At Travel Freely, we’re all about maximizing your free travel in the easiest way possible. To start, we highly recommend the Chase Sapphire Preferred® card—it’s the perfect choice for beginners seeking the best travel rewards credit card. With its spot at the top of ‘best rewards cards’ lists, this credit card is designed for beginner free travelers looking for simple ways to get great value. Why? Chase Ultimate Rewards points are highly valued and incredibly flexible.
Here are some great reasons to love the Chase Sapphire Preferred:
1) Over $750+ in free travel!
With the 60,000 points earned from the welcome offer, those points earn $750 in free travel when redeeming points through the Chase Travel℠ portal — since you receive a 25% bonus with this redemption.
However, you can receive an even higher value when you transfer your points to partner airline and hotel programs. With these transfer partners, you could easily get a value of 2 cents per point or more, making the 60,000 points earned from the welcome offer worth over $1,200 in free travel.
For those who do not like annual fees, you can even use points to erase the annual fee by redeeming 9,500 points for cash.
2) It’s EASY to redeem
You can redeem your points in the following ways:
1) Book travel directly through the Chase Travel portal. You’ll receive a 25% boost when you book travel through the portal and use your points. With this option, points are worth 1.25 cents per point. (NOTE: The 25% bonus only applies when redeeming points used to book travel through the travel portal.)
2) Transfer points to their loyalty travel partners. Chase partners with 14 different airline and hotel partners, including Hyatt, United, Marriott, Southwest, and British Airways. This is typically where you’ll find the best value. For example, it’s not unheard of to book an expensive domestic or international flight with United, where your points are worth 3-4 cents per point, although Travel Freely values them at 1.8 cents per point.
Get to Hawaii with the signup bonus from the Chase Sapphire Preferred!
3) Redeem points for cash. If you’re looking for a travel card that gives you added flexibility for cash back and not just for travel redemption, then the Chase Sapphire Preferred is a great card for you. With a redemption rate of 1 point = 1 cent, you can easily convert 60,000 Chase Points to $600 cash for anything you want to spend on.
1,000 points = $10 cash
10,000 points = $100 cash
60,000 points = $600 cash
Link: Learn How to Apply Now: Chase Sapphire Preferred (60,000 points)
3. Earn 3x points at restaurants (2x on travel)
The Chase Sapphire Preferred card is perfect for both beginners and advanced travelers. Whether you travel a lot or a little, you can still rack up a ton of points on your every day spend. This is because you’ll earn 3x points on dining, which means anytime you eat out (or even have delivery or takeout) you’re earning triple the points!
And any travel you pay for (such as hotels, airfare, rental cars, etc.) will be double points. Even things like taking an Uber or paying for parking will get 2x points, too. You’ll also earn 3x points on select streaming services and select online grocery purchases.
Additionally, the card offers a 10% anniversary points boost. This means that at each account anniversary, you’ll earn a 10% bonus on your total purchases from the year prior. For example, if you spent $10,000, you’ll earn a 1,000 point bonus.
Earning 3x Points at restaurants can supercharge your earning.
4. Awesome travel benefits.
First of all, you get a $50 hotel credit to use annually. Book a hotel through the Chase Travel Portal and you’ll receive a $50 credit whenever you want during the year. This one benefit essentially reduces your annual fee to $45.
Traveling abroad? There are no foreign transaction fees. This is huge. Avoiding the 3% fee is big time savings. Plus, you can avoid using a debit card or cash. Credit cards often get the best exchange rate abroad, and you don’t even have to worry about carrying around extra cash.
Waived rental car coverage. Primary car rental insurance is also covered when you pay for your rental car with this card. Waive the fee and save an extra $15-30 per day!
Other benefits include trip delay, trip cancellation, and baggage delay insurance. These benefits alone could be super helpful right when you need them.
Going to Europe? Save on rental car insurance and waived foreign transaction fees. You’ll still earn 2x on travel expenses and 3x points at restaurants, too!
5. Transfer to United, Hyatt, Southwest and more
You are missing out if you think an airline or hotel card is all you need. Many rewards enthusiasts miss out on extra rewards and flexibility because they don’t know about this amazing benefit of the Chase Sapphire Preferred.
The Chase Sapphire Preferred card allows you to transfer points to its 14 partner airlines and hotels. For example, Southwest Airlines is a transfer partner. You can transfer Chase Ultimate Rewards points to Southwest at 1:1. Because of the travel partners and ease of transferring rewards, this card can act like a Southwest, United, Marriott, and Hyatt card rolled into one. Whenever you need those rewards, you can transfer them. So, you can stay flexible — and not pigeonholed into one program — only making a transfer when you need the points in a particular program.
6. The Chase 5/24 Rule
Beginners may not realize that Chase has an “unofficial” rule of denying credit card applications if someone has opened 5 cards in the previous 24 months. Some cards don’t count towards this, but most personal cards do. (p.s. the Travel Freely app has a 5/24 counter feature). When you are starting out with rewards cards, you need to get this card sooner than later. The Chase Sapphire Preferred is subject to the 5/24 rule, so you want to make sure you get it before some of the other great cards.
Bottom Line
This is an excellent all-around card. The #1 card for beginners, and one of THE best cards for any type of traveler. The Chase Travel portal and transfer partners make it very flexible. At a minimum, this card’s value is $750 when using the travel portal, but we value Chase points at 1.8 cents per point because of their value when transferred to travel partners like United, Hyatt, Marriott, KLM/Air France or British Airways.
If that wasn’t enough, this card includes 3x points on dining, select streaming services, select online grocery purchases, 2x on travel purchases (or 5x total if purchased through Chase Travel), a $50 hotel credit annually, 10% point boost, no foreign transaction fees and primary rental car coverage.
Ready for free travel? Don’t miss out.
Link: Learn How to Apply Now: Chase Sapphire Preferred (60,000 points)
