It's kind of a wash: Both offer about $750 in credit towards travel. However, to get that value with Chase UR points, you must book via the Chase travel portal; with the Altitude Reserve card, you can book directly with the airline, which might offer lower fares than the Chase travel portal does.

Chase UR points are more versatile than Altitude Reserve points, as the former can be converted to airline miles or Hyatt points. On the other hand, the Altitude Reserve card comes with the Priority Pass benefits, and that card earns 4.5% in travel credits for all mobile-wallet purchases (at places like supermarkets, drug stores, fast-food restaurants, department stores, etc.)

The A/R card does have a somewhat higher minimum-spend requirement for the sign-up bonus than the CSP card does. Don't know whether that is an issue for you.

as mentioned before, I already have a chase sapphire preferred card. If I were to add the U.S. bank altitude reserve, or maybe the capital one venture X card, is it possible for me to somehow combine all those points to pay for American Airlines flights and or Hilton hotel nights?

Amex, Citi, Cap One, Chase, etc have transfer partners in all 3 alliances, but there isn't a great deal of overlap with specific partners. So, you might find yourself redeeming some AA tickets with AA and others with QF for example.

Once you have met the minimum-spend requirements and thereafter received the sign-up bonus(es) on either or both of those cards, you would then have the sign-up bonus's dollar equivalent available on each card individually. That value cannot be combined in one purchase. However, you could use the points to buy one roundtrip ticket and perhaps one or two hotel nights with each card individually. There is no necessity that your airline ticket and your spouse's airline ticket be purchased in a single transaction.

Of course, the money you spend to meet the minimum-spend requirement would also earn points, so it's possible that you would have enough points for two tickets with just one card. Unfortunately, nobody knows what the price of those tickets will be once you have received the sign-up bonus.

However, unless this is the only trip you plan to take in the next twelve months, you could also buy both airline tickets as soon as you get a new card -- using the ticket cost towards meeting the minimum-spend requirement -- and then use the bonus points you earn subsequently; maybe even to pay for some hotel nights if your Hilton HHonors points are insufficient to cover all nights of your upcoming stay.

It has always been my understanding that I can transfer points to my spouse so we can pool the points together. Are you saying that doesn�t apply to welcome bonuses?

if my spouse and I both reach the initial spend for both the Hilton Amex and both CSP cards, are you saying that we cannot combine Hilton points into just one person�s account? Are you also saying I couldn�t personally combine welcome bonuses if I had, for example, a Hyatt card and a CSP card?

There are limits on transferring points between accounts. With Marriott BONV�Y, that limit is 100,000 points per year from one particular account to another

The Hilton Honors limit is 500,000 points, with a maximum annual receipt from multiple donors of 2,000,000 points.

Consolidated "Points Pooling" Thread (Hilton Sub-Forum)

Information on transfers from one spouse's CSP account to the other spouse's CSP account can be found here:

https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/t...om%20and%20to.

But you cannot combine US Bank Altitude Reserve points with Capital One points or Chase UR points.

You can "combine" Hyatt points with Chase UR points by converting your UR points to Hyatt points by transferring UR points into your Hyatt account. But that transfer only works in one direction: you cannot convert Hyatt points into UR points.

There is no such general rule across all airline, hotel, and credit-card programs. Some such programs allow for free inter-spousal transfers; some programs allow for the pooling of points by all members of a household. American Airlines permits an AAdvantage member to transfer points to any other member for a fee; transfers to a spouse are subject to the same fee.

Points earned from a welcome bonus are treated the same as points earned by organic spend on a card when it comes to transferability.

But it is frequently unnecessary to combine points to achieve a desired result: a seven-night hotel stay can be broken up into separate bookings of five nights and two nights or four nights and three nights. Each of those separate bookings can be paid for with points from a different spouse. Similarly, a roundtrip flight for two people does not have to be paid for with points or cash from a single person's account. You can purchase a roundtrip for yourself while your wife purchases a roundtrip for herself. Or, in those markets where a one-way prices at half the cost of a roundtrip, you could purchase a roundtrip for yourself and a one-way for your wife, and she could purchase a one-way in the other direction herself.

Similar for UA; transfers between accounts generally require a fee. However, UA does have frequent flyer mileage pooling, with from 2 to 5 members in the pool.

UA announces F/F Mileage Pooling (United Sub-Forum) (March 2024)

Further to this point -- because I don't see it specifically mentioned above, and it looks like you are focused on AA flights and possibly an AA card -- Chase points do not transfer to AA. You may be able to use them to fly on AA by transferring to another oneworld partner, but you won't be able to combine then with any AA points you accumulate.

I want to provide a few examples here that might shed some light on how this works. I arbitrarily chose ORD-LAX on 7/18 in economy class because those flights have lots of award availability. I haven't used the exact same flights for all comparisons, but the mileage/points requirements are generally representative of any high availability flights.

AA nonstop


AA one stop


BA (Chase transfer partner) nonstop

BA one stop

QF (transfer from Cap One or Citi) nonstop (one stops are the same price as long as there is classic inventory available on both segments)


Notes:

• BA prices partner awards on a segment by segment basis, so you're seeing ORD-PHX added to PHX-LAX in the one stop case; for this reason, if you want to maximize value of Avios, you should focus on single segment tickets to/from partner hubs
• AA, by contrast, is fond of discounting multi-stop itineraries (2 and, even, 3 stop routings are fairly common). You can see this in AA case 2
• I don't have a lot of experience with QF, but one of my friends ended up using QF points for MHT-CLT-DEN on AA last week because he had QF, CX, and BA points, but not AA, so he was looking at 18k v 28k v 30k
• AA's pricing for AA flights is much more "dynamic" than BA or QF because it permits redemptions on nearly sold out flights at very high rates (AA does not release seats on nearly sold out flights to partners at all, so we can't really compare) and does deep discounts at the other end of the spectrum
• Even though neither BA nor QF publish award charts any more, both employ award charts behind the scenes for partner (AA in this case) awards
• BA's award charts have a distance component that you won't see in the examples above because I didn't compare flights in different distance bands, but shorter = cheaper (e.g. JFK-LHR is cheaper than LAX-LHR and long flights like JFK-HKG are typically a poor value)
• I didn't cover premium class awards in my example because I've tried to keep it as simple as possible, but I feel compelled to at least mention that premium class awards can be a good value with AA miles as you become more skilled at hunting for them....BA much less so (e.g. the same Japan Airlines flight from ORD to HND that goes for 80k miles +$5.60 in first class with AA costs 123,750 Avios + $ 264.20)

Finnair Plus recently adopted Avios as its reward currency, and BAEC Avios are transferrable to Finnair Plus. Here's the Finnair Plus redemption chart for AA:



Finnair says that its redemption rates include necessary connections at no additional Avios cost, but there have been reports here on FT that that does not seem to the case in practice. Maybe that's just a temporary IT glitch; time will tell. In any event, here's the language in question:

"The pricing of award flights with partner airlines (excluding British Airways) is based on the origin and destination zone. This means all flights within your origin and destination zone are included in the partner airline award price." (Emphasis added.)

Source:

https://www.finnair.com/us-en/finnai...-with-partners

When doing my previous test searches, I somehow forgot to mention/include that Avios are freely transferable between the various FFPs that use Avios as a currency (e.g. BA, QF, AY, etc) as long as the transferor and transferee are the same person...and it only takes minutes to create new accounts.

On the surface, this might sound like a minor thing, but as guv1976 suggested, the redemption algorithms differ quite a bit from program to program.

As such, I have now run new test searches on the same route (ORD-LAX, July 18, economy class) using AY and QF.

Unfortunately, AY came up empty (I'm guessing I did something wrong)


BUT, QR revealed a pleasant surprise!


I could not get QR to show any connecting itineraries at all for this routing. And, when I switched to IAH-LAX (two cities QR itself serves), I was only shown "connections" via DOH (i.e. basically an open jaw ticket from the US to DOH), which obviously isn't relevant.

Still, that 11k price is a really nice find because if you simply do one more free transfer (i.e. Chase to BA and then BA to QR), you unlock ~30% more value from the exact same Chase points. We've talked about this a little in the past on FT, but not in a lot of detail...perhaps, we should keep it that way.

thank you for this amazingly detailed example.

I need to read this a few times and likely find some videos to walk me through this until I better understand it. I really appreciate you shedding light on this so I can learn more.


in summery though am I correctly understanding that my Chase points cannot be combined with my AA Advantage points ? and there aren�t any creative ways to transfer Chase points to other airlines which eventually combine them with my AA points?

other than dedicated AA advantage credit cards, are there other rewards programs that directly or indirectly transfer (and combine with) AA points?


a bit off topic but can chase points be used to buy an economy ticket and AA advantage points be used to get that ticket upgraded to business class? Or vice versa?

You still seem to fixated on this idea of combining Chase (or similar) points with AA miles, even though several us have explained to you that this is not possible.

Combining miles from two different AA accounts is also not possible for all practical intents and purposes (i.e. transferring miles is almost as expensive as buying points outright and transfer upon death definitely is out of scope).

Finally, while there might be an exception or two in existence somewhere in the points universe, you can't book an award ticket with one currency and upgrade with another.