1. Why Purchase From The Portal
2. The Basics of Chase Ultimate Rewards
3. Booking a Flight Through Chase Ultimate Reward Portal
4. Final Thought
Assuming you’ve done a bit of due diligence and already spoken to folks in our Facebook Group, or Community Forums, you have no doubt seen or heard warnings against booking reservations (flight or hotel) through the rewards portal of your preferred credit card. The fact is, the recommendation is sound. If at all possible, try and do your booking directly from an airline, hotel or other vendor. It is almost always best to remove the middle person from these types of transactions, and doubly important when you are planning a large trip with many moving parts. The most important reason for this, being that it is that much easier to handle reschedules and interruptions (ie, credits and refunds) through the actual vendor and not a third party organization (Chase or Amex, etc). There are more than a few (easily found) horror stories of folks having to adjust a trip and finding it very difficult to do for bookings through the credit card company.
The second reason is simple. When paying with points, those points will almost always have a better value when transferred directly to an airline or hotel. Chase Sapphire Reserve, for instance, offers $0.015/point as a standard. You will pretty much never see point values higher than this when shopping through the portal. While better than a 1:1 conversion, 1:1.5 is still not great. However, with some time and energy, you can almost always find flights (via partner transfer) at $0.02 or even $0.03 per point. Sometimes even better than that. When it comes to hunting seat upgrades or business class trips paid mostly on points – yes, point value should be one of your top priorities.
Why purchase from the portal?
That being said, the fact of the matter is that, if you are reading this you are probably interested in traveling more for less. And, that sometimes, you will want to take a “quick hit” fare from the portal for lack of a better option.
For instance, I just booked two round trip (RT) tickets from Denver to London, with a full day stay over in Reykjavik, for 80,000 Chase URs. That’s 20k per person, per way from US to two countries in Europe. I then booked a RT flight from London to Lisbon for $60. So, 40k URs + $60 USD per person, to 3 European Countries. That is about as good as you get, and I found it on the Chase UR portal booked on Icelandair (which is not a transfer partner). I could have paid cash, as it was pretty reasonable (80,000x .0125 = $1000)…but, the name of the game here is free flights, and I wanted to fly on my points.
My point (get it?) is that don’t let people dissuade you from spending how you want to spend. Nobody can tell you what value something has to you, just know what your options are and how they relate to each other, and try and make good decisions.
For my money (and I think the general consensus is) Chase offers one of the best reward programs on the market. It is easy to understand, easier still to navigate. The reward currency Chase Ultimate Rewards is easy to earn (with a few simple techniques), widely accepted and can easily be transferred between Chase cards (this comes in handy as some cards offer I higher point value).
The Basics of Chase Ultimate Rewards
First things first, you have to hold an open account with one of the Chase reward cards. I would actually suggest holding more than one, but we will get to that shortly. Each one of the following cards offers Chase Ultimate Rewards for dollars spent (and in varying degrees, so there is a bit of strategy as to which one(s) you hold):
Chase Sapphire Preferred® Card
Chase Sapphire Reserve®
Chase Freedom Flex®
Chase Freedom Unlimited®
Chase Ink Business Preferred Card
Ink Business Cash® Credit Card
Chase Ink Business Unlimited® Credit Card
In addition to each card offering different amounts of points for different types of purchases, they also offer different point values when spending though the portal. While all the other cards points are valued at 1 cent per point, the Preferred and the Ink Preferred are each valued at 1.25 cents per point and the Reserve is valued at 1.5 cents per point. As mentioned above, this is important to know, because if you have points on both a Freedom Flex and a Sapphire Reserve, you will want to transfer all your points from the card with the lower value to the card with the higher value.
Booking a Flight Through Chase Ultimate Reward Portal
Now that you have one of the above Chase Ultimate Reward cards and you (hopefully) received your sign-up bonus (or some other stockpile of points AND transferred them to the card with the highest value (if other than the one they were earned on)…it is NOW time to book your flight through the portal.
When you log into your Chase account, you will find an area on the top right call “Rewards”. Clicking this will take you to your Rewards portal for a particular card. Additionally, you can click the card you want to explore on the main page, and access its Rewards page that way.
Once in the card you want to book with, at the top of the page you will see a drop down menu named Earn / Use. and once opened you will see all the ways you can spend your rewards points. We are going to focus on “Travel” for the needs of this article (and really, I would recommend only using points for travel or partner transfer and never consumer goods or “Pay with Points”, but that’s entirely up to you).
Once you choose Travel. You will be brought to a page that will let you choose “flights” and enter the details of the trip you wish to book. You can enter your departure and destination cities, the dates you would like to search, as well as one-way/round trip, how many passengers will be traveling and which seat class you are searching for.
Once all the data fields are entered, the engine will show you your options with cash cost and point cost. An important note is that the system shows you the cash cost per person first, and then shows you a running cost (in cash and points) for all passengers. Unlike most airline partners, the cost of the return trip (if RT) is already reflected here and will not be an additional charge. You will also note that the point value based on the listed price will always be 1:1, 1:1.25 or 1:1.5 based on which Chase card you are using, there is not much wiggle here.
After you select a flight, the system will run you through your option and confirmation screens. Note, you have 24hrs to cancel the booking without penalty (if the booking is over a week out). After which, I would try not to rely on switches or cancellations if they can at all be avoided. As noted above , there have been some reports of recoup challenges as you are dealing with Chase and not the airline directly.
Final Thought
That’s it! You have now successfully booked a flight through Chase portal using the points that you have worked so hard to collect. I hope this tutorial finds you well and if you have any questions or comments, please don’t hesitate to leave them below. And don’t forget to join our Facebook Group or Community Forum for the most up-to-date information!
Safe Travels!
