Just Call Me Haha: May Transfer Bonuses (+Flying Blue Secrets)

Every month the banks typically announce transfer bonuses, which means if you transfer points from the bank to the partner with the bonus, you’ll get more points for free with that partner! In order to take advantage of these bonuses, you need to transfer your flexible bank points to the travel partner with the bonus. You can learn how to transfer points here!

For example, if come across a 20% transfer bonus, that means it you were to transfer 10,000 bank points to that travel partner, you would get 10,000 * 1.2, or 12,000 points with the travel partner after your transfer!

Keep in mind, once you transfer points, you cannot transfer them back to your bank. Also, it is NOT recommended to transfer points from a bank to a travel partner, just because there's a bonus. It's generally best to keep your points flexible until you're ready to book travel, at which point you then transfer out of the bank.

May Transfer Bonuses*

(*these are subject to change/additional bonuses added)

American Express: TBD (I'm not going to lie, I have three airlines I'm hoping this could/will be and have my fingers crossed!)

Capital One: Qantas Airlines: 20% bonus

Chase:

Flying Blue (which is Air France and KLM): 25% bonus**

Virgin Atlantic: 25% bonus**

**These airlines also happen to be the lowest points way to go from US to Europe, at as low as 6k one way points. However, they do have higher fees than the traditional $5.60 of other airlines

Flying Blue (Air France/KLM) also has two other unique features worth highlighting which makes them very family friendly, and affordable, especially going to Europe from the US!

Kids ages 11 & under receive a 25% discount (for cash and points bookings)

Flying Blue has monthly promotion where it offers 25% off select fares, which you can combine with the transfer bonus! You have to book the travel during the promo month (in this case May) and travel within 5 months (in this case by Oct 31, 2025). (This cannot be combined with child discount).

For example, you can fly from DC to Europe for as low as 18,750 with a May promo flight; then if you add on the Chase 25% bonus, 18,750*(1-.25) =14,062 points to get to Europe!

So if you’re a family of 4; you could potentially still book Europe’s flights this summer for 120k points round trip! Which is awesome, especially if you just got the 100k pt CSP offer!!

A bonus tip for searching for flights on Air France or KLM: if you’re looking for low fare options, don’t input a departure date! If you leave the date blank, it will pull up their entire calendar for you to easily look for cheaper flight dates!

A search like this...

...will lead to a calendar view like this!

if you were to select one of the 87,500 Miles dates and drill down, you'd see the child 25% off ticket price:

and, since there's a Chase Flying Blue 25% transfer bonus, you would need to transfer out 25% less points from Chase to Flying Blue, which means you really only need 87,500pts * (1.0 - 25%) or ~66K Chase points (+ $405 in fees) to book your family of 4 a direct economy flight to Europe, instead of paying the cash price of... over $5,000!