What is a Transfer Bonus?
Essentially - it's free points or miles!
Transfer bonuses are a limited time promotion where bank/partner programs will offer extra points to transfer your flexible bank points to a specific hotel or loyalty program. Banks frequently (sometimes monthly, sometimes sporadically) 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, just for transferring!
In order to take advantage of these bonuses, you need to transfer your flexible bank points to the travel partner with the bonus. Not familiar with how to transfer points or which hotels/airlines partner with which banks? You can learn how to transfer points here, Chase Transfer Partners here, American Express transfer partners here and Capital One's here.
Keep in mind.. once you transfer points, you cannot transfer them back to your bank. They are then "stuck" in whichever airline/hotel partner you transferred to. Transfers from banks to airline or hotel partners are irreversible.
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.
Current Transfer Bonuses
(As of 5/12/2026; these are subject to change/additional bonuses added)
American Express
- Hilton: 20% bonus through 5/30/2026.
- Note that Amex standard transfer ratio is 1 Amex point equals 2 Hilton points! So when you transfer 1,000 Amex points with this transfer bonus, they become 2,400 Hilton points! (and if you have Hilton Gold Status, which you can get by having an Amex Personal Platinum or Business Platinum card; when booking 4 consecutive nights on points, you get the 5th night free!). This is a GREAT transfer points to take advantage of!
Capital One
- Qantas: 20% bonus through 11:59PM ET, May 31st, 2026
- Don't want or need to fly Qantas? Maybe you've never even heart of them! (Australian Airline) Keep in mind Airline Alliances. With this transfer bonus, you may be able to book flights on other airlines in the same alliance, such as American Airlines or British Airways, even for domestic flights!
Chase
- Flying Blue (Air France and KLM): 20% bonus through 11:59PM ET, May 27th, 2026
- Don't want or need to fly Air France or KLM? Not going to Europe soon? Keep in mind that Flying Blue is part of an Airline Alliances. With this transfer bonus, you may be able to book flights on other airlines in the same alliance, such as Delta, even for domestic flights!
- For example, you can fly Delta one-way from Denver to Minneapolis this summer and fall for just 9,000 miles booked with Air France (and this is before the transfer bonus!)
That's less miles than booking direct on Delta - for the same exact flight.
(This is why Airline Alliances can be so powerful!)
How Many Points to Transfer
To figure out how many points you NEED to transfer, you take the amount of points needs to book your flight/hotel and divide that number by the transfer bonus (in numerical form, the percent plus 1).
So say you want to book a 50,000 point flight and there's a 20% transfer bonus. You would calculate 50,000 / (1.2) to figure out how many points you need to actually transfer. In this case, it calculates out to 41,667 points.
Most programs require you transfer points in 1,000 point increments, which means for our example, with a 20% transfer bonus, you'd transfer 42,000 points to book your 50,000 point travel.
Or save your brain cells and some points - use my free Transfer Bonus Calculator! Find all of the current transfer bonuses and calculator linked here.
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