Chase Ultimate Rewards and Chase Travel

Chase Ultimate Rewards and Chase travel are some of the best points to collect in all of points and miles. These are chase banks “flexible currency” points allowing you to use them in their portal (think like Expedia) or transfer them to partners like Hyatt, Southwest, etc. We will cover transfer partners later.

Base Card- Pick one

First you need one of the following cards as your base card. This card is important because you need it in order to transfer to different hotel/airline partners. I think for 99.9% of people, the chase sapphire preferred is the best card to start with. It only has a $95 dollar annual fee and great perks.

Chase Sapphire Preferred

Best starter card on the market and only a 95 dollar annual fee. It comes with great perks like a 50 dollar hotel credit a year in their portal (like Expedia). It also comes with Doordash memberships and Instacart to name a few things.

Chase Sapphire Reserve

This is the premium version of the last card. Annual fee is quite a bit more ($550) but with that comes more a lot of perks. If you tend to cash out your points for travel, you can use the Pay yourself back option on certain categories to get 1.25 cent per point. Just make sure to erase everyday purchases that qualify in that category. If you are a military member they waive the fee, making it the best option!

Chase Business Preferred

This is the business version of the chase sapphire preferred. It has a $95 dollars annual fee as well. It usually has a high spending amount to get the bonus but has recently been lowered.

 

Once you have 1 of these cards (You can have 1 personal and the business card), you can then start to add additional cards:

0 Annual Fee cards that Pair in Chase Travel

Both of these cards have 0 annual fees. You can also downgrade one of the cards above to them after 48 months to reapply for one of the base cards above.

Freedom Flex

This is one I think is worth being in everyones wallet if you want to focus on these points. It has rotating spending categories of 5 points per dollar. This is a card many with downgrade to once 48 months have passed. This is when you can re-apply for the sapphire preferred or reserved cards.

Freedom Unlimited

This card is 3x the points on restaurants and 1.5x points on everything else. If you don’t have a business its a great catch all card that is similar to the business unlimited card!

 

Both spending bonuses are usually pretty low on these cards compared to others. so I usually downgrade to these cards or open them if you want to focus just on ultimate rewards points or don’t plan to open a lot of cards.

Co-branded Cards

There are plenty of co-branded cards that also pair with these cards. Co-branded cards only allow you to use them with that specific hotel or airline. If you are a beginner, I would focus on chase ultimate rewards points and then move onto a specific co-branded cards of your choosing.

How do I use these points for Disney? Lets break it down

1. I use my chase points 99% of the time to stay at Hyatt Hotels near Disneyland, WDW, or other locations. This is because when you transfer them, you usually can get double the value! I transfer them to my free world of Hyatt account. We have a step by step here that shows you how.
2. I have used them for flights to Hawaii, Orlando, and Southern California on southwest. We also have flown southwest for Disney cruises out of Fort Lauderdale or Miami!

Combining points together

You can pull points from any of these locations onto one on the base cards:

• Player 2 (another member of your household like a spouse) can call chase and transfer their points to you.
• Business Cards
• Other Chase flexible currency cards (many with 0 annual fees). The spending categories might be higher on some of these cards. For example, you might earn 5 points for every dollar you spend on amazon vs 1 point using one of the cards above.

This article from Travel freely breaks down ultimate rewards points in a great way with videos and tutorials as well.

Chase Rules 5/24

Something to keep in mind is that Chase bank has a rule where you can only open 5 personal cards in a 24 month period with them. When wanting to get into points and miles, you probably want to focus on both Ultimate rewards earning cards and co-branded personal cards before moving onto a bank like AMEX.

Trying to decide if you should stay at Hyatt Regency Orlando or Grand Cypress?  Here is our review of both!

Hope this helps you deep dive more into ultimate rewards points!