Award travel consists mainly of airfare and hotel stays booked using points and miles currencies instead of cash. It is a way to travel for no additional charge beyond your everyday spending, excepting annual credit card fees. Still, these are often worth their cost especially when you initially sign up for a credit card and earn a large welcome bonus. Many people are familiar with the traditional airline miles or hotel group loalty points. Before we discovered transferable points, we held a Jet Blue card and a Marriott card and together they managed to earn us a little bit of free travel every now and then. Once we discovered transferable points, and how easily and quickly we could earn them by signing up for new credit cards, our ability to travel at will became unlocked and we haven’t looked back. What are transferable points? These are points issued by a bank when using specific credit cards from their lineup. The points may be transferred from your bank rewards account to your loyalty accounts at several different airlines and hotel groups. Generally, points will transfer on a 1:1 basis though there are exceptions. Frequent Miler has excellent information all about transferable points, their corresponding travel partners, and the ratio at which they transfer.

The main players in the transferable currency space are AmEx, Chase, Capital One, and Citi. We are focusing on AmEx Membership Rewards and Chase Ultimate Rewards at this time. I know there will come a time when we add in Capital One and Citi, but for now, we are keeping it simple.

Chase Ultimate Rewards transfer to Jet Blue on a 1:1 basis and although an unpopular use of Chase points, it works well for us. We also value Chase’s ability to transfer to Hyatt and since we hold a Chase Sapphire Reserve card, we can redeem points for 1.5 cents per point in the Chase travel portal if we want to book a hotel that we can’t otherwise book with points or if the cash to hotel points value is lower than we find acceptable. For instance, on an upcoming stay at the JW Marriott Anaheim, the cash price for the room is $418. Marriott was asking for 74k Marriott points for that night rendering each point worth less than .6 cents. That’s a terrible deal! Instead, I booked this room via the Chase portal using 20k Chase points plus $285. Chase allows you to pay a portion with points and a portion with cash (determined by you) at the time of booking. The JW Marriott Anaheim is also part of a collection of hotels curated by Chase called “The Edit”. Because of our Sapphire Reserve card, we qualify for The Edit benefits which include daily breakfast for two and a $100 property credit. We will have no trouble using $100 as a family of 5 and the breakfast is probably worth an additional $60. We will report back after our stay, of course.

AmEx has a ton of airline partners which opens up opportunities for many flight redemptions and they transfer to Hilton hotels at a 1:2 ratio. We have yet to redeem AmEx membership rewards as we are in our accumulation phase with them but we have plans to use them for a trip to Hawaii in 2026.

We don’t teach a course here about how to apply for and earn credit card welcome offers because we feel 10X Travel has done such a great job at that and we don’t need to reinvent the wheel. We will say it is important to have excellent credit before you begin to play the points and miles game and it is crucial to pay your balances on time and in full. If you are paying interest, you are not traveling for free. It is very easy to get excited about all of the welcome offer opportunities out there! We encourage you to keep it simple at first, make sure you can manage keeping track of your existing cards, and paying them all off before you add another. We like to apply for 2 cards per quarter, one per adult household member. This keeps a constant influx of points and miles without complicating our lives too much. As you engage more in the world of award travel, you will start to understand what points work best for your travel goals and make informed decisions to help make those goals a reality. We hope that sharing our experiences will give you some ideas and encourage you to do what’s best for your family even if it isn’t popular in the award travel community.