I've Googled FT and cruisecritic and haven't found any current relevant info. Apparently you used to be able to redeem UR points at par for GCs.... but now Chase has this 25% bonus when booking travel, which happily applies to cruises as well.

DW already has the Sapphire so we'll get the 50+k in ~Nov. My thought is to get the Sapphire also, then Freedom for both of us, and funnel them all into one UR account. Use the 5x points on the Freedom cards and we could get to 160k points by spring --> 200k with the redemption bump.

My question, if anybody has done this in the current program: can I redeem for a portion of a cruise? If so, could it be an odd value like $1970.70 for instance? Or does it need to be in some specific increment? 1k, 5k?

Also, can it be redeemed for subsequent payments, or just the down payment? Also, does it need to be a full redemption? I would probably like to save some points for hotel redemption given the better bang for the buck.

Cruising is our primary mode of vacation so 1.25% is not a bad option for us. However, I would like to avoid accruing a large number of points (while passing on other opportunities) and then find out that redemption is a problem.


Alternately, are there any better redemption options than getting 1.25% towards a cruise?

I'm aware that the Carnival MC can get ~1.6% (or higher with extensive shipboard spending,) but it's necessary to accrue a huge amount of points to get to that level ... and with a trivial sign up bonus it's not worth the credit hit. Also, while we currently cruise on Carnival, I'm certainly not tied to them so I'd like to maintain flexibility.

I will have 240k AA miles shortly (plus 70k with DW), and we both have 50+k SWA points, but wouldn't really want to use those for a low percentage redemption and it seems that is the case for all options like that.

Thanks,
Mike