Once again we are traveling to St. Petersburg, Florida next month for Jessie’s swim meet. Once again, I booked flights on JetBlue using TrueBlue points. The flights I booked were 30,200 TrueBlue points per ticket.
And once again, you may be wondering how I always have so many TrueBlue points to book all of these tickets. Well guess what, I don’t.
When I went to book these flights, I had about 25,000 TrueBlue points in my account and I needed about another 35,000 points. To make up the difference, I transferred points to my TrueBlue account from my American Express Membership Rewards account. JetBlue is an American Express Membership Rewards travel partner. However, unfortunately, the transfer ratio is not 1:1. At the time of this post, 250 American Express Membership Rewards points equal 200 TrueBlue points. I transferred 45,000 American Express points to yield me 36,000 JetBlue TrueBlue points.
When I booked these tickets back in December 2016, I failed to note the actual cost of the tickets. A search today, shows this tickets costing $478.80 per ticket. So currently, these flights would have cost about $960 To me. it was worth the 45,000 Membership Rewards points to save close to $1000. (less $27 keep reading). Don’t forget, we easily earn a lot of Amex points because of Rob’s American Express Business Gold Rewards Card.
There was a small federal tax offset fee of $0.0006 per point of $27 that I needed to pay. There is always a fee charged when Membership Rewards points are transferred to a domestic airline frequent flyer program, with a maximum fee of $99. Amex charges this fee to offset the federal excise tax that they must pay on point transfers.
