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The Man Who Turned Credit-Card Points Into an Empire

Brian Kelly, The Points Guy, has created an empire dedicated to maximizing credit-card rewards and airline miles. What are they worth in a global pandemic — and why are they worth anything at all?

Brian Kelly, the Points Guy, at J.F.K. Terminal 4 before departing on a trip to Croatia. Credit... Jonno Rattman for The New York Times

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By Jamie Lauren Keiles

• Published Jan. 5, 2021 Updated June 15, 2023

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They came to Dubrovnik by cruise ship or Ryanair — members of a new hypermobile class of tourist, who traveled for cheap and didn’t stay long. They’d seen its walled Old Town on “Game of Thrones,” and they wanted to be there themselves, so they went. Venice, Barcelona, certain beaches in Thailand — these places had all faced their own “overtouristing” problems, but even by this standard, Dubrovnik was extreme. On busy days, tourists could outnumber permanent Old Town residents about 6 to 1. With a main thoroughfare less than a thousand feet long, this pressure on the city’s charm was overwhelming. By 2017, tourism had so overburdened the Old Town that UNESCO was threatening to revoke its World Heritage status. Mayor Mato Frankovic set out to save his city by sabotage, capping passage through the gates at 4,000 daily visitors and functionally banning new restaurants. Nevertheless, the tourists kept coming.

But then, around March 2020, they stopped. After the Diamond Princess debacle, no more cruise ships appeared in the port. Airplanes were grounded, then took flight again — ending an age of quick and easy travel and ushering in a new, slower one. Pandemic travel was arduous and impeded by knotty, sometimes contradictory governmental guidelines. To travel under these conditions required an unhinged urge to take flight and a bureaucrat’s eye for parsing fine print. Brian Kelly, the founder of a website called The Points Guy, had both — plus a few million unused frequent-flier miles. This was how, on Saturday, Aug. 7, he found himself heading from New York to Dubrovnik, to see the walled city with nobody there.

His trip began at 2 p.m. the day before, with an express nasal swab at NYU Langone Medical Center. Travelers arriving in Croatia were at that time required to present a negative coronavirus test no more than 48 hours old. Between test-processing time and travel time, the tight window posed a logistical challenge. But Kelly, as the face of the world’s most popular credit-card rewards blog, had plenty of experience interpreting strict guidelines. For 10 years, readers had come to his site for help turning terms of service into free trips. In this way, the pandemic was another day at work. That afternoon, he posted footage of his nasal swab to Instagram. Nine hours later, he shared his results: negative.

The following evening, he arrived at J.F.K. ready to board a Virgin Atlantic flight to London. The business-class ticket cost him 57,500 miles, plus $724 cash. He eased his way through the TSA PreCheck line and signed into the Delta Sky Club lounge. (The airline, he knew, had a partnership with Virgin.) A bartender announced the evening special: 10,000 points for a bottle of Dom Pérignon. On that day, The Points Guy — which publishes monthly cash valuations of the top 45 rewards currencies — had Delta miles trading at 1.1 cent each. Kelly did a quick calculation in his head: The deal was worth about $110. The same bottle of Dom at a restaurant might go for $250, or more. He ordered the Champagne.

The flight boarded at 10 p.m. Kelly counted just 12 passengers in the 44-seat business-class cabin. Everyone was wearing a mask, and some fell asleep wearing two (face and eye). “Flying during Covid is kind of like flying private,” Kelly told me later. “I had my own A350 plane.” The transfer at Heathrow went smoothly. The flight touched down in Croatia just in time. Kelly presented his negative test results.

Dubrovnik that day was near-empty and majestic, saved by disease from the lure of its own beauty. Kelly met up with his friend Mauricio, a furloughed fashion merchandiser from Miami, and they made plans to meet up with more friends and all rent a boat to hop around the nearby islands. The idea was that by the time they docked again, they’d all have been in Europe for two weeks, freeing them up to travel on to other places. This was a sort of loophole in the strict E.U. travel restrictions. Kelly knew that international travel was not, at the moment, feasible for the average Points Guy reader, but he had the points, the Covid status and the time to allow his readers to travel vicariously through him. He had no idea when the world might reopen. For now, he was content to enjoy the solitude.

“No cruise ships, no mass tourists,” he says.

Just the reigning king of cheap travel, enjoying a momentary upside to its downfall.

The seeds of cheap travel were planted in the 1970s, as U.S. airline deregulation drove down the cost (and luxuriousness) of flying. The boom would not begin for another two decades, when self-book travel websites curtailed travel agents’ power, removing considerable friction from the market and allowing the consumer to take flight more casually. In 2018, according to the United Nations, global tourist arrivals reached a record annual high of 1.4 billion — a 56-fold increase since the end of World War II. This boom, like all booms, had its clear-cut losers (locals, the environment) and winners (home-sharing platforms, crowdsourced review sites, wanderlusting influencers).

Somewhere in this mix is The Points Guy, and its domain is the set of novel currencies issued by airlines and credit cards. Points are ersatz money that you earn by spending real money, a form of currency hidden inside of another. And “loyalty programs,” as the broader sector is known, are businesses inside businesses. On an ordinary, nonpandemic weekday, an American might encounter half a dozen opportunities to accrue loyalty points, from morning coffee (Starbucks Rewards) to daily commute (Exxon Mobil Rewards+) to lunch break (Chipotle Rewards) to after-work errands (CVS ExtraCare points) to date night (Regal cinema’s Crown Club). The degree to which loyalty programs actually increase customer loyalty varies widely from program to program. Good programs dangle a deliberate carrot, forging customer loyalty and heightening what behavioral economists call “switching costs.” They exploit perceived thrift and a fantasy of status to make users want to earn, and thereby spend.

Within the loyalty-program space, travel and credit-card rewards are by far the most successful and well known. As one oft-cited, almost-certainly imaginary airline executive once put it, “People are willing to pay anything for a free ticket.” Travel rewards pose a compelling incentive — a shortcut to the playgrounds of the globalized elite. (Or, if not that, at least a chance to sit in the part of the airplane where cocktails are free.) And yet, as rewards programs have multiplied, the earned point has grown increasingly complex and fungible: A Chase Ultimate Rewards point, worth about 2 cents as I write, can also be converted to a British Airways mile, which in turn can be transferred to Iberia Plus, or cashed out for a ticket on Cathay Pacific, or used to book a rental car with Hertz. The Points Guy helps readers navigate this web.

Since 2010, The Points Guy has published over 30,000 blog posts: hotel, airline and cruise-ship reviews, next to wonkish analyses of rewards-program fine print. (Some typical headlines: “Why the Amex Gold Is the Perfect ‘In Between’ Credit Card”; “How to Get to Puerto Rico on Miles and Points”; “Why I Canceled Bora Bora Again.”) Kelly is only the face of the site; the “guy” is now voiced by a 30-person team of credit-card experts, aviation reporters and expats from legacy travel media. Older travel publications sell a daydream: crisp ocean vistas, street side cafes, European hamlets with more steeples than people. The Points Guy sells that daydream as a promise, upholding a sworn oath to help you “maximize your travel.”

This is not a false promise, at least not on an individual basis. Almost anyone with a decent credit score can get a free vacation by following the protocol outlined in the “T.P.G. Beginner’s Guide.” First, forget your debit card. Your debit card has “no point — pun intended.” It takes without giving and spends without earning. “Wouldn’t you rather know that all the money you spend is like an investment toward your next trip?”

If the answer is yes, your next step is credit. Since the chuh-CHUNK days of the Diners Club card, the credit-card industry has evolved from a substitute for checks into a passport to total convenience. The latest credit cards, known on the market as “premium cards,” charge an annual fee for access to deluxe amenities: airline lounges, free TSA PreCheck, travel reimbursements and, most crucial, points. Convertible, transferable — practically alchemical — points turn diapers and caramel macchiatos into premium status, and first-class upgrades, and over-water villas at the Conrad Maldives. Points accrue passively, without apparent work, taunting the labor theory of value by simply appearing on your monthly credit-card statement.

On The Points Guy Instagram feed, there is proof of all the ways that household-budget straw might be spun into travel gold: Honeymooners hold hands in lie-flat seats. Retirees see the Taj Mahal at last. A cancer survivor with a new lease on life strikes a pose at the world’s tallest indoor waterfall. Two dads with two kids take a family selfie, en route to a free getaway in Cancún. Three shades dominate the color palate: vitreous ocean blue, white sand and cleanable-seat-back-headrest navy. Here, the legroom goes on forever. All the rooms are suites, all the pools are infinite and anyone can live like a billionaire, so long as you play your credit cards right.

Don’t have a premium credit card yet? The Points Guy is happy to sign you up for one. This is, in fact, the site’s main source of revenue. Wander the labyrinth of guides and reviews, and soon you’ll encounter your first sign-up bonus: 60,000 for Chase Sapphire Preferred; 100,000 points for a Capital One Venture. Why should running money through this essentially arbitrary chain of transactions produce value? Does it? The Points Guy is barely concerned with such questions. With one new card, a free trip can be yours. Just enter your address and your mother’s maiden name.

The Points Guy is headquartered in New York City, in a midrise office building just north of Union Square. I went there to visit on Feb. 10, a month or so before the pandemic would devastate the U.S. travel industry. Stepping off the elevator, I felt no sense of impending collapse. The office floor whirred with bullish momentum. Inside a glass-walled conference room, a blogger pecked out posts from a converted airline seat, salvaged from a defunct Concorde turbojet.

Kelly’s office was spacious and clean, appearing mostly ceremonial. In 2012, The Points Guy was purchased by Bankrate, a consumer-finance company, which in turn was acquired by Red Ventures — a portfolio of service-y sites, including Lonely Planet, CreditCards.com, Safety.com, Reviews.com and HigherEducation.com. Kelly stayed on through both acquisitions, retaining the title of chief executive and remaining the figurehead of the brand. In a typical year, he spends about four months traveling, splitting the rest of his time between two homes in the West Village and Bucks County, Pa., where he grew up. Still, when you go on vacation for a living, the line between personal and professional life can be hard to draw. (A March 2020 Business Insider article highlighted this lack of boundaries, reporting that Kelly had made passes at freelancers and snorted cocaine in front of colleagues on a business trip to the Nobu Hotel Las Vegas. Kelly and Red Ventures denied any wrongdoing.)

A bank of shelves, behind a large and empty desk, showcased evidence of Kelly’s airport-lounge lifestyle: an unopened box of Veuve Clicquot; a scale model of a Singapore Airlines jet; two copies of “Rich Bitch: A Simple 12-Step Plan for Getting Your Financial Life Together ... Finally.” (The author was a guest on his podcast.) In the corner of the room, on a gray sectional sofa, Kelly, in dark-wash jeans and Gucci boots, reclined into a stockpile of novelty throw pillows. One was inspired by air-traffic-control lingo (Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, etc.). Another showed a dozen smiling Celine Dions. A third, in brassy, boldface type, asked, “DO I LOOK LIKE I FLY ECONOMY?” At 6 feet 7 inches tall, he did not. He spoke with a frank insiderishness that made me feel as if I shouldn’t, either.

On TSA PreCheck: “I haven’t waited more than five minutes in years.”

On the Concorde: “I’d rather be in a lie-flat bed for six hours than a cramped seat for three. Whose time is that valuable?”

On the diminishing thrills of success: “The joy of a 50,000-point sign-up bonus is lost when now our corporate cards earn up to two million points a month.”

Kelly found points and miles as a child. One morning in 1996, his father, a health care consultant, came to him and said: “Hey, I have all these frequent-flier miles. If you can figure out how to use them, we’ll go somewhere.” Kelly, age 13 — “closeted, gay, fabulous,” by his own description — called the US Airways customer-service line, asked a few questions in his best adult voice, then hung up and told his parents, “OK, we’re going to the Cayman Islands!” (He’d first heard about the Caribbean hideaway in John Grisham’s best-selling thriller “The Firm.”) A few months later, the family of six was wheels-up on a zero-dollar flight to paradise. Thus, a devotion to miles was born.

In college, at the University of Pittsburgh, Kelly earned US Airways Gold status flying to and from student-government conferences on the university’s dime. After graduation, he moved to New York and eventually wound up in human resources at Morgan Stanley, recruiting at college job fairs (and racking up airline miles in the process). The year after he started, the economy collapsed — a failure of too-imaginative financial widgets. Morgan Stanley downsized. Kelly found himself on the firing squad, waiting outside conference-room doors to escort the casualties down to the lobby. This was thankless, demoralizing work. The lifers sometimes cried. Kelly went home feeling drained. Miles and points became an escape — rewarding on some higher plane of human need. He learned the fine print of his corporate Amex card and earned a water-cooler reputation as “the points guy.” In spring 2010, he unveiled a simple website, where visitors could pay him for help booking vacations.

This first version of The Points Guy went online just as several economic trends converged. As the economy began to improve, credit-card companies were looking for ways to regain the customers they lost during the downturn. Chase had just poached a top executive from American Express — the reigning rewards charge card at the time — and had just introduced Chase Ultimate Rewards, a new, flexible points currency designed to draw millennials into the premium-card market. Kelly added a blog to his site in June 2010, just as many other miles hobbyists were launching credit-card blogs of their own. But only Kelly was lucky enough to come across a way to turn this passion into money. In February 2011, a distant friend who had come across the site reached out and asked Kelly to meet him for dinner.

“I thought he was asking me out on a date,” Kelly says. “He was like, ‘Let’s meet up, I can help you with your blog,’ and I was like, ‘OK, that’s like the lamest excuse.’”

The two sat down for a pinot grigio near the Morgan Stanley office in Times Square. The friend, it turned out, was an account manager at LinkShare (now Rakuten), which specialized in affiliate marketing — an online sales tactic in which a company pays a commission to bloggers for selling its product. If you wrote a blog post that got the top Google ranking for, say, “best nonstick skillet,” and put in an affiliate link to the product, you could earn money for every customer you brought in. This was a relatively novel concept in 2011. To Kelly, it seemed spammy, but what did he have to lose besides time? The friend signed him up as a Chase affiliate, and Kelly put up a blog post about the Chase United card. That first month, Kelly says, he earned $5,000 in affiliate payouts. The following month, he earned $20,000. The month after that, he earned $130,000. “I don’t like talking about numbers,” Kelly says. “But basically, it just picked up from there.”

At the time we sat down in his office, The Points Guy had reached a peak of about 12 million monthly unique readers. Up on the wall, a flat-screen TV reeled off a feed of metrics from the site. The blog, by then, had published 16 posts about what we then called the novel coronavirus, covering rerouted cruise ships and suspended flights from China weeks before most mainstream publications. Still, the outbreak remained a curiosity; none of the posts were cracking the Top 10.

The main thing on Kelly’s horizon that day was a new Points Guy app, which he hoped would be released by June, after months of delays. The app, he explained, was designed to synthesize the terms of different loyalty programs, helping people choose which transactions to put on which credit card. Beyond sign-up bonuses and regular spending, a major way to rack up points is by playing the so-called category bonuses — e.g. “5x points on dining” — which vary among cards and change all the time. Hardcore earners keep track of these rules in Excel spreadsheets, or by sticking Post-it Notes to their cards. The Points Guy app would make the chaos systematic, opening the hobby up to more casual earners.

“Mastercard now has Lyft credits. Amex has off Uber. Chase now has Lyft, too” Kelly said, trailing off. “It is dizzying — the amount of constantly changing promotions and targets.”

More dizzying than racking up points is figuring out how to spend efficiently. Most casual credit-card users think of rewards as a freebie. The Points Guy thinks in terms of cold, hard cash, and wants you to get the most freebies for your money. Beyond publishing points-to-cents valuations, the site also posts step-by-step instructions for transferring points among the currencies themselves. Most airlines and credit cards have transfer partners, and those transfer partners have their own partners. By converting points among the different programs, a traveler can arbitrage his way to better deals. This convoluted system formed incidentally, over many years, as airlines and credit cards formed ad hoc agreements. Kelly, who told me he has 25 credit cards and employs a full-time staff member to manage his and his company’s rewards, admitted he still messes up the calculus. “I’ll post on Instagram, ‘I’m using Alaska Airlines to fly American Airlines to fly to London first class,’ and people will be like: ‘Dumdum! Didn’t you realize if you transfer Amex to Etihad it’s less miles?’”

Kelly is a middleman’s middleman — an intermediary in an industry that exists to turn intermediation into profit. There are three major players in the travel-rewards game: credit cards (banks), airlines and consumers. Points, the set of novel currencies minted by airlines, transform their vague-but-strong mutual interests into something fungible. This web of partnerships can become tangled, but generally speaking, the system works like this:

Airlines issue their own frequent-flier miles, but they don’t always go directly to consumers. Just as often, the currency is sold in blocks to banks. With points in hand, a bank can then issue a “co-branded” credit card, like the Chase Southwest Rapid Rewards card, and use the incentives to attract high-value customers. In another version of this arrangement, a bank issues its own currency, like Chase Ultimate Rewards. These points can be redeemed for just about anything. The bank converts its own points into real dollars when buying the desired reward from a third-party vendor.

Points function, in most ways, as real currencies do. When airlines devalue their points — as United did recently during the pandemic to counter the glut of unspent miles — it can cause a minor shock wave, nerfing one card or supercharging another. But because travel remains such a high-value prize, what industry wonks call an “aspirational reward,” the minor fluctuations have not yet destabilized the market. With points in the mix, all three players generally win: Airlines make money selling rewards; consumers enjoy the indulgence of free travel; banks recruit new customers, who more than justify the upfront cost of acquisition.

It’s a common misconception that premium credit cards earn money mainly through interest payments and annual fees. Their meat and potatoes are interchange fees, the surcharges levied on merchants per transaction. When you pay with your credit card in a store, the owner pays the bank a percentage of your total. For certain credit cards, this fee is low — maybe 1 to 2 percent. For premium cards, like Chase Sapphire or American Express, the fees can be higher, depending on the merchant, to cover the cost of a card’s amenities. (This is partly why restaurants, which operate on thin margins, sometimes exclude American Express from the list of cards they accept.) In places outside the United States, interchange fees are generally capped, which can make rewards far less rewarding. In this way, points and miles are an all-American pastime. Only here was the margin wide enough for the coupon scheme to flourish into the kind of game The Points Guy’s readers play.

You might rightly begin the history of points with Diners Club, the first credit card, which came into use in 1950 and, through issuing monthly statements, inadvertently established a way to track and analyze consumer spending. Credit cards would eventually become an indispensable tool for administering travel-rewards programs, but it was deregulation in the 1970s that did more to establish points currencies themselves. From the Nixon administration on, think-tank types on both sides of the aisle began to advocate for regulatory reforms that decreased federal involvement in America’s largest industries. Energy was partially deregulated in 1973. Railroads began in 1976. In 1978, Jimmy Carter signed the Airline Deregulation Act, which undid federal aeronautics controls in place since 1938.

Before airline deregulation, flight maps and ticket prices were set centrally by the Civil Aeronautics Board. Because this prevented airlines from competing on price, they were forced to offer fliers deluxe amenities: full meals in coach, conversation-pit seating, attractive stewardesses in Oleg Cassini suits. Under the Airline Deregulation Act, carriers were free to determine their own prices, which could theoretically increase profits, but also introduced a new quandary: What would prevent the airline market from simply becoming a race to the bottom? Frequent-flier programs emerged as a way to reward customers for staying loyal. Certainly, the business traveler would spend a little more of his boss’s money if it meant getting something extra for himself.

“Using incentives was hardly new,” says Bob Crandall, American Airlines’ C.E.O. at the time. Supermarkets gave out S&H Green Stamps, luring customers with prizes like free toasters. In the airline industry, experiments like United’s “100,000 Mile Club” had already demonstrated some success, but the big impediment to administering such programs was keeping track of customers. (Who could say whether the John Smith who flew New York to London was the same John Smith who flew Houston to Detroit?) On this front, American had a technological advantage — a new computerized reservation system. “So we started doing some research about what kind of rewards people would like,” Crandall says. The answer, somewhat obvious in hindsight, was travel.

“The only thing people want more than cash, as an incentive, is travel,” says Hal Brierley, a consultant who helped design American’s first program. AAdvantage, as it came to be called, debuted in May of 1981 with a wave of pre-enrollment mailers directed at the airline’s top customers. From the beginning, the program was tiered, with the top prize being a free round-trip ticket. “If you flew 50,000 miles in one year,” Brierley says, “you got a first-class trip to wherever we flew, which at the time meant ‘Go to Hawaii.’ Even a business guy wants a beach in Hawaii!”

With haste, other airlines unveiled their own mileage programs. (“I credit United for having responded to the program literally over the weekend,” Brierley says.) These early miles, unlike modern points, were measures of actual distance: miles flown from A to B. Program enrollees received monthly statements, tracking their progress toward the reward. At this early stage, a free trip cost an airline almost nothing to give away. Airline seats were perishable; planes take off, full or not. By turning this so-called distressed inventory into an asset, airlines retained their most loyal customers, who more than paid them back in repeat business.

Within a few years, an estimated 75 percent of all business travelers had joined at least one frequent-flier program. The programs were free; there was no risk in joining. Consumer expectations were low, and most still saw the miles as a kind of funny money. Business sections, throughout the early ’80s, devoted column space to explaining terms of service — and complaining about blackout dates and mileage thresholds. One reporter deemed frequent-flier programs “as confusing and as complicated as Rubik’s Cube.” Another critic, the former senator Eugene J. McCarthy, took to The New York Times to complain:

I was rarely able to take advantage of the special reduced fares, given if one scheduled three months in advance, or agreed to go on Tuesday and return on Sunday, before noon; or to complete one’s round trip within the Octave of the Feast of All Saints, or of the birth of Clare Booth Luce; or buy a ticket before the spring equinox and use it before the summer solstice or, failing in that, only after the September equinox and before the winter solstice, flying west before noon and east after sundown.

The gimmick reputation of early mileage programs proved to be a hindrance, but soon a set of early adopters came to see the programs for what they were worth — or rather, what they could be worth.

In 1981, when AAdvantage was introduced, Randy Petersen was 30 and working in the corporate offices of Chess King, a groovy young-men’s mall retailer founded on the market-research proposition that teen males loved auto-racing and chess. Flying from grand opening to grand opening to reposition racks of nylon parachute pants, Petersen accrued a free trip to Hawaii, booked a room at the Sheraton Waikiki and ate dinner at the luau every single night. When he returned to the Chess King offices in New York, his co-workers gathered around his desk with questions about taking free trips of their own. Seeing latent demand in their barrage of inquiries, Petersen put in his two weeks’ notice. By 1986, he had struck out on his own as the publisher, editor and only employee of the world’s first frequent-flier magazine.

The first issue of InsideFlyer looked, in Petersen’s words, like a “bad ransom note.” Typewritten commentary on airline programs mixed with photocopied offers clipped from monthly statement mailers. Its first readers were road-warrior types — guys in wrinkled suits with Hartmann luggage — who traveled enough to earn a free trip now and then, but didn’t go out of their way to earn further. This all changed in 1988, with the debut of Delta Triple Mileage, one of the first industry experiments in driving consumers to actually fly more than they might otherwise. The promotion, which delivered on the promise of its name, shortened the free-ticket accrual time from a period of years to a period of months. A free trip to Hawaii, which cost about 30,000 miles, used to be an ambitious goal. Now, it could be earned in one-third of the distance — just two round trips from LAX to J.F.K.

For the average business traveler, Delta Triple Mileage increased the immediate value of belonging to a loyalty program. For mileage obsessives like Petersen, taking miles off the gold standard of concrete distance transformed program membership from a static, passive interest to a game that could be played. Triple Mileage gave rise to a frequent-flying frenzy, one that could be amped up even further by learning and exploiting airline-route particulars. Back then, routes were more limited, and travelers often completed the last leg of a trip with a short flight from a hub airport to a smaller regional one. To make accounting for these brief jaunts less annoying, Delta decided to compensate all flights with a minimum of 1,000 rewards miles, even when the actual distance was shorter. Under Triple Mileage, the minimum, well, tripled. And quickly, InsideFlyer readers realized that by stacking these short flights they could mint their own free trips. Flying back and forth between two short-leg cities, a rewards ticket to Hawaii could be earned in just eight continuous hours of flying. “One of the most popular ones was Dallas to Austin,” Petersen says. “People would do that eight, nine, 10 times in a day.”

In time, other airlines introduced their own “multiples” promotions, and around them, a mileage community was born. InsideFlyer eventually spawned its own online replacement — a message board called FlyerTalk — where mileage prodigies, including Brian Kelly, would come to hear the lore of their mileage ancestors. Most stories from this Wild West time have proved impossible to fact-check in hindsight. Back in the ’80s, before the T.S.A. and security theater, “the number of people that used to fly under other people’s names strictly to earn frequent-flier miles was extraordinary,” Petersen says. According to his memory, one high school basketball coach enlisted a whole team to fly under his name. “Back and forth all weekend,” he says. “Between Dallas and Austin, just so he could earn bonus miles. That’s how you push the envelope. You get greedy.”

One of the greatest points-and-miles hustles of the pre-broadband age was something called the LatinPass Run. In the lead-up to the new millennium, a small handful of Latin American airlines formed a consortium called LatinPass. For a while, it was doing OK, but then the big global airlines came in and started eating up all of the business travelers. LatinPass needed a competitive edge, so it turned to Bobby Booth, an airline marketer out of Miami.

Booth’s idea was to incentivize travel with the smaller carriers by creating a million-mile prize for flying at least one international segment on each of the LatinPass member airlines in one year. There were a bunch of exceptions and fine print, stuff involving rental cars, hotels and partner airlines, all of which amounted to a brain teaser for Petersen. In 2000, he worked out a plan for how you could do it and published an article in InsideFlyer saying, “I’m going to do it all in one weekend. Any volunteers?” Three people joined the first LatinPass Run. One was a Silicon Valley investor. One was a loan officer down in Dallas. The third was an off-duty I.R.S. agent. The foursome met up in Miami on a Friday and flew 24 hours a day — up, down, connect; up, down, connect. They got into Lima, slept on the concrete floor of the airport for two hours and then caught the first flight out to Nicaragua. There was unrest in the country at the time, Petersen recalls. “You’d look at all the soldiers all around with the machine guns, and think: We’ve been here. This qualifies. I’m not getting off. No, no, I’ll sit here for two hours while you refuel.”

In the end, the whole run cost about $1,100 per person. The million miles, via transfer partners, were worth at least three first-class international round trips. Petersen published the details of the run, and after that, LatinPass really took off. “You’d pull into Lima last flight of the day,” he says, “and you’d look over and see a couple of other Americans in the back, because we were all in coach, and you’d kind of nod your head a little bit, like ‘I know what you’re doing.’”

In the end, about 250 people earned the million-mile bonus — more than the few dozen the program had forecast. (One was the famous “Pudding Guy,” immortalized by Adam Sandler in “Punch Drunk Love.”)

“They ended up folding that venture just a few years later,” Petersen says. “Just because they couldn’t handle all the redemptions.”

LatinPass was an inflection point in loyalty-program history, marking a moment when airlines began to give more thought to the delicate math required to maintain a strong points currency. By 2005, the global pool of frequent-flier miles was accruing 10 times as fast as the open seats that made the whole system possible. That year, The Economist estimated the value of these unredeemed miles as more than the value of all the $1 bills in circulation. Consumers had embraced the frequent-flier program, but now airlines found themselves facing pressures to give away seats that would otherwise be sold. In time, more and more programs would begin selling points to banks. By turning their loyalty programs into income streams, the airlines could afford to give away more free seats. In fact, according to Evert de Boer, managing partner of an airline loyalty consulting firm, seats purchased with airline points can generate more revenue than seats purchased with cash.

Today the business of selling points is more stable and more reliably profitable than the business of actually flying people places. “Over time, airline performance is very volatile,” de Boer says. “Something happens — say, the price of oil goes up, or a competitor comes in, dumping capacity — and it constantly goes up and down, up and down, up and down ... ” Points, by contrast, are relatively calm. Recently, in the midst of the pandemic, American Airlines used the program as collateral to secure a $7.5 billion CARES Act loan. Delta did the same with SkyMiles to get $9 billon from private lenders. As in other parts of the American economy, airlines are finding ways to become financial-service providers. “There have been transactions in the past where the loyalty program was acquired or sold at a total value exceeding that of the airline,” de Boer says. “It’s the tail wagging the dog.”

Earlier this year, on March 8, I traveled to Washington, D.C., to attend Frequent Traveler University, a travel-hacker seminar series held several times a year around the world, most often in airport-hotel conference rooms. This iteration took place at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center as part of a Travel and Adventure Show that, unfortunately, coincided with the first wave of Covid travel panic. In the main hall of the convention center, two scuba instructors floated idly in an unattended demonstration pool.

I arrived at the F.T.U. conference room just in time for introductory remarks by Stefan Krasowski, a blogger who had leveraged the Delta and United mileage programs to visit every U.N. member country before his 40th birthday. Krasowski, like much of the room, was male, white, not overtly subcultural-looking. He warmed up the crowd with some lighthearted cracks about how “travel hacking” had affected his marriage. His wife, he said, had recently instituted a “one-free-hotel-lounge-meal-per-day rule.” The room laughed along in recognition.

In the mileage community, almost every relationship has one obsessive and one tolerant enabler, generally known as “Player 2.” Marriage unlocks a higher level of the game by uniting two incomes, two credit scores and two Social Security numbers. Several obsessives I spoke with joked that getting access to a spouse’s credit card was one of the best days of his or her life. Krasowski told the room that one of the most common questions he gets was, “What can I do about spouses that are interested in the spending, but not the earning?” He and his wife had begun taking an annual “spousal harmony trip.” She lays out the parameters, and he has to deliver: “Fourth of July weekend, Australia. Business class, single connection preferred, Korean Air.”

My first seminar of the day was called “Awards Worth MS-ing for.” MS, or manufactured spending, was popularized through FlyerTalk. The technique has since established itself as the foremost earnings tactic of hard-core milers. The seminar was hosted by Nick Reyes, a self-declared “rabid” points and miles collector, with an open-collar shirt and a neatly trimmed goatee. He approached the lectern, took off his fedora and rubbed some sanitizer on his hands. As someone struggled to set up the projector, he stalled for time by telling the crowd that he’d named his first son Conrad, after the Hilton luxury hotel chain. (He had already collected several complimentary Conrad-branded stuffed animals from his previous stays.)

“If you were to name your child after a hotel brand, which would you pick?” he asked.

The crowd tossed off suggestions: Regis (in homage to the St. Regis hotel chain), and Bonvoy (after the recently-merged Starwood-Marriott-Ritz-Carlton rewards program).

Soon the PowerPoint presentation was up and running. Manufactured spending, Reyes explained, is a tactic in which you buy a cash equivalent using a credit card, earn credit-card rewards points for the purchase and use the cash value to pay off the bill. A simple example might entail using your Visa credit card to buy a Mastercard prepaid gift card and then repaying the bill through an online bill-pay app (perhaps even using the gift card itself). This is a tidy way to print points, but rarely are MS schemes so obvious. Bill-pay apps, gift cards and other cash abstractions tend to come along with all kinds of piddly fees. In order for an MS scheme to turn a profit, the earning must exceed the cost of manufacture.

One of the earliest MS schemes, at this point a foundational legend of the points-and-miles community, was the dollar-coin bonanza. In 2005, in an attempt to overcome the struggling Sacagawea dollar — and to piggyback off the recent state-quarter craze — Congress passed the Presidential $1 Coin Act, introducing a new series of coins. The first, featuring George Washington’s face, went into circulation around Presidents’ Day 2007. For the next few years, by congressional mandate, a new president was minted every season — Adams, Jefferson, Madison and so on.

Nearly every venue of American consumer life is set up to dissuade the use of coins, and so the new series was a failure. In order to get the currency into circulation, the U.S. Mint started a new direct-ship program, allowing consumers to buy the coins online and have them mailed out free of charge. Before long the Mint started to notice strange buying patterns, as travel hackers discovered the program, used their credit cards to buy millions of coins, and delivered the packages straight from their mailboxes to the bank. This hustle generated an untold number of mileage millionaires, and even more big-fish tales for the points-and-miles community. Here’s one: At the first Frequent Traveler University in 2010, held at a Sheraton near La Guardia Airport, attendees broke for lunch together at a nearby Chinese restaurant, only to discover that the business was cash only. When the bill finally arrived, the waitress was surprised to discover a table piled high with golden coins. (Eventually, the Mint halted the bonanza by disallowing credit-card orders altogether.)

In my second talk of the day, called simply “Manufactured Spending,” a software engineer named Mike Graziano ran through a list of other bygone MS tactics, like paying yourself through the Amazon Pay portal or prepaying a Visa Buxx debit card. In the course of my reporting, I heard of others too: paying yourself through a Square credit-card reader; overpaying your taxes with a credit card and waiting for the I.R.S. to refund you; issuing short-term microloans to the developing world using a website called Kiva. One travel hacker I spoke with divided MS schemes into two categories: pajama spend, which you could do from your computer, and real-world spend, which took in-person work. Manufactured spending was getting harder, as credit-card algorithms became smarter at catching hackers. Increasingly, the profitable schemes involved arduous real-world effort, like driving between Walmart locations to buy money orders at a discount. Some hackers I read about online build these pit stops into their real-job commutes, as a kind of second shift. Others, a small percentage, make travel-hacking (and other arcane arbitrage schemes) a full-time occupation — reselling their points in secret online markets, against the credit-card terms of service.

Staying ahead as a manufactured spender means staying alert, and attuning yourself to particular ways that abstract financial innovations can be layered. “There are new financial products popping up every day,” Graziano assured the crowd. “Bill-pay apps are Silicon Valley-backed companies. Generally they are moving very quickly, and we are not on their radar when they put these products out. When you see that, do not hesitate.”

Legally speaking, travel hacking is not a crime, though it does lead to conflict with vendors and credit-card companies, many of which have instituted rules against MS schemes. A bank or airline has a lot of leeway to decide what abides by its program’s rules and what does not. Even if a travel-hacking scheme does not outright violate the terms of service, a company can simply decide the technique transgresses the spirit of its program. In cases like these, your rewards balances might be seized. Card issuers even institute long-term bans.

Every travel hacker I spoke with had a different relation to the morality of the hobby. Credit cards and airlines are not sympathetic victims, and this fact could be used to justify almost any ethical position. Some drew the line at exploiting credit unions. Others stopped at misrepresenting their own identities, or reselling points online for cash. Pretty much every player at this level disliked Brian Kelly and The Points Guy for one reason or another, including, but not limited to: being a sellout, beating them to the punch, getting in bed with the credit-card companies, advocating for suboptimal deals, masquerading as a consumer advocate, taking credit for a community he did not create and giving a face to a subculture that would rather remain anonymous.

Kelly admits these travel hackers are not his target audience. “I don’t want to have to go around to 10 different Targets to buy different gift cards to get points,” he says. “People called me a sellout in the beginning, like, ‘Oh, you’re just doing this for the masses.’ And yeah — I am. That’s the point.” He didn’t start The Points Guy to keep his deals a secret. “That was a business decision early on, and that’s why I think we’ve been able to grow it. We are very open about the fact that we have to make money. I have 100 employees. I can’t pay their salaries in Amex points.”

I left Washington on March 8 and arrived back home in New York City just in time to watch it shut down. That Thursday, Broadway went dark, and a prohibition on gatherings of more than 500 people was announced. In the following weeks, the schools were closed; the city’s daily Covid deaths reached a peak of more than 800, by some counts. The Points Guy, with its fluency in bureaucratic jargon, pivoted almost exclusively to parsing the daily-changing crisis plans. (Some sample headlines: “Everything You Need to Know About the U.S. European Travel Ban”; “Here’s How to Figure Out if You Qualify for a Flight Refund”; “How to Cancel an Airbnb if Your Reservation Is Affected by Coronavirus.”)

Over the months that followed, I checked in with Kelly periodically as he bounced around the world, from Palm Springs, Calif., to Antigua to Mexico City — getting massages, dining out at restaurants, updating his Instagram story throughout. When we last spoke, in November, he had just returned from two weeks in French Polynesia, where he stayed at the Conrad Bora Bora Nui and swam with humpback whales. Now back home in Pennsylvania, he was once again looking forward to the release of the Points Guy app, which had been kicked down the road to mid-2021. “I’m still confident it will change the way people think about points,” he said.

While writing this article, my own perspective on miles and points certainly changed. Through day-to-day spending — and expenses, which were later reimbursed by The New York Times — my rewards balances began to grow. At press time, I have: 3,815 in AAdvantage, 4,735 in Delta SkyMiles, 5,600 in Marriott Bonvoy, 44,485 in Southwest Rapid Rewards and 65,482 in Chase Ultimate Rewards. I hoped to end this story in a faraway place, relaxing on my own plot-concluding free vacation, but who knows when this might be possible? The more I sit home daydreaming about travel, the more skeptical I feel about the sorts of trips that points and miles tend to produce.

As corporate partnerships have grown increasingly enmeshed, rewards have come to form a worldwide hamster tube, connecting Sky Club lounges to Ritz-Carlton lobbies to Wolfgang Puck Expresses to Uber Black cars. This elite global habitat — part of our world, but also apart from it — is suggestive of our stratified economy at large, one that stays aloft through financial novelties and unfettered access to cheap money. A major reason points-and-miles trips exist is because airlines turn a more stable profit by minting their own currencies than by selling actual airline seats. The flight seems almost ancillary to the financial transaction it enables — a trend across the whole economy, where the selling of goods or services serves to enable the collection of data, the absorption of venture capital funds or the levying of hidden transaction fees. In this scheme, posting to social media, or collecting points and miles, or ordering a taxi or a gyro on your phone, is merely a gesture to keep the whole process in motion. The real moneymaking happens behind the scenes, driven by a series of exchanges where value seems conjured from nothing at all.

But of course, value always comes from somewhere. If you trace the thread back on any one of these businesses, it’s always the same deal: The poor underwrite the fantasies of the middle class, who in turn underwrite the realities of the rich. When credit cards charge high interchange fees, they pass the cost of loyalty programs on to merchants, who in turn pass it back to customers by building the fees into their sticker prices. Those who pay with credit can earn it back in points. Those who pay with debit or cash wind up subsidizing someone else’s free vacation. According to a 2010 policy paper by economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, the average cash-using household paid $149 over the course of a year to card-using households, while each card-using household received $1,133 from cash users, partially in the form of rewards. It remains a regressive transfer to this day.

Almost a year into the pandemic, we’ve seen travel plummet to practically premodern lows. According to the United Nations’ World Tourism Barometer, international tourist arrivals dropped 93 percent year-over-year last June, the beginning of the summer tourism season. The ripple effect was quick and vast, manifesting itself in idiosyncratic ways: Carbon emissions dipped; the Mona Lisa sat alone for four full months, probably her longest solitude since she was painted. In famously overtouristed Venice, reduced canal traffic and the disappearance of tourist “wastewater” output contributed to what one study called “unprecedented water transparency.” The decline in export revenue from international tourism has been, according to one estimate, eight times more severe than the loss the sector experienced following the global financial crisis. Hundreds of millions of people are out of work. The United Nations predicts travel will begin to rebound as early as the third quarter of 2021. McKinsey says we might return to pre-Covid levels by 2023. “Rebound,” to me, is a strange way of describing whatever the next tourist wave might look like. In any case, I’ll keep holding on to my points.

Jamie Lauren Keiles is a contributing writer for the magazine.

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Key takeaways

• The Points Guy app is entirely free to use, and it can help you optimize your spending while boosting your rewards haul
• You can download the app directly to your phone by scanning a QR code found on The Points Guy website
• While the app is currently only available for iOS, a waitlist is forming for individuals who want to access an android version of the app
• At the moment, this free app boasts an average star rating of 4.5 out of 5 stars across more than 2,700 user ratings in the App Store

Using credit card rewards can be a great way to get your travel fix at a discounted rate. However, the world of travel rewards can become extraordinarily confusing if you don’t know the ins and outs of travel hacking and various rewards programs .

Fortunately, one of the web’s premier travel rewards sites, The Points Guy (TPG), has converted its vast treasure trove of knowledge into an app that could change the way you earn and track rewards toward travel. Since TPG is a sister company of Bankrate, we were able to get insider access to write this review.

Here’s what you should know about The Points Guy app and how to use it to maximize rewards on travel.

What is The Points Guy app and how does it work?

The TPG app, currently available only on iOS, allows users to store all of their airline, hotel and credit card loyalty points in one place. By tracking everything with the app, you’ll get tips and advice on using your credit card rewards strategically toward your travel goals.

The app’s features are spread across three main travel rewards philosophies: earn, learn and burn.

As you might have guessed, this section of the app focuses on helping you earn the most rewards toward your travel goals. Here, you’ll be able to track all of your travel loyalty programs and credit card rewards in one place.

In the “Cards” section of the app, “My earnings summary” reports how much you’ve spent in a given month across all your cards and the rewards you’ve earned. In addition to spending and points reports, you’ll get insights, tips and recommendations on spending to meet your travel rewards goals. If you are planning a certain travel itinerary, you can track rewards points progress toward that goal with easy-to-read charts located in the app.

Finally, you can use the app’s Card Advisor to optimize your spending and see missed points. This app feature may tell you to start using a different card you have for different purchases, or that you could benefit from picking another rewards credit card altogether.

Burn is about using your rewards in the most efficient way possible, namely when it comes to connecting the dots between award fares and travel partners. Most people understand how to use rewards within their specific loyalty programs, but the app has the potential to reveal award routes through travel partners — which aren’t always as obvious. At times, these travel partners can offer great value for your travel rewards, especially for luxury picks, like first class, business class or upgraded hotel rooms.

The “Award Explorer” section of the app allows you to search for award routes between airports. You can filter results to include credit card-specific travel portals such as:

• Chase Ultimate Rewards
• American Express Membership Rewards
• Capital One miles
• Citi ThankYou Rewards

You can also filter results by airline loyalty programs like:

• Alaska Mileage Plan
• Delta SkyMiles
• Iberia Plus
• United MileagePlus

Meanwhile, some of the hotel programs offered in the app include:

• Choice Hotels
• IHG Rewards
• Marriott Bonvoy
• World of Hyatt

There are many other loyalty programs to choose from, and this is just a sampling. In fact, the app page says there are more than 70 loyalty programs currently supported through The Points Guy app.

The search results return the number of points you’ll need for a given award route and the fare classes available for the route. Once you see an award route that you like, the app will guide you through the steps to book it. You can even save your favorite trips in the app and track your progress as you build your stash of points and miles until you have what you need.

You’ll still get access to the content you’ve always enjoyed from TPG, but now you’ll be able to customize your homepage with the content categories that interest you the most: points and miles, deals, credit cards, hotels, airlines, family travel, luxury travel, beginners, guides and more.

It’s even possible to use the app to stay up-to-date with the latest travel news, even if that means saving your favorite articles in the app so you can read them later when you have more free time. The Points Guy app also offers curated travel deals that you can learn about through daily reading, so you won’t want to miss out.

How to use the TPG app

You’ll get the most out of your TPG app when you give it the most information possible. With that in mind, here are a few things you should do immediately after downloading the app:

Choose your home airport

When you create your account, you’ll have the opportunity to choose your home airport. Adding this information will pre-populate your airport when you are searching for award routes, which can save time if you often fly out of the same airport as your “home base.”

Connect your loyalty accounts in the “Cards” section

Adding all your loyalty accounts to the app is a must if you want to stay in the know about your award travel options. Not only that, but this step helps you get an eagle’s eye view of all your rewards points in one place, and it prevents you from forgetting about small balances you have that might come in handy at some point. From there, the app can even alert you when you have points or miles that are nearing their expiration date.

To keep an accurate running balance of your points and their estimated value, this step is key:

The good news is that the app makes it easy to add your loyalty programs and credit cards for tracking. You can authenticate your hotel and airline loyalty program accounts right inside the app. If it takes a long time to sync loyalty accounts using your login credentials, you have the option to add your points manually.

Add your cards in the “My wallet” section

Here, you need to connect any rewards credit cards you want to track. You can add credit card accounts using the same in-app authentication process as the loyalty programs you connected.

Once you add your credit cards, you can identify them if the app can’t do so as soon as it’s synced. If your card is not properly identified, you won’t see the correct rewards structure displayed for the card and your points balance and tracking could be incorrect.

Also, if you’re adding a new card, you can unlock the welcome bonus tracker. You’ll just need to add your card approval date and you will get coaching and reminders to help you make that goal.

Save an award flight

To save for an award flight, you’ll need to search for one. You’ll enter the airports of departure and destination along with how many tickets you are looking for. In this search, you have the option to filter by transfer partners and loyalty programs, but it’s best to stay away from filters so that you can see all of your options.

Once you get the results back, you can favorite the trip using the heart icon in the upper right corner of the screen.

The app will also display the number of points you have toward each fare class on this route.  This will include not just your points in one program but will also factor in all transfer possibilities.

Turn on location services

Another neat feature of the app is that you can get real-time spending tips based on your goals, like booking an award fare or meeting a welcome bonus spend requirement. In the “My earnings summary” section of the Cards tab, there is an “Out making a purchase?” option. This will recommend nearby places to spend along with the best card to use to earn the most rewards.

App users can also set up push notifications that alert them when rewards earning opportunities are nearby, but this only works if you have location services turned on. If you have location services turned on and visit a merchant where you don’t usually shop, and there is a clear best card to use, the app can send an alert recommending the best card in your wallet.

Turn on app notifications

If you turn on notifications in the app, you’ll get important updates about the app and your accounts within the app. Some important details you can get alerts for include:

• Alerts for expiring points
• Notifications to keep you on track for a sign-up bonus
• Notifications to ensure you use monthly or quarterly credits

The types of notifications and frequency may change over time, so it’s best to have them on so you don’t miss crucial updates that will impact or improve your user experience.

The bottom line

The Points Guy app can be a handy tool to help you track and organize your award travel plans at a glance. If you are an avid traveler who relies heavily on award fares and discounts, you’ll get a lot of value from the tracking, reports and recommendations features the TPG app provides.

Related Articles

8 of the best ways to use points and miles for travel

How to start traveling with points, miles and credit cards

The Points Guy debuts its travel rewards app

10 free apps for getting the best deals

New to Chase Ultimate Rewards? Here are 3 easy ways to redeem 75,000 points

There's never been a better time to consider applying for one of the Chase Sapphire cards , with both cards currently offering elevated welcome bonuses for a limited time only. These are the highest bonuses we have seen on these two popular cards in over a year.

The Chase Sapphire Preferred® Card currently offers 75,000 bonus Ultimate Rewards points after you spend $4,000 on purchases in the first three months from account opening, as well as:

• 5 points per dollar spent on Lyft (through March 2025)
• 5 points per dollar spent on all travel purchased through Chase Travel℠
• 3 points per dollar spent on dining , including eligible delivery services, takeout and dining out
• 3 points per dollar spent on select streaming services
• 3 points per dollar spent on online grocery purchases (excluding Target, Walmart and wholesale clubs)
• 2 points per dollar spent on all other travel
• 1 point per dollar spent on all other purchases

The Sapphire Preferred has no foreign transaction fees and has many travel perks , including delayed baggage insurance, trip interruption/cancellation insurance and primary car rental insurance .

Meanwhile, the Chase Sapphire Reserve® currently offers 75,000 bonus Ultimate Rewards points after you spend $4,000 on purchases in the first three months from account opening and also earns:

• 10 points per dollar spent on Lyft (through March 2025)
• 10 points per dollar spent on Chase Dining booked through Ultimate Rewards
• 10 points per dollar spent on hotel and car rental purchases through Chase Travel
• 5 points per dollar spent on airline travel booked through Chase Travel
• 3 points per dollar spent on travel not booked through Chase
• 3 points per dollar spent on other dining purchases
• 1 point per dollar spent on all other eligible purchases

Other perks include an easy-to-use annual travel credit worth $300, a fee credit for Global Entry or TSA PreCheck (up to $100 once every four years) and Priority Pass Select lounge access, as well as entry to the growing list of new Sapphire lounges . Cardholders also get primary car rental coverage, trip interruption/cancellation insurance and other protections .

Chase points are really valuable because of the number of ways you can use them. We generally recommend maximizing these points by transferring them to airline and hotel partner programs but recognize this could be complex to navigate if you are a beginner.

If you are new to Chase cards and haven't earned Ultimate Rewards, you may be daunted by the plethora of redemption options — but don't fret. We are looking at easy ways a Chase Ultimate Rewards beginner can get real value from 75,000 points with minimal effort.

Related: The complete guide to Chase Ultimate Rewards

Book travel via Chase Travel

You can use your Ultimate Rewards points to easily reduce the cost of virtually any plane ticket, hotel stay, rental car or experience when you book worldwide travel through the Chase Travel portal . You don't need to worry about airline partners, alliances or award availability using your Chase points in this way.

As a Chase Sapphire Preferred cardholder, when you redeem your points for travel, each point is worth 1.25 cents. If you have the Chase Sapphire Reserve , your points are worth 1.5 cents each toward travel redemptions in the portal. This means the current 75,000-point welcome bonus would be worth $937.50 if you have the Preferred card or $1,125 if you have the Reserve card.

If you wanted to book a Main Cabin flight from New York's LaGuardia Airport (LGA) to Miami International Airport (MIA) for $129 through Chase Travel, you could choose to reduce the price to $0 by redeeming Ultimate Rewards points.

If you have the Chase Sapphire Preferred, your points would be worth 1.25 cents each, so you could use 10,320 Ultimate Rewards points to reduce the price to zero (or a mix of cash and points, if you prefer).

If you have the Chase Sapphire Reserve, your points would be worth 1.5 cents each, so you could use just 8,600 Ultimate Rewards points to reduce the price to zero. Another way of thinking about this is that the 75,000-point welcome bonus on the Sapphire Reserve would be enough to fly a family of four round trip to Florida on American Airlines for no cash if redeeming Ultimate Rewards through Chase Travel.

Get additional cash back for gas and pet purchases and charitable donations

Chase's Pay Yourself Back option allows cardholders to use points at a redemption value similar to booking travel. This won't typically give you the maximum value for your Ultimate Rewards points you can get when strategically using transfer partners; however, it could be a good choice if you're looking for a simple return or are sitting on a pile of points without immediate use.

You can redeem your Ultimate Rewards points at a rate of 1.25 cents each on the Chase Sapphire Preferred or 1.5 cents on the Chase Sapphire Reserve as statement credits for donations you make to the following charities until June 30:

• American Red Cross
• Equal Justice Initiative
• Feeding America
• Habitat for Humanity
• International Medical Corps
• International Rescue Committee
• Leadership Conference Education Fund
• Make-A-Wish America
• NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund
• National Urban League
• Out & Equal Workplace Advocates
• Thurgood Marshall College Fund
• United Negro College Fund
• World Central Kitchen

If you have the Reserve card, you can use the Pay Yourself Back feature to redeem Ultimate Rewards points for 1.25 cents each for purchases at gas stations, pet supply stores and services, wholesale clubs and cardholder annual fees.

If you wish, you could reduce the annual fee of the Reserve card to zero in the first year by redeeming 44,000 Ultimate Rewards points while still enjoying all the perks of the Reserve card.

Requesting a credit through Chase's Pay Yourself Back program is relatively straightforward. Log in to your eligible Chase account via the mobile app or desktop and select the "Pay Yourself Back" option in the redemption menu.

Next, you'll see a list of eligible purchases to redeem points. Points can be redeemed for purchases as far back as 90 days. You can offset the full purchase amount, assuming you have enough points to cover it, or you can redeem a smaller amount if you prefer.

From there, you can confirm the redemption value and amount of points required and then choose to complete the transaction. Your statement credit should be posted within three business days.

Save money on all purchases

Another no-fuss way to use your Ultimate Rewards is to earn statement credits on every purchase. You can redeem 1 Ultimate Rewards point to save 1 cent on any purchase you make on either card. This means 75,000 points could save you $750 on any purchase you like, even if you don't travel.

If you want to save money on the purchases you are making every day, this could be an easy way to do it. When you receive your monthly credit card statement, you can apply as many Chase points as you wish to reduce the balance owed.

Bottom line

While you'll get the most value from your Ultimate Rewards by transferring them to airline and hotel partners to redeem for premium cabin flights and luxury hotel stays, you may want a simpler way to save money on your everyday purchases.

If you are new to Ultimate Rewards, these are simple daily ways to save. Don't miss out on the elevated 75,000 Ultimate Rewards welcome bonuses available on the Chase Sapphire Preferred Card and the Chase Sapphire Reserve .

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Yahoo Finance

Top travel credit cards, according to the points guy.

When planning ahead for major travel plans , most people turn to their credit card's trusty points systems to find the best deals on bookings and airfare prices.

The Points Guy Director of Content Eric Rosen joins Yahoo Finance for its Travel Guide 2024: Industry Insights special to share advice on how to best utilize credit card perks for travel bookings.

"For now, you have to rack up enough points to actually use those to redeem them for the flights. That said, you can also go for a variety of different credit cards, like a Chase Sapphire Preferred or an Amex Gold Card as part of your wallet, so that you can use actually those points towards the cost of your airfare without having to be loyal to one airline program or another," Rosen says.

Catch more of Yahoo Finance's special Travel Guide 2024: Industry Insights coverage this week, or watch this full episode of Yahoo Finance Live here .

Editor's note: This article was written by Luke Carberry Mogan .

Video Transcript

MADISON MILLS: All right. Well, as folks look to save on their spring and summer vacations, as Carrie mentioned, credit card points can be a smart way to keep your costs down when traveling. So joining us now with the best tips and tricks for putting those points to work as part of our 2024 travel guide, we've got Eric Rosen, The Points Guy's director of content.

Eric, I'm going to jump right in with a personal question from a viewer named my mother. You're booking a flight. You don't have enough points to cover the flight. I told her to wait until she had enough points to buy it. Tell me if I'm right or wrong.

ERIC ROSEN: Well, you're right and wrong, I would say. There are certain airline programs that let you use points towards part of your flight, of course. But for now, you obviously have to rack up enough points to actually use those to redeem them for the flights.

That said, you can also go for a variety of different credit cards, like a Chase Sapphire Preferred or an Amex Gold card, as part of your wallet so that you can actually use those points towards the cost of your airfare, without having to be loyal to one airline program or another. So there are lots of ways to play the game to save some money.

JULIE HYMAN: Well, and also, you just heard our Kerry Hannon talking about the importance of being flexible and booking early, which I suspect is also helpful when you're using points.

ERIC ROSEN: Absolutely. Those are great pieces of advice. Airlines open up their award availability about 331 days in advance. It seems to be typical among US airlines. Some don't schedule quite that far out. So if you know your plans well in advance, that's when you'll find that award availability.

But also, to her point, if you're flexible, you can find some last-minute deals. As airlines find they have unsold seats, they'll open those up for award availability. You can put those miles to use. You might just end up flying, you know, on a Wednesday night instead of a Friday night, things like that. So, the more you can be flexible, the more likely you're going to be able to put your points in miles to use.

MADISON MILLS: And I know part of the advice is to utilize price alerts and to, you know, again, be flexible. To your point, Eric, is there a moment though where you advise people to go ahead and pull the trigger and not continue to hold and wait?

ERIC ROSEN: If you've been tracking prices and they're within your budget, I would say just book the flight then. As you get closer and closer to the departure time, chances are those prices aren't going to drop. You won't see a precipitous $500 to $200 drop on the airfare that you're going for.

So if it fits within your budget, you've got a limited amount of vacation days, the kids are off of school, don't wait too long to book your trip. That said, if things really aren't in your budget, you might want to save it for a later vacation sort of like she had mentioned, where instead of going on your spring break now, think about an early summer trip before everyone's out of school, or towards the end of summer right before school starts again, where you might have a better chance of locking in a good price that fits your budget.

JULIE HYMAN: So, Eric, Maddie asked a question on behalf of her mom. I'm going to ask you a question on behalf of myself. I am not a points girl. And I'm just wondering what-- and I have what is probably a mistaken perception in my mind that it's complicated, right? That navigating, accruing the points, you know, and then using them, that it's somehow difficult to do. Disabuse me of that notion, if it's incorrect. And tell me like, who are these-- who is best served by getting these points situations and cards and using them?

ERIC ROSEN: Absolutely. You know, airline programs, hotel programs do a really good job at making it seem very complicated to use their miles or saying that like, you just need to rack up some miles and you'll get a free flight. And then you go to look and you're not able to find the thing that you actually need. If you want to keep things simple, there are a lot of ways you can do it, right? Get a solid cashback card like the Chase Freedom, right, so you can earn points on every purchase and then use those points for cashback, whether it's on travel expenses or on something else.

We also suggest going for transferable points, something like Chase Ultimate Rewards, Amex Membership Rewards, Capital One miles, where you can redeem them at a set rate for things like flights and hotels so you don't really have to do a ton of mental calculations in order to get some value. Or you can transfer them to a variety of different airline and hotel partners that suit your need at a particular time, rather than having to stick to one program that might change its rules on a dime and leave you without enough miles for that trip you've been having your eye on for the last couple of months.

MADISON MILLS: All right. Eric, one final question here for the users out there who have been utilizing credit card points, I'm wondering about the kind of transfer deals that come up from time to time. What is the best way for folks to stay on top of those potential opportunities, and capitalize on them at the right times?

ERIC ROSEN: Definitely. So when you're talking about are transfer bonuses, where instead of like one Amex point to one British Airways miles or one delta mile, for instance, you might get a 25% bonus. So if you transfer 1,000 of them, you'll get 1,250 miles instead of the usual 1,000. The best way to stay on top of those is to follow sites like ours, The Points Guy, because we have regular updates of what transfer bonuses are currently out there.

And I would say don't go speculatively transferring all of your points from those programs all at once because you should have a specific imminent redemption in mind where you can really take advantage of that extra value, rather than counting on something coming down the pike in a few months time. Because like I said, programs can change, or that hotel that's in one category of award redemption today could go up the next day and then you've transferred all these points and you're not quite able to use them because you can't transfer them back to your other original account.

MADISON MILLS: All right, Eric. We really appreciate it. Thank you so much for that advice and have a great weekend. Thank you.

ERIC ROSEN: Thank you.

DaniloAndjus / E+ / Getty Images

Advertiser Disclosure

The Points Guy launches new app with features for maximizing travel rewards

The new app makes earning and booking award travel easier than ever before

Published: September 27, 2021

Author: Ana Staples

Editor: Cathleen McCarthy

Reviewer: Brady Porche

How we Choose

The Points Guy App has been in the works for years – here’s the first look.

The content on this page is accurate as of the posting date; however, some of our partner offers may have expired. Please review our list of best credit cards , or use our CardMatch™ tool to find cards matched to your needs.

With the abundance of airline and hotel loyalty programs and credit card rewards becoming more and more competitive, managing rewards earning and redemptions can turn into a challenging task.

An app that would optimize this process has been a long time coming – and now, it’s finally launched.

On Sept. 27, 2021, CreditCards.com sister site  The Points Guy announced the launch of The Points Guy App . The app will allow users to connect their credit card accounts and rewards programs to track their progress, pick the best card to pay with to maximize earnings and find travel redemptions that offer the best value.

The new app is full of useful features and provides users with ways to “learn, earn and burn” their rewards.

Here’s the first look at this exciting new product.

What The Points Guy App offers

Juggling multiple rewards credit cards and loyalty programs can become a complicated process even for experienced cardholders and travel enthusiasts.

The Points Guy App makes this process much simpler. The app tracks rewards, suggests the best cards to use on purchases based on the user’s location, offers redemption options and explains how to use them. Additionally, users can stay on top of travel rewards news with The Points Guy’s news feed personalized to their interests.

The number of features the app offers, from sign-up bonus tracking to step-by-step instructions for booking award travel, is truly impressive and shows the level of expertise and attention to finer details put into this product.

“It’s been a complicated piece of product,” Mitchell Stoutin, The Points Guy App’s head developer, told us. “And this is the great thing about having the TPG staff behind this, to have these very, very deep travel experts on points and miles. I locked a number of them in rooms in Austin with very large whiteboards for days at a time, getting them to explain to us what was happening so we could build this piece of software. And I think it really came out great.”

Learning with The Points Guy

The first section of the app, “Home,” provides the opportunity for users to stay in the know of the travel industry trends. Here, you can track the latest travel news from The Points Guy, search articles and adjust your feed to follow topics like points and miles, deals, credit cards and more. You can also bookmark stories to return to them later.

Earning rewards with The Points Guy

The “Cards” section of the app allows users to add their credit cards by connecting their card accounts and access their earnings summary. The tab shows how much cardholders have earned and analyzes missed earning opportunities, offering a better card option.

In this section, users can also check which card they should use for a purchase based on their location. For cardholders with multiple credit cards earning different rewards rates, this can be a rather convenient feature.

For cardholders working to earn a welcome bonus, the app has another useful feature. By adding the date of approval, users can track their progress to meet the spend requirement.

In the “Points” tab, app users can add their hotel and airline loyalty programs and track the net worth of their rewards, including their card points and miles. Here, they can also check the points and value breakdown based on The Points Guy’s evaluations.

Burning points and miles with the Points Guy

In the “Award Explorer,” users can plan how to burn the rewards they’ve earned based on the estimated lowest price.

When a user taps on an award travel redemption option in search results, they can see transferable points toward the trip, prices in cash and points and credit card offers that could help them boost their points.

Probably the most exciting feature here is “How to Book” – step-by-step instructions on booking award travel. The process of transferring points may be confusing, especially to those new to travel rewards, so the detailed instructions the app offers can be extremely helpful.

Should you download the Points Guy app?

The Points Guy app is an ambitious product that can make earning and redeeming travel rewards easier. With the expertise behind the app and countless unique features, it’s an exciting addition to a credit cardholder’s list of downloaded apps.

However, we’ve noticed a few bugs while testing The Points Guy app – some minor, others more significant, like miscategorized transactions in spending reports or having to reconnect multiple accounts. The developers are continuing to work on the app and actively asking for feedback. For instance, the “Award Explorer” tab shows a message the feature is still in early testing and encourages users to report any info that looks inaccurate.

That said, the app is still an excellent product built by some of the most knowledgeable travel rewards experts. Despite some glitches that will likely be ironed out in the future, The Points Guy App has potential to save its users money on travel and make managing rewards simpler than it’s ever been.

The Points Guy App is currently available to iPhone users. Android users may have to wait to get their hands on the new app, but the developers are hoping to release it at the end of the year or the beginning of 2021.

Bottom line

The Points Guy App is an exciting new product that can help cardholders get the most of their credit cards, points and miles. While some features aren’t perfect yet, it shows amazing potential and is undoubtedly a helpful tool for award travel enthusiasts.

Editorial Disclaimer

The editorial content on this page is based solely on the objective assessment of our writers and is not driven by advertising dollars. It has not been provided or commissioned by the credit card issuers. However, we may receive compensation when you click on links to products from our partners.

Ana Staples is a staff reporter and young credit expert reporter for CreditCards.com and covers product news and credit advice. She loves sharing financial expertise with her reader and believes that the right financial advice at the right time can make a real difference. In her free time, Anastasiia writes romance stories and plans a trip to the French Riviera she'll take one day—when she has enough points, that is.

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CreditCards.com is an independent, advertising-supported comparison service. The offers that appear on this site are from companies from which CreditCards.com receives compensation. This compensation may impact how and where products appear on this site, including, for example, the order in which they may appear within listing categories. Other factors, such as our own proprietary website rules and the likelihood of applicants' credit approval also impact how and where products appear on this site. CreditCards.com does not include the entire universe of available financial or credit offers. CCDC has partnerships with issuers including, but not limited to, American Express, Bank of America, Capital One, Chase, Citi and Discover.

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Editorial integrity is central to every article we publish. Accuracy, independence and authority remain as key principles of our editorial guidelines. For further information about automated content on CreditCards.com , email Lance Davis, VP of Content, at [email protected] .