Transferring Chase Ultimate Rewards To Jet Blue
As a family living in the Boston suburbs, we love that Chase Ultimate Rewards transfer to Jet Blue on a 1:1 basis. We love it even more when Chase offers a transfer bonus to Jet Blue and hope to see that offered again soon. Most points and miles experts will say that transferring to Jet Blue is not a great use of your Chase points, and they aren’t wrong when looking at only the cent per point value. Chase Ultimate Rewards are generally valued at about 2 cents per point. If you redeem your points for more than that, you’re winning! If you redeem your points for less than that, you are “wasting” some opportunity to use them at a higher value.
One thing that helps us get more value out of Jet Blue points is that we have a Jet Blue Plus Card. This card offers 10% of your points back after you travel on an award booking. With this rebate, we are generally able to get a value of 1.5-1.6 cents per point based on the cash price at the time of booking. Jet Blue’s points cost per flight is dynamic based on the cash price which makes it more difficult to get great redemptions. If you can snag a 25% transfer bonus from Chase to Jet Blue, then you can bring that value closer to 1.8 cents per point which we are very happy with.
Even if we only see a value of 1.5 cents per point for each of our redemptions on Jet Blue, it’s still worth it for us, and we will continue to transfer Chase points as needed. Value is about more than just the monetary value of a point. Living in the Boston area, Jet Blue is a major player and has a ton of direct routes available. We value the convenience of a direct flight greatly! More than that, we value being able to fly our family of 5 across the country so our kids can visit with their cousins, year after year, without hesitation. We value getting to Orlando each summer to use our Disney Vacation Club points from the ease of the Worcester airport.
Could we book our Jet Blue flights in cash and use it as an earning opportunity? Absolutely. For a family of five on a single income, however, the free airfare matters more than the points optimization. Additionally, we highly value the flexibility that booking with points brings. Should we need to cancel a flight, our points are placed right back into our account. If you book with cash and need to cancel, you are issued a credit to your Jet Blue travel bank to use towards future travel, and it expires within 12 months. This also comes in handy when Jet Blue offers a sale and the price of your flight drops. Once again, if you modify or cancel & rebook this flight as a cash-paying customer, the difference will be credited to your travel bank and will have an expiration date. With a points booking, although you can’t modify your existing reservation, you can simply cancel and rebook at the lower rate. When you cancel an award flight on Jet Blue, the points are added back to your account immediately.
Our motto for the best Jet Blue fares is to book early and check often. We like to plan our travel well in advance and are usually waiting for Jet Blue to open up their availability (they do this about 11 months in advance). Jet Blue offers many sales throughout the year, and prices fluctuate based on supply and demand as well. It has become part of my morning routine to check any of our existing flights over coffee, and if the rate has dropped, I cancel and rebook. I will usually cancel and rebook a flight at least 2 times after my initial booking. Could I just wait for a sale and book then? Yes, of course, but I find the fares to be decent when they are first released, and just in case a flight doesn’t go on sale, at least I locked in a decent rate by being early. Another benefit to booking early? Plenty of time for the airline to change its schedule. Why is this a good thing? If Jet Blue changes your flight time by an hour or more, they are obligated to allow you to rebook to another flight from your point of origin (or co-located city) to your destination (or co-located city) within a 3-day window. A good strategy can be to book the flight you want but also book the cheapest flight you can find in hopes that the schedule will change by an hour or more and you can get the more convenient flight for a bottom-of-the-barrel price. When you transfer Chase points, which are much easier to accumulate, you can play this game of chance.
I don’t think we’ll win any superlatives or bragging rights for best-ever Chase Ultimate Rewards redemptions here, but we will win big with family travel, intact savings accounts, and convenience. That’s good enough for us.
