Today we’re going to talk about how to transfer your chase points to their transfer partners. If you are new here, we’re all about how to maximize the value for credit cards. So how to get them as cash back and also how to travel for free? If it sounds interesting, subscribe to our channel. Let’s get started.
This is probably one of the most requested videos, we will talk about how to do it. But there’s also going to be a lot of work on your end to figure out what works for you to start. What you want to do is to log in to your chase account, if you are under the new website, it should be on your left hand side in the bottom.
Once you click onto that screen, you can see all the chase cards that you have that earn ultimate reward points. What you want to do is to click on to either the Chase Sapphire Preferred or the Chase Sapphire Reserve, or the Chase Inc preferred card, because those cards allow you to transfer your points.
If you have points of cards at the freedom card, they are the freedom unlimited or the Chase Sapphire Preferred, what you can do is to combine your points. So if you go to the top left and you hover over your point balance on the bottom of that, there’s a combined points button.
Once you click that, you can transfer your points from one card to another card. You can transfer points from your ink card to your personal guards. I have a separate logon for my tastes business cards and I can transfer points with my ink card to the Chase Sapphire reserve. For the most part, you probably want to pull your points onto one card.
The Chase Sapphire reserves are the preferred, depending on which one you have the main reason for. This is because there’s not any benefit of having the points with the freedom card or freedom unlimited card. The main point of those cards is to gain points and then transfer to your travel cards that way.
You can book more advantageous Lee to do transfer partners, you hover over the use points button and there are a lot of different options. So you can either book travel or you can transfer to travel partners, which should be the third one down. Once you do that, there are a bunch of partners, and all you need to do is to click one of the partners.
So transfer points and you have to enter your ID information. The good thing to chase points is that the transfers are instantaneous, if you look at Amex or city which transfers typically and takes a few days, there are a lot of different options. It depends on you, so this is now the hard part you need to sit down and to compare all the different options to see which one cost the least amount of points.
There are a bunch of sweet spots, but if you want those, you have to put in the effort and check it pretty often. There are a lot of different sweet spot redemptions, but those are typically hard to get. So these are ones where the routes are very advantageous or maybe the hotel redemption is very advantageous, which means you’re spending a lot less points.
Since they’re so good, though a lot of people want to get them meaning that there is not enough supply for the demand of people again, which means checking pretty often and being willing to put into work.
A week or two ago, someone messaged me, asking me whether I was lying about the iyx tree thing about redeeming for Bora Bora cuz. They tried once or twice but they couldn’t find anything and I basically spent a week trying probably one to two minutes every day. Since I put it on to my hot bar for my Chrome and I checked it pretty often, probably four or five times.
It doesn’t take that long and I already got two nights for a lot of good redemptions. You need to put into work, no one is going to hand it to you, since there are a lot of different options. Let’s run through a real example.
So let’s say I am trying to go from San Francisco to Seoul. What you want to do is to run down the list of partners and to see what the rates would be for each one. For some of them, it’s easy. So for United, you have in a work chart and you know how much it exactly costs.
Let’s assume that we’re flying in economy class, and this means that a one-way ticket via saver rate is thirty five thousand points and one-way standard is eighty thousand points. You would want to put this information down in your spreadsheet that way, you can compare it.
And the next step is to see whether there’s any saver availability as well as any award availability for your dates. You can do this on the united side by searching for San Francisco to Seoul, searching for a war travel. Once you do that, you should see an award availability calendar, giving that we’re looking for economy.
What we’re looking for is the solid line, if you don’t have flexibility, this is obviously going to be a lot harder. If you can pick dates, if you can adjust your vacation, I think this is pretty useful on top of the thirty-five thousand points. You will have to spend five dollars and sixty cents in fees.
Or you don’t have any flexibility during the dates, you need to travel, there is not any saver availability and you will need to spend eighty thousand points per way. Even though you might not take this route, my recommendation would be that you should note it down onto the sheet in the way you can compare with both different options.
In our example, we’re going to assume that you have flexibility, so we note down the seventy thousand points total as well as about the eleven dollars and fees beyond transfer partners. What you would want to look at is to route via the travel portal since, you are getting one point five cents per point for this. I’d recommend using Google, because searching on a chase portal is not the easiest thing to do.
Obviously, searching for itself is pretty straightforward. The main difference is that it’s hard to compare different dates and to also filter by Airlines. I just find Google to be cleaner and easier to compare, looking at the cheapest rates in December. We find dates for the fifth and also coming back on either the 10th or 11th, because the flight is cheap.
So this one is 504 dollars, which doesn’t mean it necessarily makes sense for you, unless you don’t mind a long layover and we want to have layover in these cities. Obviously, that’s not too bad, but these would not be my first choice. What you can do here is to run down the list of different airlines and mark off the ones that you actually want to fly.
At the end of the day, you could also pick all airlines and then choose to minimize the stops. After we pick different airlines, we can see that the 9th, 10th, and 11th are the cheaper dates. We’re going to pick the 10th and then for any return dates from the 17th to the 21st seem pretty reasonable and seem relatively low, even if you wanted to do a bit longer.
It’s not that much more, but let’s pick the 18th. If we leave from the 10th, the layover seems pretty crazy on the first day, so there is a 17 hour layover in Vancouver. If you want to hang out in Vancouver, you can basically spend a whole night there and also some of the mornings.
If you want to grab food that works up pretty well, but if you don’t want to do that, I would choose a different date. So if we move two dates to the 11th, then snow comes back on the 18th, the layover is a lot more reasonable at 3 hours. Now that we have this information, what we want to do is to note it down on to our spreadsheet again for comparative purposes.
Then you can do the math to see how many points it would cost. What you would also want to do is to see that the result, as what you would get on the chase travel portal again, it’s pretty typical. So I’m not going to do it here, but it’s worthwhile.
If you are making a big flight purchase, I’m not going to run through the rest of these transfer partners, because that’s too much work and it’s something you should do by yourself. So it should only take you about 30 minutes to maybe 10 hours. If you’re doing a lot of plans in order to do all this, you can do it while watching YouTube or watching TV, looking at it from a feasibility point as well.
There’s probably 10 Airport people in the U.S., leave from about 50 different destinations which people fly from. So if you look at all the totals, you’re looking at 10 times, 50, so 500 different routing options and that change is based off the programs. The changes is based on availability and time of year and stuff like that.
So it’s not feasible in the past, I’ve done a few highlights of different sweet spots and I’m probably going to keep doing that. But it’s not really feasible to do every single option, because there are so many of them in the whole act of transferring your points isn’t really hard, it’s putting in your information, it’s figuring out who to transfer it to and whether it makes sense to transfer.
It transfer partners to make sense for sweet spot redemptions, so I typically try for these sweet swap redemptions for last-minute flights. And the main reason for last-minute is that their rates don’t really change, like airplane ones do. So there are some other transfer partners like Southwest, where the price in terms of points is based on the price, in terms of the ticket cause.
So that’s not really going to help there, but for these other ones, for United, for Korean Air, it’s a fixed cost. Transfer Partners are also pretty good during busy times, so for Korean Air, there are peak times. So you have to pay more, but it might be cheaper than what you would pay otherwise.
So the whole point of this is that you need to compare it yourself to see which ones can make more sense. The final good use of transfer partners is for business class and first class, but for that availability becomes a really big issue. Most people who want to redeem that either have very flexible schedules, where if they find out two or three days in advance.
I’m going to take a week off from work. Alternatively, you need to check it a lot, just to find the availability. You need to put in the work. For someone who doesn’t really want to compare, all of these transfer partner options and you feel like it’s too much work.
My recommendation we did just goes to Google flights to find the cheapest dates and then it’s a bucket of the Chase Sapphire reserve, because you still get a lot of value. If you don’t have a specific location in mind, my recommendation would be signing up for Scott’s cheap flights, because he has a lot of deals.
In the past video, I talked about how for most people, you’re probably going to get a lot more value redeeming at one point five cents per point, using the Chase Sapphire reserve for these specific deals or mistake pricing rather than trying to do transfer partners.
If you compare any other options outside of Chase and Mac city in terms of transfer partners or booking, you need to consider that as well. You want to put a giant list of options and to pick the one, which is the cheapest.
For some people, they feel like this is a lot of work and it’s not really worth the effort. For me, I find it very interesting because I like optimizing, and I’m doing this while watching YouTube or watching Hulu or Netflix. So it doesn’t feel like work, it’s researching random things while you’re enjoying yourself or relaxing anyways for a typical trip.
I have to spend about one to ten hours doing research anyways, so it’s just part of the equation. Once you figure out the plane tickets, you need to figure out the hotels to compare different options, find redemptions for that as well. If you need to rent cars, you need to consider booking through Costco or booking through another site, where you might get a discount and look for coupon codes.
It’s just part of the whole process, so there’s not really one guide for it, because it’s a very long process, you can compartmentalize it. This is the ultimate awards part of it, flight booking part of it. But it’s really impossible for me to walk through all of it, because this would be a ten hour or five hour video if I had to do that.
Hopefully, it is helpful and let me know if you have any questions, my question for you is how your experience has been with transfer partners, let me know the comments down below. If you like this video, give it a thumb up, it really helps us out. And if you know anyone else who’d benefit from what we just talked about, feel free to share this video with them, because it’s probably going to help them out by the wise. See you next time.