My First Chase Points Boost Redemption

I’ve been collecting Chase Ultimate Rewards points for many years now. The vast majority of the time, I’ve transferred those points to hotel and airline partners for free-ish travel.

The new Points Boost from Chase recently rolled out with the changes to the Chase Sapphire cards. When you book through Chase Travel, some redemptions will value at 2 cents per point (instead of the traditional 1.5 cents on the Chase Sapphire Reserve and 1.25 cents on the Chase Sapphire Preferred card.) The key word here is some. It’s impossible to predict which hotels and flights will be included in the higher value.

My Luck with Chase Points Boost

I recently had to book a flight for my 17-year-old son. Unfortunately, not only is the date fixed, but the time of his flight also has to be within a certain window. We have almost zero flexibility.

While I found a cheap saver award flight for the way there, return flights were looking expensive. The cheapest award flight I could find was 20k+ points, and the cheapest cash flight was over $200. I decided to try my luck with Chase Travel through my husband’s Chase Sapphire Reserve card.

Based on a regular redemption of 1.5 cents per point, I found this economy flight for 15,565 points. This was the best deal on points I could find for our narrow travel window, and I was getting ready to book this flight.

Then, I happened to scroll to the right and saw that the business class version was part of the Points Boost for 2 cents per point. For around 2000 more points, my son could fly in business with two free checked bags. He will have a lot of luggage for this trip, so the free checked bags benefit comes in handy.