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Chase Ultimate Rewards points give you lots of options for booking award travel.
You can redeem for travel through the Chase Travel Portal or transfer to partners like United, Hyatt, and more.
You’ll usually get more value by transferring to travel partners — but booking via the travel portal is simpler.
Read Insider’s guide to the best rewards credit cards.
Using Chase points to book travel through the Chase Travel Portal can make sense for cheap flights or hotels.
Westend61/Getty Images
Chase Ultimate Rewards® points are one of the most valuable rewards currencies out there. One reason for this is how incredibly flexible they are.
There are two main ways to redeem Chase points for travel:
Through the Chase Travel Portal at a value of up to 1.5 cents per point (depending on which card you have). You can use them for airfare, hotel stays, rental cars, cruises, and more.Transfer them to Chase’s 14 airline and hotel transfer partners to get (nearly) free flights and hotel stays.
Chase points are easy to earn, too. For example, the Chase Sapphire Reserve® currently offers an increased bonus of Chase Sapphire Reserve®. That’s worth Chase Sapphire Reserve®, per Insider’s points valuations.
This flexibility helps to insulate you from miles and points devaluations — if one program updates its award chart in a way that decreases the value of its miles, you still have many other options for using your Ultimate Rewards. But how do you know when to use your points directly with Chase’s travel portal and when to transfer them to an airline or hotel program?
The best cards for earning Chase Ultimate Rewards points
Booking travel through the Chase Ultimate Rewards portal
The simplest way to use your Ultimate Rewards points is by logging into your account at the Chase Ultimate Rewards travel portal. The Chase Ultimate Rewards portal will show a variety of flights, hotels, car rentals, and even travel experiences. Each choice will show the price in cash and then the number of Ultimate Rewards points that it will cost. You can also pay partially in points and partially in cash.
The amount that you pay in points is completely dependent on the cash price at a fixed rate, depending on which Chase card you have:
1 cent per point:
Chase Freedom Flex℠Chase Freedom Unlimited®Ink Business Cash℠ Credit CardInk Business Unlimited℠ Credit Card
1.25 cents per point:
Chase Sapphire Preferred® CardInk Business Preferred® Credit Card
1.5 cents per point:
Chase Sapphire Reserve®
If you have multiple Chase credit cards with Ultimate Rewards, you’ll want to transfer your points to the card that has the highest redemption value.
One note is that you may occasionally be able to get a lower price elsewhere (especially when booking hotels directly through the hotel site itself), so be sure to investigate your options before booking.
Transferring Chase points to airline and hotel partners
The other option for using your Ultimate Rewards is by transferring them to one of Chase’s 14 airline or hotel transfer partners.
You’ll need a premium Chase card (i.e., one with an annual fee) in order to be able to transfer your Ultimate Rewards to transfer partners. Chase points transfer to every travel partner at a 1:1 rate.
You can transfer to the following 11 airlines:
Aer Lingus AerClubAir Canada AeroplanAir France-KLM Flying BlueBritish Airways Executive ClubEmirates SkywardsIberia PlusJetBlue TrueBlueSingapore Airlines KrisFlyerSouthwest Airlines Rapid RewardsUnited MileagePlusVirgin Points
And these three hotel programs:
IHG Rewards ClubMarriott BonvoyWorld of Hyatt
Once you transfer your Ultimate Rewards points to an airline or hotel loyalty program, you can’t transfer them back to Chase. Once your points are transferred, you can redeem them according to the relevant award chart of the hotel or airline.
Booking with Chase vs. transferring points: Which is best?
Unless you’re a master of the many rules of all of the various airline and hotel loyalty programs, it can be difficult to figure out when you should transfer your points and when you should use them through the travel portal. Let’s look at a few scenarios.
The portal is a better option for hotel stays — with Hyatt as the exception
First, let’s look at a stay at the Crowne Plaza Chicago West Loop, an IHG hotel. Here are the cash and points rates for a random upcoming date. First, booking through the Ultimate Rewards portal:
Chase
With my Chase Sapphire Preferred® Card, which gets me 1.25 cents per point in value for booking through Ultimate Rewards, a night here would be less than 25,000 points. Compare that to paying the points rate via IHG:
IHG
33,000 points? I don’t think so. This is common with IHG and Marriott — you’ll almost always be better off using your Chase points through the travel portal instead of transferring to the hotel loyalty programs.
However, there can be value in transferring Chase points to the World of Hyatt program, because Hyatt points are consistently worth double and even triple the value of IHG and Marriott points.
Read Insider’s points and miles valuations to find out how much your credit cards are worth.
For award flights, transferring points makes the most sense for first or business-class seats
With airlines, things get a bit trickier. The best course of action is to check the cost in miles on the airline’s website and then compare it to the cash cost divided by either 1.25 cents per mile or 1.5 cents per mile depending on which Chase credit card you have.
The best value for transferring Chase points to airlines will be for premium international airline flights in first or business class, where you can often get upwards of 5 to 10 cents per mile. Let’s look at an example.
A fancy lie-flat one-way business class seat from Chicago to Frankfurt costs $3,925 through the Chase Travel Portal. If you’ve got the Chase Sapphire Preferred® Card, you’ll receive a value of 1.25 cents per point when booking travel through the Chase Travel Portal. You’ll pay 314,000 Chase points for this flight.
Chase
However, you can book the exact same seat by transferring just 60,000 Chase points to United Airlines. You’ll pay $5.60 in taxes and fees. That’s less than 20% of the price you’ll pay had you booked through the Chase Travel Portal — a value of 6.54 cents per point.
United Airlines
Conversely, for many cheap sale fares, you can get much better value by using your points through the travel portal. I’ve booked round-trip flights from the US to Barcelona on TAP Portugal on a ~$300 cash fare. Booking through the Chase Travel Portal cost me about 20,000 points thanks to my Chase Sapphire Reserve®. Transferring to an airline like United or Singapore Airlines would have cost me around 60,000 miles round-trip. In that case, using the travel portal was a clear winner.
Bottom line
I hope that this guide has helped discuss the different options for maximizing redemptions for your Chase Ultimate Rewards, and when it might be better to transfer your points vs when to book through the travel portal. When in doubt, it’s always worth taking the time to compare the value you’ll get from your points with each option for redeeming your points.