Ultimate Rewards points (UR points) are the flexible award currency issued by certain Chase bank credit cards. Chase offers a wide variety of co-branded credit cards for hotels, airlines, personal use, business use, Amazon, and even Disney. The following specific cards, though, earn UR points:
Sapphire Reserve (CSR)
Sapphire Preferred (CSP)
Other Sapphire cards, including discontinued, product change-only, or invite-only
Freedom
Freedom Flex
Freedom Unlimited
Ink Preferred
Ink Premier
Ink Cash
Ink Unlimited
The Sapphire family of cards is aimed at the travel and premium travel market. The Freedom family is more geared towards everyday spending, and technically don’t earn UR points on their own, but the “cash back” they earn can be transferred to any of the UR-earning cards. The Ink cards are for small businesses. Remember, a lot of things can qualify as a small business!
Five of the above cards have no annual fees, while the CSR tops the range with a $550 annual fee, but has the most credits to offset it.
I’ve noticed Chase seems to like to change their intro bonuses frequently, but they are pretty consistent from person to person. The Sapphire cards usually have bonuses in the 50,000-60,000 point range, while the Freedom cards are usually around $200 cash back (equal to 20,000 points) with a lower spending requirement. The Ink cards have the most lucrative bonuses, typically between 75,000 and 100,000 points. Chase’s cards are subject to a few restrictions on new accounts and new account bonuses. Most notably, the 5/24 rule limits new applicants to five new personal cards in the past 24 months, and most cards limit signup bonuses to once every 48 months. This is much nicer than American Express’s once in a lifetime bonus rule, though! For example, I’ve had a CSP for about ten years, and just recently product changed it to a Freedom Flex so I could open a new CSP and earn another intro bonus!
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So you sign up for one or two Chase cards and have earned a couple hundred thousand points; what should you do with them? Where Chase really shines is how easy it is to get at least reasonable value from their points. For this reason, Chase UR cards are, in my opinion, the best for beginners.
Option 1: Cash Back
For statement credits/cash back, points are worth 1 cent each, which isn’t great, but is at least something. This is the worst possible redemption value, though, so read on to get more value. The only upside is that it's easy to redeem for cash back or as a statement credit when logged into Chase and selecting "Ultimate Rewards." I also lump things like gift cards or shopping directly with points under this option. Sometimes, certain stores may have offers for more than 1 cent per point, but it's not common and it would be hard to get more than 1 cent on average in the long run.
Option 2: Travel Portal
For travel, you can book through Chase’s travel portal, and UR are points are worth 1.25 or 1.5 cents each, depending on which card you have. The CSP and the Ink Preferred are 1.25 cents per point, while the CSR is 1.5 cents per point. That’s on ANY travel you can book through Chase’s portal! That means no searching for award space, no worrying about transfers, and no loyalty to any airline or hotel required (again, this is really useful for beginners). This middle-value redemption is what sets UR points apart from Amex MR points. They both have the same top-end redemption options, but only Chase offers the ability to redeem at more than 1 cent each with such ease.
If you prefer to redeem points in this manner, then the CSR makes more sense than the CSP. Both have an annual fee, but the credits and benefits of the CSR make the fee easier to swallow. Getting an additional 20% value from your points every year could be worth $100-300, especially when you consider you'll earn more points in the first place, offsetting the higher fee.
Option 3: Transfers
Lastly, similar to other issuers, Chase has transfer partners. These can really offer incredible value, but to make the effort of transferring worth it, I usually expect at least 2 cents per point.
Transfers work with Chase basically buying millions of loyalty points in bulk, and then exchanging them for your UR points when you initiate a transfer. They will be deposited into your selected loyalty account, so you need to have an account with the transfer partner target before transferring. All of these transfers are one way only; if you say you want to transfer 145,000 points from UR to Singapore Krisflyer, you will lose 145,000 MR points and gain 145,000 miles in your Krisflyer account. Krisflyer doesn’t offer a transfer to UR points, so there is no way to transfer them back.
I used the example of 145,000 points transferred to Singapore, because it’s also a great example of a redemption we recently used. 145,000 points, plus about $110 in taxes and fees was enough to book a one-way business class ticket from MLE (Male, Maldives) to LAX with a connection in SIN (Singapore). This ticket would normally cost over $5,000. The get the value of the points, use the formula:
( [ticket cash price**] - [reward taxes and fees] ) * 100 / [points used]
**alternatively, you can use what you would reasonably be willing to pay for the ticket, rather than just what the airlines charges other people for it. Just because someone else will pay $5,000 for a seat on a plane for 20 hours, maybe you scoff at that and would only ever pay half that, no matter how amazing the seat and plane are. If that’s the case, you can use $2,500 as the cash price and run the calculation.
In this case, ($5,000-$110)*100/145,000 = 3.4 cents per point!
All transfer partners are not created equal, as 1.5 cents per point from the CSR travel redemption is actually better than some of Chase’s transfer partners. For example, you could transfer UR points to Southwest RR points, and get about 1.4 cents per point of value. Or you could book the same Southwest flight from the portal, get a value of 1.5 cents per point, AND earn more RR points on top of it, because from Southwest’s perspective, you booked the ticket in cash!
Over time, with some redemptions like the example above, and perhaps some redemptions through the travel portal, we strive to keep the average value of UR points well above 2 cents each. This way, we can comfortably use 2 cents per point as the benchmark value or UR points when calculating a % return on spending. It’s worth noting that you can more easily extract more value from your points when you have more of them. It’s honestly pretty hard to get more than $20 of value from 2,000 points, for example. Business and first class airline tickets offer the highest value, usually, but they also take a large amount of points to book.
So sign up for one (or a couple) of the UR-earning cards, and use the signup bonus(es) to jump start your points balance!