Random News: IHG Set Your Sights Promo, 40% Transfer Bonus to British Airways, and AMEX Offers for Virgin America, Carters, and Healthy Back Store

Good afternoon everyone!  I love waking up in the morning and having a ton of new travel promos and offers to talk about, it makes my job a little easier.  The first offer I want to talk about is IHG’s new promo called Into the Nights Set Your Sights (link) (hat tip to Loyalty Traveler).  It is very similar in structure to the Into the Nights promo.  Here are my offers:

• Book 5 nights at any IHG property
• Book a Mini-Vacation Package (see image below)
• Book and pay with a Chase IHG Rewards Credit Card
• Book a stay with a Bonus Points Package

I must complete 3 out of 4 offers to get 33,100 bonus IHG points.

The problem (or possible opportunity) with booking the Mini-Vacation Package is that it is actually a timeshare presentation, not a mini vacation.  Usually when I think of a mini vacation, I do not think of sitting in a sales presentation for 1-2 hours, but that is just me.  IHG is trying to make your mini vacation / timeshare presentation as enticing as possible by offering you a 4 day / 3 night stay at one of their 6 vacation properties (Orlando, Las Vegas, Myrtle Beach, Gatlinburg, Cape Canaveral, and Williamsburg) for only $199 + tax, with a $100 night credit or 20,000 IHG points (link).  Assuming you live/travel to an area with one of the 6 vacation properties, you might do pretty well.  Since you are required to attend the sales presentation, you must visit the property, you cannot call the front desk and tell them to virtually check you in.  I like your thinking though…

In other news, American Express Membership Rewards has a 40% bonus on transfers to British Airways (hat tip to Miles4More).  Normally transfers are 1:1, so anytime there is a huge transfer bonus from Membership Rewards, it is time to take note.  The transfer bonus should be good through January 31, 2015, but there is no guarantee that the transfer bonus will last that long (remember the American Airlines Cadillac promo?).

I was checking my Mercedes Benz Platinum and Premier Rewards Gold cards and I have 32,553 Membership Reward Points.  What should I do?  Transfer some?  Transfer all?  Transfer none?

I first looked at the Membership Rewards transfer partners (link) and cross referenced those airlines with SPG transfer partners (link).  It might surprise you that 13 out of 17 airlines are on both lists.

I would seriously consider moving all my Membership Reward points to British Airways, unless I had plans to transfer Membership Reward Points to El Al, Frontier, Iberia Plus (British Airways workaround) or JetBlue.  If you did not have plans to transfer to those 4 airlines, you can always transfer SPG points to the other airlines (assuming you had a large stash of SPG points).

If you plan on moving some Membership Reward points to British Airways, read this post.

Here is the complete list of SPG airline transfer partners (Membership Reward airline partners are in red):

Random question, does anyone know how I can combine Blue Cash Preferred dollars and Old Blue Cash dollars?  I’m not sure why there are separate.  Thank you for the help.

Last but not least, here are 3 new AMEX Offers that showed up in my account this morning.

If you have any questions, please leave a comment below.  Have a great day everyone!