If you have Chase Sapphire Preferred…
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Anonymous
| We love it. Use it regularly for the lounge benefit when we travel for all four of us which is easily worth $100 a time. Get about $2k worth of free hotels per year either through the portal or exchanging points for hotel points. |
Anonymous
| If you do the research you'll find the Chase cards to be a really good one. One note - Reserve is worth it. Even if you travel 3x a year for the vacations at school - you get the annual fee back with the points for reward travel. |
Anonymous
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We’ve had Sapphire Reserve for years and really like it; we use the card for everything, so we accumulate a lot of points, and we get the fee back many times over in travel savings.
We aren’t loyal to a certain airline or hotel chain so will use the travel portal to get the 1.5x points value. The prices are consistent with what we find on hotel and airline sites, and we’ve found the travel agents to be helpful when we’ve needed to make changes. |
Anonymous
| Thank you all! I realize I was confused and actually meant the Reserve, not the Preferred. I had been thinking about this for a while and then got an application in the mail, which spurred me into action. |
Anonymous
| We had the reserve for a while but then it got so expensive. I should maybe run the numbers again on whether it’s worth it but last time it wasn’t (the priority plus lounges get so busy they lost some of their attraction too). |
Anonymous
Yes, if I’m transferring - but I have found I get better value most of the time by booking the flight on the Chase portal. I have reserve so I get the 1.5 bonus when booking (which is why it’s usually fewer Chase points than to book directly by transferring and using miles). |
Anonymous
That’s the Reserve. OP is asking about the Preferred. OP we have it and use it often for travel insurance as well as to transfer to airline and hotel partners. The portal is almost always a bad deal compared to transfer partners. You can also get Chase points with business Ink cards if you have a small business. |
Anonymous
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I have the Preferred, but the Reserve is good too. The big differences with respect to travel are (1) Reserve gives you airport lounge access through PriorityPass and the Chase lounge network, (2) Reserve gets a 1.5x points multiplier on travel booked through the Chase portal and Preferred gets 1.25x, and (3) Reserve includes a Global Entry credit for the primary cardholder and Preferred does not. If you're a family of 4 and want to use the lounge benefit together, you'll need to have both you and your spouse on the account so you can each bring in a guest. Adding an authorized user is an additional fee on top of the $550 annual fee for the Reserve. The sign-up bonus is typically the same, although you should wait for a special offer (or ask in a Chase branch) because they offer more than 60,000 points quite frequently.
IMO the real benefit to the card is the ability to transfer points out to travel partners. You'll usually get the great redemptions you hear about from points enthusiasts from doing this, not from using the portal. The basic concept is that you transfer the points to Hyatt's loyalty program (or United, or whichever program you want to use), and then book your travel through the partner using the points. There's a learning curve to this - it's better practice to "price out" the travel in points through the partner first, and then do the transfer from Chase; you'll typically get better points redemptions in low-peak times, which don't really coincide with school breaks; etc. - but you can sometimes get great redemptions. Chase enthusiasts will tell you that Hyatt is the best transfer partner, because they're the only hotel chain that doesn't do dynamic points pricing and typically charge fewer points for comparable rooms with respect to competitors. |
Anonymous
| I have the Reserve but will be cancelling once the last trip I booked on it is complete. Like a prior poster, I had a HORRIBLE experience with them on a fraudulent charge. They did nothing for months in responding to my submission and then ultimately told me the dispute was too old. I lost over $2000. I bank with them and charged over $70K (all paid in full and on time) on the card last year so think I am a fairly valued customer, but the customer service is terrible. Will stick with my Amex and considering adding a VentureX to have a Visa. |
Anonymous
Interesting. We had the opposite experience - there was a fraudulent charge and they were very fast, efficient and responsive to our needs. It was resolved and the disputed charges reversed quickly and with very little fanfare. I guess mileage will vary. Booking hotel points - we booked the wrong arrival date and they were extremely helpful with making the change for that as well. |
Anonymous
| I don't really get why people love it so much. We live overseas and people constantly talk about how it's awesome, but even with a ton of travel, I wouldn't spend $300 on lounges in a year, nevermind the opportunity cost of losing points for Amazon, etc. |
Anonymous
You get travel insurance through the card? So you don’t have to buy separate trip insurance? |
Anonymous
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It’s worth it at a minimum for the 60-80k miles offer at signup. Get a signup bonus, make sure you meet the spending goal and get those points. Worth a decent ticket. If you don’t like the card cancel it after a year. It’s my main shared card with my spouse and I’m
Happy with it |
Anonymous
Right. That's why I think it's worth the $250 net annual fee apart from the lounge access. Just book our plane tickets paying any costs with the card, and the insurance is active. https://www.chasebenefits.com/sapphirereserve2 |
Anonymous
ahhh... I get it now. I was rthe person upthread saying even as frequent flyers the $350 lounge fee I don't think is worth it, but a free ticket is. |