bren9690

I've been using credit card points for travel for several years now, but I've always just booked through the given card's portal or directly with the airline, depending on what card I am using. I've never really learned the whole transferring-points-to-different-airlines side of thing.

Right now, I am trying to plan an East Africa trip, but am running into difficulties with flights. I am wanting to use my Chase Ultimate Rewards points. The flights I'm wanting are MCI to ZNZ, then KGL back to MCI. Going through the Chase Portal, this would cost over $2,700 per person (!!!). If I search the flights on Google Flights, I can find them for half that using a combination of United and Turkish Airlines, but it says to book by calling Turkish Airlines. In this scenario, can I use my Chase points? If so, how? I would think if I transferred them to United, which is one of their transfer partners, then I'd have to book on United (where the price is astronomical).

If I flew out of and into JFK instead, that whole portion would be Turkish Airlines at which point I could book on Turkish Airlines' website (and then book the MCI-JFK roundtrip separately). Would that make a difference?

I apologize if I'm not making much sense. As I said, I'm new to this part of the points game.

sbm12

Welcome to FlyerTalk!

If you transfer the points to United then you'd want to book an award trip, not a revenue ticket. You would need to check the UA site to see if the seats are available on your dates. If seats are available it would be 80k r/t in coach or 140k r/t in business.

You can also try calling Chase and feeding them the specific flights to see if they get the lower prices. No guarantees there but it could work.

And you can try pricing the trip on the Chase portal to/from JFK rather than MCI and see if the price is more reasonable.

dvs7310

It sounds like you're confusing two quite different systems. When you book via the Chase portal, you're getting a regular revenue ticket paid for by your points. You can more or less buy any ticket on any airline as long as you have enough points in your account. When you transfer points to an airline, then instead, you're booking an award ticket which is subject to very limited availability.

From Chase UR you can transfer to quite a few airlines, so you're not limited to only Star Alliance, but it it's Star Alliance you want then you can book either via United or Singapore Airlines, whichever gives you the better deal, as both will have access to the same inventory. You should also look to see what Flying Blue offers you in terms of routing and award price. They are quite competitive for some regions. To check Flying Blue, you have to create an account first but it doesn't need any miles in it.

You'll end up using significantly fewer UR points going with the mileage transfer option but you may or may not find the routing that best suits you and the flights flown do not accrue frequent flyer miles since they are award tickets. Booking via the portal, you pay in points whatever the cash price is for the route, so you do earn miles and status miles, if that makes a difference to you, but you will also spend a lot more points. If you're finding an economy ticket for $1,500 round trip, you could fly business class for almost the same number of points using an award ticket.

sbm12

Depending on the card a $1500 r/t revenue ticket is 100k UR points. On UA the routing is 80k/140k r/t, plus taxes/fees that are included in the $1500. On SQ it is 104k/174k++ for the same seats. FlyingBlue will be 80k/200k++ for the same city pairs. But award seats are more capacity controlled than the portal/revenue booking.

dvs7310

Fair point, I didn't pull up the award charts for Flying Blue and Krisflyer. They are competitive in some regions, not so much in others. Personally I'd much rather 140k for business class seats than 100k for revenue economy unless I was really hurting for PQMs near the end of the year. But of course to each their own as other people certainly have different priorities.