners. Right now, for example, there’s a 30% transfer bonus when you transfer Chase Ultimate Rewards points (UR points) to Virgin Atlantic Flying Club. (It lasts until June 15.) Usually, transferring 10,000 Chase UR points from Chase to Virgin Atlantic Flying Club will get you 10,000 Virgin Atlantic miles. But when Chase offers a 30% transfer bonus, transferring the same number of UR points will get you 13,000 Virgin Atlantic miles!

Here’s an example of how a transfer bonus might play out:

I’ve picked a flight from Seattle to London in economy on Virgin Atlantic leaving 6 April 2024.

If you want to book this flight using your Chase UR points, when you transfer those points to Virgin Atlantic Flying Club while the transfer bonus is happening, you don’t have to transfer 25,000 UR points. You just transfer 20,000 UR points and the 30% transfer bonus transforms those 20,000 UR points into 26,000 Flying Club miles. (Points can only be transferred in chunks of 1,000, which is why you’d actually end up with 26,000 miles. 20,000 is the minimum number of UR points that would yield at least 25,000 Flying Club miles, which is the amount Virgin Atlantic requires to book this flight. So you’ll also be left with an extra 1,000 Flying Club miles.) Now you have 5,000 “extra” UR points that you didn’t have to transfer to Virgin Atlantic and you can use for something else, because you took advantage of the transfer bonus. (Those 5,000 UR points could be a whole Hyatt night!)

So the biggest takeaway from learning about transfer bonuses is that you can save a lot of points if you are able to book something during one of these transfer-bonus time periods!

How do I know when a transfer bonus is happening? The most likely way is that you’ll find out from one of your favorite miles-and-points experts! The second-most likely way is that you’ll just see it when you log into your points account and navigate to the “transfer to travel partners” page. Like this:

When do you want to transfer points? You usually want to transfer your points out to a travel partner only after you’ve verified that award flights or nights you want to book are actually available. Why? Because once you transfer the points out of your credit-card account and to a travel partner, you can’t transfer them back. You want those seats or rooms to actually be bookable! So for example, if you have AmEx Membership Rewards points and you transfer them to Delta, they’re now Delta points. Period. And they can’t become Membership Rewards points again. So if you want to book a specific flight and you think Delta might have good award availability, but then you only look after you’ve transferred and discover that Delta’s award calendar is looking terrible, you’re stuck! But if you have AmEx Membership Rewards points and you see that Delta’s award calendar is terrible, and Air Canada’s award calendar is looking good, you can still transfer those points to Air Canada and get a better value for your flight. You have the choice and you can pick what benefits you the most.

Should I transfer points just to take advantage of the transfer bonus? If you’re wondering whether you should take advantage of a transfer bonus speculatively—meaning you don’t have an actual flight on the airline in mind to book right now—just so you get more of the airline’s points, here’s my advice: don’t do it. Well, don’t do it unless you know for sure that you will absolutely use that airline’s miles to book something really soon. It’s not the worst thing in the world to end up with points stuck in one airline’s program, but keeping those same points in their transferable state is more likely to get you a great redemption because you can pick which program benefits your particular goals the most when you’re actually ready to book something. It gives you much more flexibility to keep your points transferable until you have a solid plan on how to use them. Even though you may be tempted by the transfer bonus, without a real plan to use those extra points you gain, you may not come out ahead of what you might be able to accomplish using those points for a different travel partner.

Important tip: Also think about transfer time! While a lot of transfers between points programs and their travel partners are instantaneous (e.g., Chase UR to Hyatt), some aren’t. (I once had a transfer from Chase to Singapore Airlines take several days. I was sweating during the wait, wondering if my seats would disappear!) And that can mean the difference between being able to book an award flight and that flight being gone by the time your points transfer over. Some airline programs allow you to put an award booking on hold for a certain period, which might be enough time to allow your points show up, so do some googling before you try to see if that’s an option for the trip you want. (I have a great chart laying out all the different average transfer times to each loyalty program; my free email newsletter subscribers get access to it.)

Can anyone get transfer bonuses? Yes and no. Most transfer bonuses are publicly available, meaning anyone can get them if they have that bank’s points. But occasionally there are targeted transfer bonuses, like the ones I saw when I logged into my AmEx Membership Rewards account this week: 25% bonus to Flying Blue and 20% bonus to Cathay Pacific. I’ve never seen any other bank do a targeted transfer bonus but American Express, but never say never.

So the two things? You said there were two things I need to know. Right!

Thing One: Whenever you’re looking into booking a trip using points, always do a google search before you transfer any points that is something like [transfer bonus] and then use use the Tools to filter Any time > Past month. Check to see if any airline or hotel programs you might potentially want to transfer your points to have any bonuses going on before you settle on a program to use. If you want to book a flight on Virgin Atlantic and you discover that American Express has a 20% bonus but Citi has a 30% bonus, that might help you lean toward using your Thank You points instead of your Membership Rewards points. It would be really frustrating to book a trip and then only find out about an option that made more sense after you’ve already booked it. It’s worth a quick search.

Thing Two: Whenever you find out about a new transfer bonus, no matter what program it’s with, take a quick mental run-through of what travel plans you have coming up (or what travel plans you might want to have coming up) and see if there are any bookings you might want to make now because of the transfer-bonus timing opportunity. If you know you were thinking about flying to New York in the fall but weren’t sure when or how you’d get there, test out the award availability for the program with the new bonus you just heard about and see if there’s a way to get there using the bonus to bump up your points purchasing power. Strike while the transfer bonus is hot, so to speak.

If you’re interested in earning transferable points so you can be ready to jump on bonus offers when they pop up, head to my Travel Freely page with all the best welcome offers on cards with those points. Filter by Rewards Program and then select these four, and it’ll show you the best publicly available offers from all four of the major banks (even the ones that don’t earn us a commission).