Originally Posted by
flygirl12
Ha, you're very right- I could definitely use the cash back to fund future travel. Somehow the cash going into my bank account feels practical, even if I then took it out for trips later. The illusion of miles-funded trips being "free" makes it more appealing, I suppose, than having saved cash to use. Since I can't really predict the value of money vs. points for a hypothetical trip, looks like I'll just have to make a decision!
That's one of the best things about the Chase UR program. The points are in cashback form unless you decide to transfer them. My girlfiend had ~60K points in her UR account, and was looking for a coast-to-coast trip over Christmas for two. The cheapest we could find was $579 per ticket, but using award travel on UA, I found the same flights for 25K miles RT each. She was able to transfer 50K UR points to UA and book $1160 in airfare with it. 2.32cpm is significantly better than cashback (pretty much locked in at 1cpm)!
One thing to take into consideration when making your decision is how much discretionary income you have. If you don't have excess cash to spend on trips, and plan to count entirely on rewards/CB for travel, then maybe sticking to CB is the best option, because you can always use it. If you have finance some trips yourself, then you can emphasize rewards more and use those for the trips that have award availability (and maximize redemption value, like my parents did).