Premium Ultimate Rewards

Since this is an ultra-premium Ultimate Rewards card, the following rewards are available:

• Redeem Points for 25% More Value: Points are worth 1.25 cents each when used to book travel through the Chase Travel℠​ portal.
• Transfer Points to Partners: Points can be transferred one to one to a number of airline and hotel loyalty programs.

Travel Benefits

• No foreign transaction fees

Travel Protections

• Auto Rental Coverage: Chase offers primary auto rental CDW (collision damage waiver). Here’s the description directly from Chase: “Decline the rental company’s collision insurance and charge the entire rental cost to your card. Coverage is primary and provides reimbursement up to the actual cash value of the vehicle for theft and collision damage for most rental cars in the U.S. and abroad.”
• Trip Cancellation / Interruption Insurance: “If your trip is canceled or cut short by sickness, severe weather and other covered situations, you can be reimbursed up to $10,000 per person and $20,000 per trip for your pre-paid, non-refundable travel expenses, including passenger fares, tours, and hotels.”
• Trip Delay Reimbursement: “If your common carrier travel is delayed more than 12 hours or requires an overnight stay, you and your family are covered for unreimbursed expenses, such as meals and lodging, up to $500 per ticket.”
• Lost Luggage: Reimburses for costs incurred to repair or replace checked or carry-on bags and property within if loss or damage occurs during a covered trip. Coverage is up to $3,000 per person per trip (or up to $500 for jewelry, watches, cameras, video recorders, and other electronic equipment).
• Baggage Delay Insurance: “Reimburses you for essential purchases like toiletries and clothing for baggage delays over 6 hours by passenger carrier up to $100 a day for 5 days.
• Travel Accident Insurance: When you pay for your air, bus, train or cruise transportation with your card, you are eligible to receive accidental death or dismemberment coverage of up to $500,000

Purchase Protection

• Extended Warranty: “Extends the time period of U.S. manufacturer’s warranty by an additional year, on eligible warranties of three years or less.”
• Damage and Theft Protection: “Covers your new purchases for 120 days against damage or theft up to $500 per claim and $50,000 per account.”

Lyft Rideshare Benefits

5X Rewards: Use your Sapphire Preferred card with Lyft in order to earn 5 points per dollar. That’s 3X points in addition to the 2X points you already earn on travel.

Redeem points for travel: 1.25 cents per point

This option is directly available to anyone with a premium Ultimate Rewards card: Chase Sapphire Preferred, Chase Ink Business Preferred® Credit Card, or the no-longer-available Ink Plus. If you have points with no-fee Ultimate Rewards cards, then move them first to your premium card. Next, log into Chase under the premium account, and go to the Chase Travel portal to book your travel. A $500 flight would cost 50,000 points if you used points attached to a no-fee Ultimate Rewards card, but with your premium card, it would cost only 40,000 points.

Details about booking travel through Chase

You can use the Chase Travel portal to book airfare, hotels, cruises, activities, and car rentals. Airfare purchased through the portal still earns airline miles and elite qualifying miles. Hotels booked this way do not earn hotel rewards. Worse, hotels booked through the portal often won’t offer you elite benefits even if you have status. Unfortunately, Chase switched to an Expedia-backed portal and removed some ultra-low-cost carriers. For example, you can no longer book Spirit Airlines or Southwest through Chase Ultimate Rewards. There is a work-around for some carriers though. Our comprehensive Chase Ultimate Rewards Guide will help you through this.

Travel protections apply

When you pay with points for travel, Chase’s automatic travel protections do apply. So, you can be covered for things like car rentals, trip delays, trip cancellation & interruption, lost luggage, etc. The coverage you receive will be based on which card’s rewards were used to book the trip. For example, if you have both a Chase Sapphire Preferred and a Sapphire Reserve, you would want to move your Ultimate Rewards points from the Preferred to the Reserve and then use the Reserve points to book your trip. You will get both better value (1.5 cents per point) and better travel protection.

The best use of Ultimate Rewards points, in my opinion, is to transfer points to airline and hotel partners in order to book high-value awards. Your best bet is usually to wait until you find a great flight or night award before transferring points. Points transfer at a ratio of 1:1 as shown in the list of transfer partners below. Keep in mind that while transfers are instantly posted to most loyalty programs, transfers to Singapore Krisflyer and Marriott Bonvoy are not instant.

Move points to premium or ultra-premium card first

You cannot transfer points directly from a no-fee Chase Ultimate Rewards card to airline and hotel partners, but you can move points first to a premium card (Sapphire Preferred or Ink Business Preferred, for example) or ultra-premium card (Sapphire Reserve) and then transfer the points to airline or hotel partners. Points can be transferred to the loyalty accounts of the primary cardholder or any authorized user on the account. Points can also be transferred to the loyalty account of a joint business owner, but they do need to be an authorized user on the associated business account.

Through the Ultimate Rewards portal, you can redeem points for cash back, gift cards, merchandise, or experiences. With this approach, you’ll usually get 1 cent per point value. One exception is that Chase occasionally offers gift cards at a discount so you may be able to get better than 1 cent per point value during a gift card sale.

 

You can also use points to pay some merchants directly (Amazon.com, for example). Don’t do this. These options offer very poor value. Further, they may compromise the security of your account (i.e. if someone gets into your Amazon account, they might spend your Ultimate Rewards points – causing you a headache in getting your points reinstated).

If you are the primary account holder with multiple cards, you can freely combine Ultimate Rewards back and forth between your accounts. Your points can then be redeemed according to the card to which you move them. If you intend to cancel a Chase Ultimate Rewards card, you should first combine your points with a card you intend to keep active. Once you cancel, you will forfeit any unused points in that account. A product change should not affect your balance, but some people prefer moving points before a product change as well just to be safe.

Chase allows customers to transfer Ultimate Rewards points to any other account in that customer’s name or to one additional household member or joint business owner (for free).

Why this is valuable:

You earn points with the card offering the best return on purchases and then use points with the card offering the best redemption rate.

• Only one member of your household needs to maintain a premium card for transferring to partners or booking travel (though note that the primary cardholder can only transfer points to partner loyalty programs in the name of the primary cardholder or authorized users).

Transfer difficulties? Create a loop

If you have trouble transferring between accounts, some users have been able to combine points between their own accounts — like from Bob’s Ink Business Cash to Bob’s Sapphire Reserve — via secure message. However, you may run into an issue if you try to connect more than one of your cards to a single card that belongs to someone else. Chase allows you to combine/transfer to someone else who lives in your household (or a co-owner of your business for business cards), but I’ve had complications with this from time to time. For example, let’s say that Joe and Suzy live in the same household and are joint owners of a business and have the following accounts:

• Chase Freedom Unlimited® (Joe)
• Chase Ink Business Cash® Credit Card (Joe)
• Chase Sapphire Reserve (Suzy)

Joe first combines points from his Freedom Unlimited to Suzy’s Sapphire Reserve. Later, he logs into his Ink Business Cash account and tries to combine points with Suzy’s Sapphire Reserve. Joe may run into an error adding Suzy’s Sapphire Reserve card to combine points. This has happened in our household several times. In that case, Joe should log into his Freedom Unlimited account and remove Suzy as a household member (click “remove saved card”). About 24 hours later, he should be able to add Suzy to his Ink Business Cash in order to combine his points to her account.

The easy solution I’ve found is to create a loop. In the example scenario they should transfer like this:

Joe’s Freedom Unlimited —> Joe’s Ink Business Cash —> Suzy’s Sapphire Reserve —> Joe’s Freedom Unlimited

Creating a loop chain has solved that problem in my household. As noted, it took 24 hours after removing accounts to re-add them to other cards, so be aware of that limitation.

Thankfully, it is very easy to keep Chase Ultimate Rewards points alive: simply keep the points in an open Ultimate Rewards account and they will not expire. Note that if you close an Ultimate Rewards card, you will lose any points associated with that card. You should first combine points to move points away from the card you intend to close and to another card that will remain open as per the sharing section above before canceling.

Once you are approved for a Chase card, you have three months to meet the required spend in order to get the signup bonus. If your usual spend isn’t enough, consider using the Plastiq bill pay service to use your card to pay bills that can’t usually be paid by credit card (rent, mortgage, contractors, etc.)