In this post, I’ll show you exactly how to use your Chase points. More specifically, I’ll guide you through step-by-step on how to:

1. Redeem your Chase points for booking flights.
2. Redeem your credit card points in Chase’s Ultimate Rewards platform to book hotels.

If you’d like to know how to transfer your points to travel partners, go ahead and read my post on how to transfer Chase points to Southwest. The method shown in that post can be expanded to any travel partner, not just Southwest (I use Southwest as an example in the walkthrough to make things more concrete).

Before we get started, you should get one of the below credit cards to maximize your bang for your buck:

• Chase Sapphire Reserve
• Chase Sapphire Preferred

If you use a regular Chase credit card for the methods below, you’ll only get $1 per 100 points. However, if you use one of the Sapphire cards, you’d be able to get $1.50 per 100 points (or 50% more).

Note for the steps below you probably want to do it in a Firefox window. On Chrome, I find that a lot of the steps lead to a Request 400 error:

How To Use Chase Points For Flights

Step 1: First, go to https://ultimaterewardspoints.chase.com/ and login with your Chase credentials.

Step 2: Select the card you’d like to use. In my case, I’ll select my Chase Sapphire Reserve card (shown below). If you don’t have enough points in your Chase Sapphire card, simply transfer points to your best credit card (normally Sapphire Reserve/Preferred).

Step 3: Click the chevron at the top, then click “Travel”.

Step 4: Fill in the details for your flights, and click Search. For me, I’ll pretend to go to SFO from JFK. Once you enter your details, you should see results like this:

Normally, $176.80 would require 17680 points. Here, it only requires 11,786 points because I’m using my Reserve card! For roundtrip no less! Again, if you don’t have a Reserve card, you definitely want to just get one in order to take advantage of this huge money opportunity here. If you’re not going to get a Reserve card because it’s expensive, just get the Chase Sapphire Preferred ($95/yr) and you’ll get 25% extra instead of 50% extra. That is, with the Sapphire Preferred you’ll get this fare for 14144 points instead of 17680 points.

Step 5: Click Select and then Select this fare. If you’re doing round trip, you’ll need to select the appropriate flight for your return leg as well.

Step 6: You’ll then see a trip summary page. Pick the upsells that you’d like as they present it to you. Then, click on Continue Booking.

Step 7: Finally, you’ll be taken to the page where you can input your contact info/rewards numbers/etc. Once you’re done filling in the fields, just press Complete Booking and you’re done!

How To Use Chase Points To Book Hotels

I’m actually going to Italy in 6 days, and below is the exact method where I used points to pay for all of it!

And I only spent under 100K points doing it! You can do the same (for cheaper, probably) – here’s how to do it:

First, follow Steps 1, 2, and 3 as you would for booking a flight – just login and make sure that you have enough points on appropriate credit card.

Step 3: Then, click “Hotels” in the tab shown below:

Step 4: Fill in your details as needed. For me, I just said I’m going to FCO for 2 weeks in November. Here are what the search results will look like:

Note that there’s a ton of filters for you to tweak and play with so you can narrow down exactly what kind of hotel you’d like to stay at. For Italy, they even have a neighborhoods filter so you can book a hotel close to popular locations.

Step 5: Click the listing that you’d like. I just clicked on random listing for my example. Once you’ve clicked on the hotel you’d like to stay at, it’s time to pick a room that suits you. Once you’ve found one, just click Reserve:

Step 6: Like booking travel, you’ll be taken to a final page where you’d put in your information and choose how you’d like to pay. In my case, I’d just book with points. When you’re done filling in your information, just click Complete Booking and you’re done!

This example trip was from Nov 17 – 30, and it would have only cost me 66449 points! That’s 2 weeks of vacation stay, for free!

My example:

Below are my bookings – you’ll notice they’re more expensive because I decided to splurge on higher-end hotels. But it’s up to your discretion on how you want to spend your points.

I spent 78111 points for 6 nights across Italy. My total cost is $106.66 for taxes. While not technically free, paying $106 to stay for 6 nights in a foreign country is “free enough” for me.

Wrapping It Up

Credit card points are great, when you don’t just convert it back to cash. Instead, you should maximize your credit card points’ value by using it for travel, as you’ll get more than $1 per 100 points.

In this post, we covered how to use your Chase points for flights and hotels via Chase’s Ultimate Rewards dashboard. The examples above demonstrated that you can use less than 100k points to book 2 week’s worth of lodging in Rome, and that you can do an SFO<->JFK round trip flight for under 12k points.

• Caveat: If you’d like to do business class/first class offerings, they’ll require a lot more points. In these cases, you’ll probably want to travel your credit card points directly to Chase’s travel partners for max value.

PS: Have something you’d like me to give opinion on and/or do research on to post? Comment below for requests or email me directly at hello@goodmoneygoodlife.com and I’ll respond ASAP.