I don't know a lot about the Zync, but I thought I read on here that it wasn't eligible to upgrade to the other charge accounts, that you had to apply for a new account. I also thought that the timeframe was that an account had to be open 13 months before it could be upgraded. I'm sure someone else will confirm or give you better info if I am mistaken.
Another thing to consider, if you don't have any immediate point transfers in mind, you could accumulate the MR Express points and wait to add the Green, Gold, or Platinum. So you could continue to pay the lower AF for a while and only add the other card when you want to transfer the points. Of course, that doesn't give you as much flexibility if something comes up where you want to immediately transfer points.
Starting Score: ~500 (12/01/2008)
@chan85 wrote:Can somebody please clarify the diff between membership rewards and membership rewards express?? I have the zync and enjoy the points I have earned but I have read several posts of people complaining about the rewards express option so I must be missing out on something good lol
MR Express points can't be transferred to frequent flier programs or hotel points. Your best redemption option is for gift cards at a rate of $0.01 per point.
Regular MR points can be transferred to frequent flier miles or hotel points (though the hotel point transfers aren't generally a good idea). The best value of MR points is for transferring to frequent flier miles and redeeming for travel. It's a bit more complicated to value the points then, but you can get a lot better than 1 cent per point. Especially if you redeem for last minute domestic travel or international business class.
As an example, you could fly to Europe business class for 100K miles. There are often bonus points awareded on transfer. BA had a 40% transfer bonus recently. Using that transfer bonus, you would have had to transfer 72K points to get 100K miles. Depending on how you place your spend (using various bonus categories), you'd spend considerably less than $72K to get 72K MR points. But even assuming you only got 1 MR point for $1 spent, it would take $72K spend for that redemption. An international business class ticket can easily cost $6K. So, $72K spend gets you a $6K airline ticket. Or, redeeming for gift cards, $72K spend gets you $720 in gift cards.
There's some other wrinkles in there. For example, for the ticket you still have to pay taxes and fees, and you don't earn miles on an award ticket whereas you would be earning miles if you bought the ticket, etc. Also, you probably would never spend the full $6K for the fare if you were spending your money. But you get the idea. Instead of redeeming for giftcards, you could take a vacation and fly upfront. Depends on how you value that.