Of course it
can be, see
this example of a domestic economy class routing where transferring to Delta saved $0.021 per point, which is slightly better than $0.02 from a 2% cashback or points card.
However, this is very dependent of your home airport and frequent destinations. If you live near, or travel to, airports that are serviced by commuter airlines you are likely to realize a better than 2% return, but if you generally fly to/from hub airports in economy class you will probably not because the fares are lower.
That seems to be the case. I checked quite a few Delta flights in the last couple of years and never saw anything above $0.015 for flights I was interested in. That's exactly why I asked the OP question. But I can see now how others might get better value out of the MR points. Thank you.
To get the full value from Chase Ultimate Rewards you need to have more than one Chase card. Sapphire Preferred alone won't do much in terms of rewards. You also need Freedom to earn 5 point per dollar on revolving quarterly categories, and an Ink business card to earn 5 points per dollar on several fixed categories, including office supply stores where you can buy gift cards issued by various merchants where you would otherwise earn only one or two points.
Would you please elaborate a little further? I just got 65k points on my Saphire and quite satisfied with that. I understand that Freedom would allow me to earn additional UR's but that doesn't render the Sapphire rather useless, does it? I haven't got Freedom yet (Chase told me to cool down for a couple of months with my CC opening spree I'm on) and perhaps I don't see how the tandem works yet. Is it because the efficiency of earning points is much higher with Freedom (due to quarterly specials) and they allow to transfer the Freedom points to Sapphire's UR for subsequent use with a lot of partners? Is that it?
Also, I haven't applied for a business Ink card because I don't have a business. Is it just a matter of registering some bs business with the state and requesting CC's with the business's ID number? Is that what folks with no real business do?
I'm sorry to bombard you with all these newbie questions, but appreciate your help. Thank you.