Not everything having to do with credit cards and rewards is doom and gloom these days. Yes, frequent flier and other loyalty programs are devaluing their rewards, but there are some bright spots out there if you know where to look.

Membership Rewards Takes A Step In The Right Direction

One of the great things about American Express’s Membership Rewards card is it’s flexibility. You have your choice of transferring points to miles in many different airline programs. Other airlines don’t have a direct points transfer option, but they have a fixed point award option. The flexibility is key to it’s value since you may be saving up points for years, without being locked into a single program. When you are locked into a single program, inevitably the airline will increase it’s award redemption requirements, curtail availability, or even drop their flight to your intended destination.

Even when things go according to plan, it can be very confusing to figure out where you should put your miles to get your flight. For a case study in that, check out my parent’s experience on their recent trip to Africa. At that time, I noted: “No one ever said that booking award travel was easy, in fact, it seems to be deliberately designed to be difficult. I suppose they figure that travelers with more money than time will just pay cash for their flights.”

Fortunately, American Express has taken the first step in helping it’s members untangle the web of alliances that makes point redemption so challenging. It is called the Membership Rewards Flight And Room Finder or MR-FARF (just kidding). While the name may not be catchy, hopefully the tool will catch on. What it does is search through the participating airline’s award inventory for flights that match your itinerary. It also works with participating hotel programs.

What’s The Catch?

Usually, when you find a tool this great, there is always a catch. In this case, you may have already sensed what it is by my use of the word “participating”. So far, Amex only has three airlines listed: Virgin Atlantic, Airtran, and Hawaiian. Missing are at least a dozen other Membership Rewards airline partners. Also, it is not clear if this tool searches within the available inventory of award seats among those airlines partners. For example, your Hawaiian miles may be redeemed on airlines such as Delta, Continental, Northwest, Alaskan, and Virgin Atlantic. I can’t say if this tool will search all of these airlines for awards available to Hawaiian Airline’s loyalty program members.

What About Hotels?

This program also purports to work with hotel bookings, which are much more simple than airlines anyways. Like the flight search option, this tool is only searching a limited number of loyalty programs. In this case, only two, Priority Club and Hilton.

What Do I Think?

I am going to go out of my way not to criticize Amex for this very limited offering. In fact, I commend them for this initial effort. Of course, I would like to see them increase the number of airlines and hotel chains that they include in this search. I would also like them to further clarify if this tool searches airline’s partner’s availability. Ultimately, I would hope that the goal is a search of all available options for redeeming your Membership Rewards points. This would greatly enhance the value of their program at little direct expense to American Express. Finally, the holy grail would be to include a rewards availability calendar

Good start Amex, keep it up, and please find a catchy name!

This entry was posted on Monday, March 23rd, 2009 at 23:45 and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.