acasteve

Sorry if this might be old news, but I Just noticed that a TSA Pre-Check gift card is available for 9,000 points. A good deal?

ryanmcv

Where are you seeing this?

Anyways, I don't think it's a great deal. PreCheck costs $85 for 5 years I believe. At 9,000 points, that is a value of less than $0.01 per point. I regularly redeem for flights at a rate of at least $0.014 or $0.015 per point.

Often1

All depends on whether you intend to use your points for anything. There are all manner of people who have orphaned points lying around from various carriers and using those points to purchase a magazine subscription, Pre-Check access or whatever, might be a great deal.

NoStressHere

Please provide a link or source.

Please.

ursine1

More Rewards is available to Rapid Rewards Visa Card cardholders. You can find the offer by searching for "precheck."

pitflyer

Lots of gift cards available at 1 cent per point, the one that got lost when COVID started was Amazon. Mostly places where you could probably get a discounted gift card otherwise, so the actual value is less than than 1CPP. But at least it's an option (hopefully Amazon comes back someday) for those of us who stocked up on points from CC bonuses and have nowhere to go to use them. Link is: https://www.southwest.com/rapidrewar...m-more-rewards

EAJuggalo

Depends, are you going to be able to use the points for anything else in a reasonable time? How difficult is it for you to acquire RR points? Do you value Pre as much as a roundrip flight MDW-MCO? Personally I don't get all that many RR points, so I tend to hoard them. But Pre saved me and my family over three hours in one MSP-MCO roundtrip last year.

pinniped

If you are a US citizen who thinks there's a chance you'll fly internationally even once in the next 5 years, I'd do Global Entry instead. Interview availability is opening back up in most places and the procedure is very similar to PreCheck.

I would not use my WN points for this, given how WN points can easily be used on flights at better value. On a legacy airline, 9000 miles could easily be orphaned - or practically so, with super-limited options to find oddball 7500 mile flights. On WN that isn't the case.

NoStressHere

Personally, I would be hesitant to do the global entry. Here is why.

We have it and it is up for renewal. We of course can not do the interview, so we have to deal with it at some point in time. Even in normal times, they are really backed up on interviews. I wish we could just apply for TSA Precheck only and not worry about global entry.

They have a couple of other options to get through quick when coming back on intl flights that I think work just as well.

pinniped

Just did my renewal...interview itself was 5 minutes, an hour total counting the time to drive to/from the airport.

The *initial* interview was maybe 15 minutes. I suppose that's maybe 5 minutes longer than a regular Precheck interview (?). The agent flipped through my passport and we just sort of talked about where I'd been prior to the interview and then did the fingerprint thing.

I booked my slot for today about six weeks ago.

I can't imagine going through 99% of the effort and *not* getting the GE bit, even if you only use it a couple times a year. IIRC there wasn't even much of a cost difference...maybe $20 more than Precheck... (Some credit cards will reimburse this as a card benefit.)