A transfer bonus is only worth anything if you can price the trip before you move the points. Most bonuses fail that test. The offer lives inside a bank's logged-in transfer screen, the award price lives somewhere else, and by the time you have both numbers the bonus has usually expired or the seat is gone.

This one passes the test, at least for one airline. Chase Ultimate Rewards points transferred to Avios get a 30% bonus through December 1, 2026, and two of the airlines that take Avios publish the offer on their own public pages. British Airways says it plainly: convert by December 1, 2026 and collect 1,300 Avios for every 1,000 Chase points. Aer Lingus says the same, with the terms attached. That matters more than the percentage. A bonus you can read on the airline's own site is a bonus you can plan around. A bonus you only heard about is a rumour with a deadline.

The Aer Lingus terms, on the airline's offers page, are short and worth reading before anything else. The bonus covers transfers completed between 12:00 AM Eastern on November 1, 2026 and 11:59 PM Eastern on December 1, 2026. It is for US members only. The minimum transfer is 1,000 Ultimate Rewards points. And the bonus Avios land up to seven days after the transfer completes — which is not the same as instantly. If you are booking a seat that might disappear this week, transfer early enough that a seven-day wait for the bonus does not leave you short. Transfer the full amount the award needs, not the amount you hope the bonus will top up in time.

The math is a 23% discount on the Chase points you need

At the standard rate, the deal is one-for-one. Iberia's own partner page states it exactly: 1,000 Ultimate Rewards points equal 1,000 Avios, in increments of 1,000, with a 1,000-point minimum. Aer Lingus states the same standard value on its partner page. The bonus lifts that to 1.3 Avios per Chase point, so every award gets cheaper in Chase points by the same fraction: divide the Avios price by 1.3, then round up to the next 1,000-point block.

That is a 23% cut in the Chase points a given award costs. It is not 30% off — the bonus adds 30% to what you receive, which is not the same arithmetic, and the difference is worth keeping straight when you are deciding how many points to move. A 13,000-Avios seat needs 10,000 Chase points with the bonus instead of 13,000 without it. A 50,000-Avios seat needs 39,000 instead of 50,000. The saving grows with the price of the seat, which is why this bonus rewards people with a specific, expensive redemption in mind and does very little for anyone moving points on spec.

How many Chase points does an Ireland flight actually cost?

Aer Lingus is the program where this bonus is easiest to use well, because Aer Lingus publishes its Avios prices. Its own chart prices reward flights one-way, by zone, with separate off-peak and peak prices. The long-haul zones are the ones that matter from North America:

• Zone 5 — Dublin to Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Hartford, Indianapolis, Minneapolis, Nashville, Newark, New York, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Raleigh-Durham, Toronto and Washington; Shannon to Boston and New York: 13,000 Avios off-peak in economy, 20,000 at peak; 50,000 Avios off-peak in business, 60,000 at peak.
• Zone 6 — Dublin to Barbados, Cancún, Denver, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Miami, Orlando, San Francisco and Seattle: 16,250 Avios off-peak in economy, 25,000 at peak; 62,500 Avios off-peak in business, 75,000 at peak.
• Shorter European flying is cheaper still: Zone 1 starts at 4,000 Avios off-peak in economy, Zone 2 at 6,500, Zone 3 at 8,500, and Zone 4 — Dublin to Dalaman — at 10,750.

Run those prices through the bonus and the Chase cost becomes concrete. An off-peak Zone 5 economy seat, one way, is 13,000 Avios, which is exactly 10,000 Chase points at 1.3. A round trip at the same price is 26,000 Avios, or 20,000 Chase points. Off-peak Zone 5 business is 50,000 Avios one way, which needs 39,000 Chase points after rounding up to the next 1,000-point block — 38,462 divided out, and Chase moves points in 1,000s, so 39,000 is the transfer that covers it. A business round trip at the off-peak price is 100,000 Avios, or 77,000 Chase points. Zone 6 economy off-peak, 16,250 Avios, is 12,500 Chase points; Zone 6 business off-peak, 62,500 Avios, needs 49,000.

Those numbers are only as good as the date you fly. Peak dates cost substantially more in every zone — 20,000 instead of 13,000 in Zone 5 economy, 60,000 instead of 50,000 in business — so the first thing to check is whether your dates fall in an off-peak or a peak window on Aer Lingus's own calendar. A bonus does not rescue a peak-date booking. It makes an off-peak booking you already wanted about a quarter cheaper in Chase points. That is the whole decision, and it is a good one if the dates cooperate.

British Airways and Iberia: same bonus, different homework

The bonus is not Aer Lingus-only. British Airways publishes the same 30% offer, the same December 1 deadline, and the same 1,300-for-1,000 figure. Iberia's public partner page, by contrast, still shows only the standard one-for-one value, with no bonus mentioned. That does not mean a transfer to Iberia Club will not earn the bonus — the bonus is applied on Chase's side — but it does mean Iberia's own page is not the place to confirm it. If you plan to book through Iberia, confirm the bonus on your Chase transfer screen before you confirm the transfer, and price the Iberia award first. Do not assume the Iberia price matches the Aer Lingus price. Each Avios program prices its own awards, and a seat that is cheap in one program's chart can be expensive in another's.

British Airways needs the same caution for a different reason. BA's reward flights carry taxes, fees and carrier charges on top of the Avios, and the cash amount varies by route and carrier. Aer Lingus is not exempt from that warning either — taxes and fees apply there too — but with Aer Lingus you at least know the Avios side of the equation before you start. With BA, search the exact flight, read the full cash amount, and only then decide whether the bonus makes that particular booking good value. The cheapest Avios price with a heavy cash surcharge is not automatically the best use of Chase points.

There is also a housekeeping point that costs nothing and saves real frustration. British Airways says Avios do not expire as long as you collect, spend, buy or share at least one Avios every 36 months. A balance parked for a speculative transfer and then forgotten is not in danger next month, but it is not immortal either. If you transfer for a trip that falls through, put the balance to work, or at least keep a small earning activity on the account, rather than discovering the expiry rule three years later.

What this post deliberately does not price

Other transfer bonuses were widely reported this week alongside the Avios offer. I checked the hotel programs' own public pages for them and found no mention of a Chase bonus on them, so I am not pricing those bonuses here. That is not a claim that they do not exist — Chase's transfer screen is the authoritative place, and it sits behind a login. It is a claim about what can be verified before you move points: the Avios bonus can be, on the airlines' own pages, and a hotel bonus that cannot be is not something to build a transfer around. If your Chase transfer screen shows another bonus, price the exact hotel night first, compare it with the cash price, and only then decide. The same rule applies to every bonus in this article. The bonus is never the reason. The priced trip is.

The play, in order

First, find the seat and write down its Avios price and its taxes and fees, on the airline's own search. Second, divide the Avios price by 1.3 and round up to the next thousand — that is the Chase transfer. Third, check that the transfer will complete by December 1, 2026 at 11:59 PM Eastern, remembering that the bonus Avios themselves can take up to seven days to post in AerClub. Fourth, transfer exactly that amount, in one go if the award needs it, and book. Do not transfer a round number because it feels tidy. Do not transfer early because the bonus feels urgent. The bonus runs for a full month. The seat does not.

Chase points are flexible precisely because they can wait. The right use of a 30% bonus is to let them wait until the award is priced, then spend fewer of them than the standard rate would demand. That is a smaller, quieter win than the headline suggests, and it is the only kind of win a transfer bonus reliably delivers.

💡 Why This Matters for Your Strategy

News in the points-and-miles world moves fast, and promotional changes often have a short window. If this announcement affects a card or program you hold, log into your awardtrail dashboard to check your current benefit usage, bonus progress, and whether a transfer or redemption makes sense right now — before terms change.

As a general rule: transfer points only when you have a specific redemption in mind — transfers are almost always one-way and non-reversible. If you're unsure of the value, check our redemption guides before acting.

View Redemption Guides · Read Our In-Depth Analysis

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