AmEx offers a few ways to use Membership Rewards points.
However, redeeming for anything aside from travel offers a poor value, usually 0.5-0.8¢ each, and is generally a poor use of points.
You can get a slightly better value by booking flights through AmEx Travel, either online or by phone. Points are worth 1¢ each towards flights, but if you book a hotel or anything else, you'll only get 0.7¢ per point.
Another option is to use points to bid for upgrades on a flight. You'll only get 1¢ per point, but it can be a decent redemption if you want to try for an upgrade but don't want to pay cash.
The best use and value — potentially — is to transfer points to airline frequent flyer partners and book flights that way. You might be able to get a dramatically higher value for points this way.
That's because booking frequent flyer "award tickets" is different than buying reservations outright — you can read more about how it works here. In most cases, the cash price and the miles price of a ticket aren't linked, so it's possible to get exponentially increased value from your points by transferring them and booking an award ticket instead.
That means potentially being able to fly long-haul in first or business class with points, among other things.
For example, my wife and I recently flew first class to Japan and back by transferring credit card points to Virgin Atlantic, then booking flights on Virgin's partner airline All Nippon Airways. You can read about exactly how we booked the flights here.
The only catch is that you may need to search for saver availability — which are lower-priced award tickets. This can be tricky, but there are a ton of helpful guides online. Once you have a flight in mind, if you're having trouble figuring out how best to use your points, just do a Google search for that specific trip.
AmEx's partners include: Aer Lingus, AeroMexico, Air Canada, Air France/KLM, Alitalia, ANA, Cathay Pacific, Avianca, British Airways, Delta, El Al, Emirates, Etihad, Iberia, Hawaiian Airlines, JetBlue, Singapore Airlines, and Virgin Atlantic, as well as Choice Hotels, Hilton, and Marriott.
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