Amazing American Express Membership Rewards Promotion: 50% Delta Bonus and 25,000 MQMs
Update: Some offers mentioned below are no longer available. View the current offers here.
Wow. That's all I can say. American Express normally runs 10-40% transfer bonuses to Delta, but I've never seen anything like this. Before you transfer any points, double-check with Delta and American Express that you are eligible for this offer.
"Once you register, you'll earn a 50% mileage bonus on all the Membership Rewards® points you transfer into your SkyMiles account by December 15, 2010.
And if you transfer 50,000 points or more, you'll also receive 25,000 Medallion® Qualification Miles (MQMs). That's enough to give you Medallion status and benefits like waived baggage fees, unlimited upgrades, preferred seating, and more."
So not only do you get a 50% bonus, which is unusually high, but you also get enough Medallion qualifying miles to get you to Silver elite status- or bump you over a certain threshold if you already have a lot of MQMs. This is a huge amount of elite qualifying miles- for example you'd get that many miles for flying LAX-Sydney roundtrip AND LAX-Tokyo roundtrip. Or to get 30,000 MQMs from the Delta Reserve card, you'd need to pay the annual fee of $450 and then spend $60,000 in a calendar year.
Even if these 25,000 won't push you over to the next elite level, Delta has rollover, so any miles over your current level, but below the next, will rollover to the next year's qualification. Its always nice to start the year with a healthy balance of Medallion Qualifying Miles.
If you have an American Express Membership Rewards account, but don't currently have 50,000 points, American Express will let you take out an advance of up to 15,000 points (not available on corporate cards).
If that's not enough you can buy points for 2.5 cents each, max of 500,000 points a year.
If you don't have an American Express card, you can get a Gold Card here that comes with a 25,000 point sign-up bonus when you spend $1,000 in the first three months. Offer expires 11/8/2010.
While I generally don't recommend Amex to Delta transfers, this offer is too lucrative to pass up!