I just booked our United Airline tickets for next February to Telluride, Colorado. The day that I booked, the flights cost about $900 per ticket. I did not pay for these tickets. I booked these 5 tickets using my Chase Ultimate Rewards points. Wow, a savings of $4500!
In the above case, I booked my tickets through Chase Ultimate Rewards Travel rather than transferring my Chase Ultimate Rewards points to United and booking the flights through United’s MileagePlus Program. The reason I did it this way is as follows……
When I looked at United’s website, the United flights that I wanted required 75,000 United MileagePlus miles per ticket. So I would have had to transfer 375,000 Chase Ultimate Rewards points to my United MileagePlus account. (Points transfer at a 1:1 ratio).
When I booked the tickets through the Chase Ultimate Rewards program, I needed to only use 360,000 Chase Ultimate Rewards points. Reason being, one Ultimate Reward point equals $0.0125 incremental ticket value on travel. So in this example, I needed 360,000 points to redeem $4,500 worth of airline ticket. (4500/.0125).
So by booking the tickets through Chase Ultimate Rewards Travel, I saved myself 15,000 Ultimate Rewards points. Note however, it does not always work out this way and sometimes you will be better off transferring. You just need to compare and figure it out.
