When redeeming points or miles for travel, there are generally two main ways: Move your miles to a transfer partner or book travel through a card’s travel portal. More often than not, the better deal is always had by transferring your points to travel partners. Let’s go through a couple of scenarios where this is the case….
What are Travel Portals?
Most major credit cards (Chase, American Express, Capital One, etc.) offer a travel portal to book travel using your points or miles. The portal typically has a fixed redemption rate (usually 1-1.5 cents per mile).
There are advantages to using these portals. A considerable advantage is that you don’t have to worry about award availability. If seats are open on that flight or rooms are available at that hotel, you can book them through the portal and pay with points. To this end, there are, for sure, situations when using a travel portal makes the most sense.
What are Transfer Partners?
Many credit cards offer the ability to transfer your points or miles to various airline and hotel partners. You would then use these miles to book directly with that travel partner. The downside is that you will be limited to award availability – this can especially be tricky if you try to book during peak travel times. The upside is that your points and miles can go a lot further.
Travel Portals vs. Transfer Partners – Let’s Break it Down
Let’s say you want to take a girls’ trip to Spain, and you want to fly business class. A quick Google Flights search shows the most affordable non-stop option in business class is on Iberia from Los Angeles to Madrid. So let’s go to the Iberia site and check it out….
$3,332. Yikes. Ok, let’s say you recently acquired the Chase Trifecta, and you’re sitting on a stash of 150,000 Ultimate Rewards in your Chase account. Let’s pop on over to our Chase travel portal, which looks like this:
If we check this same flight in our Chase travel portal, we will find it for the same price as advertised on Iberia ($3,332). However, from our Chase portal, we can choose to apply our Ultimate Rewards rather than pay cash. The redemption rate using our Chase Sapphire Preferred is 1.25 cents per mile. Grab a calculator, and let’s do the math:
This means that to use Ultimate Rewards to book this flight through the Chase travel portal, you would need 266,560 Ultimate Rewards to secure a $3332 flight. OMG. Not possible.
Let’s explore the third (AND MY FAVE) option…
Transferring to Travel Partners
Your Chase Ultimate Rewards dashboard also offers the option to transfer to travel partners
Now, one important note—and I mean really important—once you transfer your Chase Ultimate Rewards out of Chase and to a travel partner, you cannot transfer them back to Chase. Once they have left your account, they are gone. Therefore, you do not transfer to a travel partner unless you are positive there is an available award redemption that you plan on booking immediately.
In this case, let’s look at that same flight on Iberia but select “pay with Avios.” Avios are the mileage “currency” used by Iberia and British Airways. Here is what pops up:
The exact same flight but for 62,500 Avios. But, how do you get Avios? You would need to transfer 63,000 Ultimate Rewards (transfers must be in increments of 1000) from your Chase account and into your Iberia account. (This is why it’s a great idea to have already established loyalty accounts with hotels and airlines).
So, in the case of this flight, you had three options:
There’s a clear winner here, right? This comes with some caveats, though.
The biggest one is that airlines and hotels have limited award availability. Just because there are 100 open seats on the plane doesn’t mean all 100 will be available to purchase using Avios. In fact, I have found that Iberia, for example, will only release two business class award seats per day.
You will often need to hunt around for award space. Traveling as a family can get tricky (my husband and I have taken one kid each and flown separate flights because we couldn’t find four award seats on the same flight). But look how much money and miles it saves you to book this way!
Conclusion
Regarding which is better – travel portals vs. transfer partners, you will almost always find way better value using a transfer partner. While finding award availability can be more challenging, the value you glean from using transfer partners is SO worth it.
