Being in the West typically means that Avios isn’t really a good option to transfer your Membership Rewards Points but to help me in my intra-Australia flights with Qantas, I needed to top up my Avios balance by 14,700 Avios.
The Process
Like every other transfer from Membership Rewards to a loyalty program, the process is dead simple.
First, log into your American Express Account
Look for your Membership Rewards balance and click on the View and Redeem Points button.
Go to the Travel menu and find the Frequent Traveler Participants submenu. Click on the link.
Scroll down until you find British Airway Executive Club (Avios) as a transfer partner.
Click on Transfer my points and then choose how many points you want to transfer over. For security, you will need to confirm your credit card information.
Membership Rewards transfer to Avios on a 1:1 basis so I transferred 14,700 MRs.
After you click on Complete Transfer, you will go to a final confirmation screen.
How Long Does It Take?
American Express shows that it can take up to 5 Business Days to transfer the points over. I transferred my points at approximately 4:00PM MST on June 8th.
The points showed up in my British Airways account two days later.
It should be noted that June 8th was a Thursday and the point showed up in my account on Saturday morning.
Conclusion
I’ve always found that American Express is very conservative in their estimates for transfer times. Though they claim that it can take up to 5 business days, my experience has that it’s been much faster. It’s similar to my experience with transferring MRs to SPG.