Thanks to its current 100,000 point welcome bonus offer, you or someone close to you probably has (or will soon get) a new Chase Sapphire Preferred card. Obviously, the first thing you should do is use the card enough to meet the spend required to earn the welcome bonus. Beyond that, there are many ways to get great value from this card. In this post you’ll learn how to maximize point earnings, how to use your card’s perks to save money, and how best to use your card’s rewards.
Earn more points
Use your card to pay for dining & food delivery
The Sapphire Preferred card offers 3 points per dollar at restaurants, coffee shops, and food delivery services. Since it has no foreign transaction fees, the card is a great choice to use for dining worldwide.
Use your card to pay for Netflix, YouTube TV, Hulu, and other streaming services
The Sapphire Preferred card offers 3 points per dollar for select streaming services. In my house, we use my wife’s Sapphire Preferred card to autopay streaming services such as NetFlix and YouTube TV. It’s a great “set and forget” way to earn 3 points per dollar for all of that spend.
Use your card to pay for grocery delivery
The Sapphire Preferred card offers 3 points per dollar for online grocery purchases. This includes both online purchases made directly with grocery chains and through services like Instacart.
Use your card to pay in-app at grocery stores
The Sapphire Preferred card doesn’t specifically offer a bonus for shopping in-person at grocery stores, but if you check out through the grocery store’s app, you are likely to earn 3 points per dollar since it is equivalent to an online order.
Use your card to pay for travel
The Sapphire Preferred card offers 5 points per dollar for travel booked through Chase Travel℠ (Chase’s travel portal), 5 points per dollar for Lyft (through 9/30/27), and 2 points per dollar for all other travel purchases.
The card also offers very good travel protections when you use it to pay for your trip:
- Primary car rental coverage
- Trip cancellation and interruption
- 12 hour trip delay
- Lost luggage
- Baggage delay
- Travel accident
Caution: Before booking travel through Chase Travel, please see this section below where I describe a number of reasons why booking travel through portals can be problematic.
Automatically collect your annual 10% point bonus
Each account anniversary you’ll automatically earn bonus points equal to 10% of your total purchases made the previous year. For example, if you spent $20,000, you’ll get 2,000 bonus points. This means that the card effectively earns 5.1X for travel booked through Chase Travel℠ (2.1X all other travel), 3.1X for dining, select streaming services, and online grocery, and 1.1X everywhere else.
Refer family & friends
If you have family members or friends interested in applying for the Sapphire Preferred card or the Sapphire Reserve card, you can earn refer them from your Sapphire Preferred account. If they’re approved, you’ll earn 10,000 points and they’ll earn whatever the welcome bonus is at the time that they apply.
Apply for no-annual-fee Ultimate Rewards cards
Several Chase no-annual-fee cards earn Ultimate Rewards points even though they are advertised as cash back cards. The trick is to earn “cash back” points with these cards and then move the points to your Sapphire Preferred card to make them more valuable. Once moved to your Sapphire Preferred card, you can redeem points through Chase Travel℠ at 1.25 cents per point value, or you can transfer to select airline and hotel programs for even better value.
Here are some no-annual-fee “cash back” cards to consider:
- Freedom Unlimited: Earn 3 points per dollar for dining and at drugstores, and 1.5 points per dollar everywhere else. Since the Sapphire Preferred card only earns 1 point per dollar outside of its bonus categories, the Freedom Unlimited is a great companion card. Use it wherever the Sapphire Preferred doesn’t offer a bonus.
- Freedom Flex: This card earns 5 points per dollar (up to $1,500 per quarter) in categories that change each quarter.
- Ink Business Cash: This card always has a great welcome bonus. Plus, it earns 5 points per dollar at office supply stores and cellular/landline/cable (on up to $25,000 in total purchases in 5x categories annually). If your internet, TV, and cell service providers accept credit cards, then this is an awesome way to automatically earn 5 points per dollar for all of that spend! If you’re not sure that you have a business or would like more information about applying for this card, see: How to apply for Chase Ink cards.
Earn more with Bilt Rewards
Bilt Rewards is a free-to-join rewards program. Bilt points are similar to Chase points in that they share many of the same transfer partners. With either Chase points or Bilt points, you can transfer points 1 to 1 to Hyatt, United, British Airways, Air France / KLM, Air Canada, and more.
Bilt offers an easy way to automatically earn rewards for many types of purchases. Simply add your Chase cards (or other credit cards) to your Bilt Wallet and you can earn Bilt points in addition to your usual credit card rewards at the following merchants:
- Participating restaurants
- Participating fitness clubs
- Lyft
- Walgreens
- More coming soon…
You can also pay your rent through Bilt using your Chase card. Bilt will charge you a 3% fee to do so, but you’ll in turn earn 1 Bilt point per dollar. With the Sapphire Preferred card, you would earn 2 transferrable points per dollar (1 Chase point + 1 Bilt point) for that 3% fee. While I wouldn’t necessarily recommend that for ongoing rent payments, it could be a great option for quickly meeting the Sapphire Preferred card’s minimum spend requirement for its welcome bonus.
Helpful Links (Frequent Miler may earn a commission if you use our links):
Save money
Save with DoorDash
Sapphire Preferred cardholders are eligible to get complimentary access to DashPass – a membership for both DoorDash and Caviar. This unlocks $0 delivery fees and lower service fees on eligible orders for a minimum of one year when you activate by Dec 31, 2027
Additionally, DoorDash members get up to $10 off a month for non-restaurant DoorDash orders.
Save 10% off gift cards (including Amazon)
DoorDash offers its DashPass members the ability to buy many digital gift cards for 10% off. This includes Zift Zillions of Gifts cards that can be redeemed for Amazon credit and many other merchants. Details can be found here.
Save with Lyft
In addition to earning 5 points per dollar for Lyft rides through 9/30/27, you can get additional benefits indirectly thanks to a partnership between Lyft and DoorDash. Simply link your DoorDash and Lyft accounts here to qualify for Lyft discounts and priority pickup upgrades.
Save on a hotel stay each year
The Sapphire Preferred card offers up to $50 back per membership year for hotel stays booked through Chase Travel℠.
Save with Chase Offers
Chase Offers are rebates for specific merchants. Available rebates change regularly and you have to add the offers to your account before making an eligible purchase in order to receive the rebate. Use tools like CardPointers or SaveWise to automate adding offers to your card.
Redeem points for great value
Book travel through Chase Travel℠
Via Chase Travel℠ you can use your points to pay for travel for 25% more value (compared to cashing out your points for a penny per point). Unfortunately, there are several downsides to booking travel this way:
- Airfare: If things go wrong, or you need to make changes, the airline will likely tell you that you have to go through your travel agent. This can make things much more complicated. Also, if you have to cancel a flight, any residual value may be held with Chase Travel℠ rather than directly with the airline and so you’ll have to go through Chase again to use that credit.
- Hotels: If the hotel you book has its own rewards program, you won’t earn points or elite recognition when booking through Chase. You also cannot apply discounts that are available when booking directly such as AAA, AARP, member rates, government rates, etc.
- Car Rentals: You cannot apply discounts that are available when booking directly. Plus, you won’t earn car rental rewards for these bookings. Further, if you have elite status with the car rental company, your status may not be recognized.
- Uncompetitive Prices: Sometimes Chase Travel℠ doesn’t offer the best available prices. In those cases, the value you get for your points will be considerably less than 1.25 cents per point.
If someone in your household has the Sapphire Reserve card, you can do even better by moving your points to their account. With the Sapphire Reserve card, points are worth 50% more via Chase Travel℠ (e.g. 1.5 cents per point).
Regardless of whether you can get 1.25 cents per point with the Sapphire Preferred card or 1.5 cents per point with the Sapphire Reserve card, it’s possible do even better by transferring points to select airline and hotel partners…
Transfer points to Hyatt for hotel stays
When looking to book a hotel or resort, Check Hyatt’s website to see if there’s a Hyatt that fits your needs and is bookable with points. Hyatt points are often worth around 2 cents each, or more, for Hyatt’s own properties (note though that Mr & Mrs Smith hotels and other partner brands bookable with Hyatt points offer far less value).
Before transferring points to Hyatt, find a comparable hotel (or the same hotel) on Chase Travel℠ to see how many points Chase would charge to book your stay. Compare that to the number of points that Hyatt requires to book their hotel with points. If you find that Hyatt’s point price is much lower than the price found through Chase Travel, then you can transfer the required number of points from Chase to Hyatt to book your stay.
Transfer points to United Airlines for select flights
United Airlines doesn’t have fixed award prices. You can sometimes get great value for your points and sometimes awful value. For this post, I ran a random search for flights from Detroit to San Francisco and found that United wanted either $324 in cash for economy or 15,000 points + $5.60. Using points in that case would deliver an excellent value of over 2.1 cents per point. Paying with points through Chase Travel would cost a lot more: 25,879 points with the Sapphire Preferred card (or 21,600 points with the Sapphire Reserve card).
Transfer points to other airline programs
There are many airline programs that can offer great value for your points under the right circumstances. It’s possible to get great value from Air Canada, Air France/KLM, British Airways, JetBlue, Emirates, Singapore, Virgin Atlantic, and more. See this post for a complete list of Chase transfer partners.
I don’t recommend transferring your Chase points to hotel chains other than Hyatt. Marriott and IHG points are usually worth far less than Hyatt points.
For many ideas of how best to use points transferred to partner airlines, see: Best uses of Chase Ultimate Rewards
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>> Collect your annual 10% point bonus
This happens automatically right? Like no action required to “collect”. If so, perhaps change Collect to “Dream about how you will spend …”.
OK, I’ve changed it to “Automatically collect…”
I got the offer, but I already have the Chase Reserve. Can I get the bonus for this Chase Preferred?
I don’t think so, and I don’t think that Chase has a pop up warning stating so like Amex does…
Has it been 48 months since you last received the bonus on the Sapphire Reserve? If it has been that long, you can downgrade the CSR to a Freedom product, and apply for the CSP 4 days later.
If you take a few minutes to read the linked article “Everything You Need to Know” you’ll find complete information about eligibility and the process to go through if you are able to make yourself eligible.
Some time ago I read the linked article to which you refer, and thought I was not eligible. However, those of us who have played this game any length of time know that YMMV. I received 2 helpful replies…. and then there was yours.
You can’t get the Sapphire Preferred while you have the Reserve open, but if it has been at least 48 months since you received a welcome bonus for the Reserve, then you CAN do this:
Info like this is available here: https://frequentmiler.com/sapphire-preferred-100k-qa-everything-you-need-to-know/
i get alots of information in this blog