Counterpoint: Recent frustrations trying to get 1.5c per point toward paid travel

The other day, Tim published a fantastic post about using points to stay at the Paradores of Spain. If you don’t know what the Paradores are, know that I didn’t either and am thankful for the education Tim gave me there. Along with teaching us about what may be the coolest type of lodging in Europe, Tim made the point that he finds Ultimate Rewards pricing to be more closely parallel to direct booking pricing on International stays. He may be right about that, but my recent frustration with Ultimate Rewards has been how much is missing from the portal. Even when I want to use my Ultimate Rewards points at a value of 1.5c per point, I often can’t because Chase is missing what I want.

To be clear, I love Ultimate Rewards points, I just prefer to use them for Hyatt stays or occasional airline transfers and I don’t often use them to book travel through Chase Travel.

My hesitation with Ultimate Rewards

Tim made mention in his post that I often argue that Chase Ultimate Rewards are only kinda sorta maybe worth 1.5c per toward paid travel when you have the Chase Sapphire Reserve card. More accurately, they are worth 1.5c per point toward the Chase Travel Portal price. When the Chase Travel Portal has the best price you could get on whatever travel you’re booking, you are getting 1.5c per point. But when you could otherwise use a AAA discount or click through a shopping portal or use a coupon code or book that Avis rental car through Amazon to get 10% back in an Amazon gift card, you’re not really getting 1.5c per point if you’re booking through Chase.

For example, if you’re looking at a hotel that costs $150 through the Chase travel portal, it would cost 10,000 Ultimate Rewards points. However, if you could click through a portal to get 5% cash back on your booking or you could use a AAA discount for 10% off, then your comparison point shouldn’t be $150 but rather $142.50 or $135 (which means 1.425c per point or 1.35c per point). If the hotel you want is on Hotels.com, consider that you could have essentially gotten 10% back toward a future stay via their Hotels.com Rewards program (and maybe purchased discounted Hotels.com gift cards to pay less than sticker price for your stay). I find the opportunities to truly get 1.5c per point in value toward hotels to be somewhat few and far between.

However, as I said at the beginning, Tim made the point that internationally, the Chase Travel portal stacks up better. It certainly may, but I’ve been disappointed lately at how poorly it stacked up in a couple of situations for my real-world travel needs.

Hotel selection limitations

I’ll (hopefully) be taking a trip to Europe this summer that will include a few quick nights in Northern Italy. I was looking at Lake Como, but a reader specifically recommended a town called Stresa on Lake Maggiore.

Jumping a few steps ahead, I initially settled on a place that looks great in a nearby town called Belgirate (though truthfully there were lots of really interesting options around Stresa, particularly on the small islands nearby!). I was initially searching via Airbnb (because of Chase Pay Yourself Back) and Expedia (because I expected that results at Expedia would be approximately the same results as Chase without the need to log in to my Chase account to search until I was ready to book).

As an example for this post), I searched Belgirate, Italy from June 22-24, 2022 (checking in about two weeks from the time of writing this post). At this late juncture, Expedia shows 43 properties available within 5 miles of the center of Belgirate. It’s worth noting that many of those options appear to be apartment rentals more like Airbnbs, but there are also a number of hotels (none of them are chain properties).

I was particularly excited about a property I saw called Relais Casali della Cisterna. It has multiple room types available during these June dates (and it also did during my actual trip dates), including a couple of suites with what look to be incredible views that conveniently sleep an entire family for reasonable prices. Furthermore, reviews appear to be outstanding across multiple sites.

I was initially pretty excited when I saw suites that sleep 4 or 5 people for less than $250 per night. That Superior Suite above has a balcony and looks excellent. At $208 per night, I was thrilled at a stay that I expected would be fewer than 14,000 Ultimate Rewards points per night.

Chase shows a grand total of three hotel options in Belgirate. Actually, make that two hotel options (the first two, as you’ll notice below, are actually the same hotel). In fairness to Chase, most of the options that come up via Expedia are really in the nearby town of Stresa, so perhaps I shouldn’t be so harsh about the limited booking options. The good news is that Relais Casali della Cisterna is one of the 2 options in Belgirate. The bad news is that it shows up as sold out for those dates. And every other date I’ve tried.

I guess it’s probably not Chase’s “fault” that the hotel shows up as sold out here. It appears to be a small family-owned/operated hotel and maybe they accidentally flipped off some switch that should be on. That said, that switch appears to be “on” at almost every other OTA on earth.

However, this property seems to have something against credit card portals as they are unavailable via Chase Travel, Amex Travel, Capital One Travel (the name populates in the search bar, but then the property doesn’t even show up in the list), Mastercard Travel, US Bank’s travel portal, or Rocketmiles.

That said, it was available to book and earn miles or redeem miles via Avianca LifeMiles (albeit at poor value either way).

My frustration here is that I didn’t want to pay cash. I wanted to use my points to good value….and I couldn’t for that property. In that case, my best options if I wanted to use points would be to:

• Redeem Amex points via Schwab at a value of 1.1c per point and use cash to pay for the hotel (18,909 points per night to cover the $208 suite in this case)
• Book and pay with my Capital One Venture card and redeem points at a value of $0.01 per point to reimburse the charge (20,800 points per night to cover the $208 suite in this case). I imagine I could probably book via Hotels.com to earn Welcome Rewards and maybe even click through a portal to get there and still stack with the Venture Card to reimburse the purchase.
• Cash out Chase points (or any type of cash back / cash-based points) at a value of $0.01 each and pay with cash (20,800 points per night pay me back for the charge)
• Use Chase points to cover dining purchases until I reach $208 per night worth of dining purchases and redeem points at a value of 1.5c per point to cover the dining purchases and then use the cash I would have paid for meals to pay for the room. That indirectly gets me sort of 1.5c per point, but I say “sort of” because it means sacrificing the chance to earn 4x on an Amex Gold card or even more on a card that’s earned the current +5 referral offer when paying for my dining purchases.

Otherwise, I could just suck it up and pay cash or book a different place. I don’t love any of those options.

To Tim’s point, the price I was seeing via OTAs did indeed match the price I saw booking direct (more or less), which came to the equivalent of about $207.20 per night. That said, booking directly also provided the opportunity to book a rate with breakfast included, which wasn’t an option via Chase.

This is one highly specific hotel example that is hardly representative of the entire Ultimate Rewards booking portal. However, it illustrates why I get am not so quick to extol the virtue of 1.5c per point toward paid travel. Truthfully, I don’t typically prefer boutique-style hotels over the predictability of chain properties anyway, so booking via the Chase portal rarely makes sense for me since I’d rather book a chain property and then I’d rather book direct and earn hotel points / elite credit. However, I know that others do prefer those more unique properties and they often report that prices via Chase are similar to direct booking prices.

Personally, if I’m going to book paid travel with Chase points, I’d ordinarily lean toward booking flights, but that doesn’t always work out as I’d like either.

Intra-European flights: Missing extra fare classes

Unfortunately, I recently ran into another weakness of using credit card points for intra-European travel: lack of availability of different fare classes, which can make a difference given the way many European carriers unbundle fares.

As an example, take an Air Baltic flight from Riga, Latvia to Madrid, Spain (note that I wasn’t looking to book this specific flight, but the situation was similar). The flight came up via Google Flights at $156 on June 30, 2022.

It actually came up a bit more expensive via Chase at $179 (second option below) or it was alternatively bookable via Iberia for $169.

The problem is that those fares are what Air Baltic labels a “Green” fare. That doesn’t include a checked bag or seat selection.

If you book directly via Air Baltic, you have additional fare options, including Green Plus or Green Classic, which each include a checked bag (classic also includes seat selection).

Unfortunately, you can’t book those bundled fare options via Chase.

In my case, I was booking a flight on a different airline with a similar situation: economy tickets through Chase were about $150, which turned out to be the no-frills fare that included no checked bag or seat selection. I could book a fare directly through the airline that included those things for around $175 per person — but then that meant spending more than $500 cash for my family (we definitely need some checked baggage and seat selection).

In the end, I booked a business class fare that was about $225 per passenger ($675 total) and I used the Amex Business Platinum Pay With Points rebate to get 35% of the points back. That meant I ended up using just shy of 15K points per passenger. It pained me a bit to pay more for intra-European business class (which I know just consists of a blocked middle seat), but on the flip side I didn’t really want the hassle of trying to add checked bags and seat selection a la carte to what amounted to a basic economy fare. Still, I couldn’t help but feel a little disappointed that points had once again failed to net me the full 1.5cpp that I’d hoped.

Rental Cars: Forget about it

When it comes to rental cars, I rarely even waste the time to log in to Chase to search because I know that their prices won’t come close to matching what I can find via Autoslash.

Case in point: for the same trip, the cheapest economy class car via Chase that came from a major international rental agency comes from Avis at about $874 all-in (or just over 58,000 Ultimate Rewards points). Instead, I booked via Avis for about $400 (plus additional fees for car seats unfortunately, so about $500 all-in with the add-ons) and I expect to get 10% back from Amazon via this old deal I had entirely forgotten about. In this case, it’s a one-way rental as I’ll fly into one airport and out of another, so I would be tempted to give Chase a total pass if not for the fact that I don’t think I’ve ever seen their prices even match what I find via Autoslash (forget about beating those prices). The fact that I’ll be paying cash for this certainly held some weight in determining hotel and flight details discussed above as I wanted to minimize the number of things I paid for with cash rather than points.

There are still situations where the Chase portal is great

My recent frustrations with the Chase portal aside, Tim obviously showed situations at the opposite end of the spectrum where you could book a room in a castle for a little over 8K Ultimate Rewards points per night. There are certainly times when booking via the Chase portal can make a lot of sense and I have certainly booked hotels via Chase on more than one occasion. For this trip I’ve recently been trying to finalize, I’ve been trying to use the Chase portal because I would like to minimize my cash outlay.

At the end of the day, the Joy of Free is worth something and I know that I have acquired my Chase points at far less value than I’m getting (whether I’m getting 1.5c or 1.4c or 1.25c it is still far below my acquisition cost for Chase points). Because of that, I am sometimes willing to accept a bit less than 1.5c per point in value — though I’m careful to recognize that I’m not getting 1.5c.

In general, I find the Chase portal is typically good for airfare since airfare prices are fairly standard across multiple websites. Intra-European airfare or airfare on low-cost carriers can be an obstacle (though Greg proved that low cost carriers are not necessarily an insurmountable obstacle). But overall, I do like the option to use points at 1.5c per point toward all economy class airfare via Chase with the Sapphire Reserve as opposed to Amex, which only allows you to use points at good value toward economy class airfare on a single chosen US-based airline (and only if you have the Business Platinum card).

Bottom line

I love Chase Ultimate Rewards points, but I’ve recently been pretty frustrated when trying to use them to good value to cover paid travel for an upcoming trip. Chase didn’t have the hotel I wanted (nor many of the other nearby options shown on other booking portals), nor did they have intra-European economy class fare bundles that included checked baggage and seat selection on at least a couple of different airlines. While I could still use points to decent value, especially considering how easily Ultimate Rewards can be amassed, I have struggled to get a full 1.5c per point toward my recent trips. There have been times in the past when it has worked out, but this type of trip is why I always hesitate on the bump in value for paid travel — sometimes you just can’t make it work out to that full value.

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