I'm new to credit card miles & points, please explain this to me like I'm 11

In My Humble Opinion
1

I am finally at a place in my life where I have, in combination, good credit and some money. So I decided to jump into the world of credit card miles & points. Now, some context: I don’t intend to gin the system to such an extreme that I can get free Business Class trips to Dubai for free, like these people (sort of the Miles & Points version of Extreme Couponing). I have neither the money, the time, nor the wherewithal to dive into that rabbit hole. But at the same time, I don’t want to leave money on the table (so to speak).

So I have the Chase Sapphire Preferred card. I plan to use it for just about every purchase to rack up points. For some travel-related things: I plan to use it to book a cruise on Norwegian Cruise Line for December 2026, and a hotel room in New Orleans the night before. Do I just book those things as I usually would, online, and whatever bonuses I’ll get will just happen naturally? Or do I need to call Chase and book my travel through them?

As for air travel, presently the only air travel I’m planning is a short round trip flight, St. Louis to New Orleans and back, the end of this year. Next year I plan to fly round trip to London & back; is there a way I can gin this system to get an upgrade to a better seat? Or knock down the price of a better seat?

And also, my Chase Sapphire card allows me access to certain lounges at certain airports. Like, when I fly to New Orleans, I can wait in a nice lounge just by showing my card?

Is there anything else I need to know about this system? I’m completely new to the whole thing.

2

That particular card has been one of the best. But Chase just nerfed it and removed most of the super-value it once had.

The big thing to know is it takes a lot of spending to make much happen.

For very round numbers, a point or mile at most places is worth about a penny at redemption. So if you want a $500.00 air ticket or hotel room, you’ll spend about 50,000 points/miles to get it. And at the typical earning rates for low-tier members you’ll have needed to charge nearly $50,000 on the card to earn those points / miles.

Sometimes there are specials where you earn points / miles at 2 or 4x the rate. Sometimes there are specials where at particular redemptions you get more like a nickel’s worth of value per point.

All of these cards are structured in tiers. The people who spend a LOT get huge multipliers on their benefits. The people who spend a little get no multipliers on theirs. I have a friend who owns a business and runs $100K through his credit cards every month. He gets lots of points and multipliers and perks. And has a hard time spending them anywhere near as fast as they build up. Leading to ever greater status and multipliers and …

I suspect that you’ll find the benefits pretty paltry. But better than zero which is what you had before.


Yes. But.

There are several brands of lounge. Some airline-affiliated and some not. Whether any given terminal has the brand(s) of lounge you have access to is very hit or miss. Easy for you to check for lounges along your itinerary in advance of traveling, but the thought that Card X gives access to spacious uncrowded lounges everywhere you might travel is not reality.

There is one rapidly growing lounge brand called “Priority Pass” which is not affiliated with any airline. The problem is they’re doing so well selling memberships as perks to credit card companies that I’ve never been in one that wasn’t packed to standing room only with people. Most of whom are K-mart shoppers. Everything about their lounge experience is cheap. It’s often less crowded out in the terminal than in one of their lounges.


ETA upon reading @Telemark just below: Yeah, I goofed. Chase’s Sapphire Reserved is the (former) industry leader. Their Sapphire Preferred is much more ordinary.

3

We have the same card, and are operating on the same premise. I’ve just redeemed my first reward flight so I can explain some of the basics.

The “best” way to redeem points for rewards is to transfer points to partners (from Chase to an airline or hotel) and use them there. It’s almost always better than redeeming through the Chase travel portal, although there are some exceptions.

For example, if you want to fly to London you first look on the airlines that fly from your home city to London and see what rewards flights cost. They will vary considerably by airline. The biggest trick is that you don’t need to use the carrier airline to book. For example, if you want to book a flight on British Airways you don’t need to book through them - you might transfer your miles to Iberia and book the BA flight through them for fewer miles. It’s a bit of an intricate process, one that takes some time to understand.

Nothing happens naturally, you need to work at it. Hotels are more complex and less efficient use of points, but we haven’t explored that much.

Chase Sapphire Preferred is a lower tier card, compared to the top tier Chase Sapphire Reserved. You’re not going to get any airline lounges with it.

4

OK but will I get any value at all, however minimal, by booking my cruise through them? I think I read something about $300 onboard credit or 1.5x points or something.

5

You probably will get some benefit, but it’s not the best value for your points. Transfer to airlines and buying flights will almost always get you more bang for your buck (points). I don’t have much experience with cruises - not sure where the value proposition is.

It looks like you can transfer points to Mariot Bonvoy and book cruises through them. I’ve never looked at that.

6

The 1.5x points are valuable. When you’ve accumulated enough to spend them.

Cruise lines are even worse than airlines about ever changing prices, continuous sales “Last DAY!”, and various come-ons like on-board credits. If you check 5 sources you’ll get 5 prices for the same cabin on the same ship on the same sailing. If you don’t already have a frequent cruiser account at that cruise line, just opening one may give you a bunch of bonus stuff too. e.g. $X onboard credit and a $500 discount on your first cruise.

The gotcha is the deal on offer direct from the cruise line, from e.g. Expedia, and from Chase will all be different and you can’t add them up. Hotels offer discounts on airfare if you book through them, and airlines off discounts on hotels if you book through them. And cruise lines offer the same. All the various factions that make up the total travel industry can all cross-sell each other’s products to some degree. And can sometimes offer a deal you can’t get another way. Sometimes. Now credit cards have charged into this space and are just another sales faction within the travel industry.

So the game becomes checking all the various ways you have to buy the same product and see which one pays you more benefits and / or costs less in total price.

Sometimes there’s no material difference. Sometimes there’s significant difference. One gotcha is ensuring you’re comparing like for like across sales channels. Some cruise lines have 3 kinds of cabins, period. Others have a 6 flavors of cabins divided into 20 tiers of “cruise product” with greater or lesser included benefits in each. Each for a different price. Which makes comparison shopping between booking your cruise via the airline versus the credit card vs the hotel all the more challenging.

7

Often for cruises you will get similar or better onboard credits from travel agencies if you book through them. It’s a pretty standard perk that cruises offer to anyone that brings them a customer (credit card portal, travel agent, etc).

You really should do the math for your spending to find out whether points or cash back is better for you. If you have high spend and travel a lot, you can do well with points. But if your travel is more limited in quantity or more varied in type (different airlines, cruises, varied hotels) you might do better with a cash-back card.

I agree with @LSLGuy 's point regarding airport lounges. The credit-card or “pay-to-play” lounges are pretty shabby and almost always crowded. The business-class ones in international hubs are very nice, but obviously you have to pay for a business-class ticket to access those (hence the smaller crowds). I don’t think I would pay for a high-tier CC just for lounge access.

For me it just wasn’t worth trying to play the miles game - my time was more valuable. So I just found the best cash-back combinations (one for gas, one for groceries, one for food and travel, etc) and maxed those out and use the cash to travel the way I want to.

My brother travels a ton for work so using a card that adds points to his already high frequent-flyer miles is absolutely worth it. But you’re locked in to one airline network and one hotel network.

8

That’s of course the goal of the various affiliation programs, and especially the multiplier tiers. When you have high status at hotel network X or airline Y it becomes very costly in terms of perks foregone for you to book at hotel network A or airline B instead. So you’re motivated to stick to only your home brands and they get all your sweet sweet travel dollars.

Speaking just to hotel tiers, 15 stay-nights a year is sort of “jacks or better to open”. If you want the kind of frequent-sleeper status that includes hotel concierge lounges w free happy hours, free breakfasts & discounted other meals, a complimentary bottle of OK wine in your room, a layer or two of room upgrades, etc., you need to be spending 60-100 nights a year in their hotels. That can get spendy.

Easy to do as a corporate road warrior on an expense account. Harder for a well-off retiree who travels extensively as their main recreation. Impossible for a 3x per year vacationer who’s still working.

9

I had the Sapphire Reserve for quite a while, and just downgraded to the Preferred a few days ago due to the “nerfs” LSLGuy mentioned.

The Reserve was quite the amazing card if you were responsible with your spending and could pay it off every month (otherwise the 30% APR will far surpass any benefits you get from it). But with it, you got not only airport lounges (crowded though they were), but free food at some airport restaurants for you and a guest, TSA Global Entry and Precheck paid for, free Dashpass and Lyft Pink, primary rental car insurance, travel insurance, accident insurance, luggage insurance, up to 10x points in some categories/merchants and 50% back some redemptions, and numerous other smaller benefits that in the aggregate made the moderately high annual fee worth it if you were careful.

But that was a loss-leader for Chase as they were trying to expand their card offerings to a new generation of middle-class tech money. The Reserve was so successful that other banks tried to copy its success. But then they started steadily enshittifying, losing perks here and there, decreasing redemption values, etc. Fast forward to 2025 and Chase repositions the Reserve not for the middle-class but for the White Lotus wealthy, with perks aimed at fancy luxury travelers who spend thousands instead of hundreds per night and who dine at famous restaurants, not neighborhood joints. The annual fee doubled accordingly. Too bad.

The Preferred, by contrast, is really not anything too special. It’s a basic travel card similar to the ones you can get at any major bank. It has a $95 annual fee and not many benefits — rental insurance, some travel coverage (but minimal compared to the Reserve), free Dashpass (which isn’t that great), etc. You also get a $50 credit a year to spend on hotels, plus more points accrued, if you book travel through Chase Travel. But Chase Travel sucks. It’s basically a white-labeled Expedia with fewer guarantees about reservations and shitty cancellations. Hotels treat you as a second-class citizen when you book through online travel agents like that. Chase Travel customer service isn’t good, the UI is slow, the offerings are lackluster, the ads are numerous. In general it’s just not a good way to book travel.

I only kept mine because I wanted to keep my credit line with Chase open and was too lazy to research their other options that had primary rental car insurance coverage. But for $100/year, you can probably find cards better aligned to your specific lifestyle or region, like an airline card that would give you free flights or luggage on a certain airline. The Preferred is just this kind of bland, mediocre middle-ground card that doesn’t do anything particularly well, but it’s hard to justify the $100 a year for its lackluster benefits. It’s a pretty different situation from the old Reserve (or even the new one), where you DO have a lot of options for accruing and spending points and maximizing value if your card fits your lifestyle. With the Preferred, you don’t really have as much “agency” because it’s such a simple card.

Anyway, since you have it already, try to get the welcome bonus (spend $5k to get 75k points). If you can organically charge $5k to it within the time limit, do that. Otherwise, you can consider paying your rent/mortgage on it (either through your landlord if they have a service that allows that, or sometimes through a third party rent payment processor), or you can Venmo it to a friend for a fee — just do the math and make sure the fee doesn’t surpass what you’d get back from the points. This is called “manufactured spend” and you can game the system this way if you really want to. See the subreddit r/churning index - churning for discussions on that and similar credit card gaming strategies.

Beyond that, it’s basically just a matter of booking travel on Chase Travel (if you can stand it — I can’t) to get the 5x points and taking advantage of Dashpass if you use it. If those benefits aren’t worth it to you, consider switching to another card. If you stay within Chase, they can side-grade you to any other card you qualify for and keep your existing credit line. Or you can reapply at another bank, but best to wait a few months or a year or so between cards — don’t open too many at once, because that looks bad for a while on your credit report.

https://thepointsguy.com/ is a website that discusses all of these things and is generally a good resource, they though are also affiliated with many of the cards, so they’re not impartial the way that Consumer Reports is. Still, it’s a generally useful service.

The most important thing is to make sure you’re not keeping a balance on the credit card, but paying it off in full every month. If you’re not able to do that, the rewards don’t matter at all — the interest will FAR surpass them — and you should be looking at refinancing your debt with something lower interest than worrying about points.

10

And specifically on this note, the Preferred does NOT include any lounge access, whether Priority Pass or Chase’s own new Sapphire Reserve lounges (which, as the name implies, is for Reserve cardholders).

The lounges are fine… crowded, yes, but free drinks (including alcohol) and light bites at most places makes it worth it still. A few whiskeys before boarding? Why not. And Priority Pass gets you free restaurant food at many airports around the world (that you can take to go and bring on board on departure, or to your hotel upon arrival). They’re fine if you get them as part of a card you wanted anyway, but not worth it on their own.

If you typically fly with the same airline anyway, the airlines’ own branded cards of a certain tier will get you access to their own lounges, which are typically better and often less crowded than the Priority Pass stuff anyway.

But while you’re on the Preferred, you don’t get any special lounge access.

11

The Preferred welcome bonus (75k) might get you a domestic upgrade — it’s worth about $750, give or take, depending on promotions. But that’d be a pretty silly way to spend that money. Business and first class on most US domestic carriers isn’t really that good anyway. Better to save that for, say, blowing it all on a wild party upon arrival in New Orleans :laughing:

Upgrading on an international route is typically MUCH nicer (both because of the longer duration and the higher quality of many non-US airlines, especially the Asian and some European ones), but is also correspondingly much more expensive than a domestic upgrade (thousands of dollars, typically). It would be hard to build up that kind of rewards on a credit card within a year, even with a welcome bonus, unless you spent a LOT of money or really gamed the system.

Still, though, the main thing I want to point out here is that if this is your overall goal (more comfortable air travel), you should probably look up the airline-specific cards for the carriers you fly the most often. They will typically give you better airline-specific rewards (luggage, points, loyalty status, lounge access in the upper tiers) but only for that one airline (and their global frequent flier partners). If you typically fly the same airline from the same airport, this will almost certainly win out over a generic, non-airline-specific travel card like the Sapphire. With the airline cards you typically some sort of status upgrade after a minimum spend, which is a much better deal than trying to force an upgrade through cashback points redemption. The main downside is just that you’re limited to that one specific airline.

12

The real money is in the signup bonuses. If your plan is to get one card and use it for everything, you aren’t really playing the miles & points game. At the very least you are going to want to get each possible card for the dominant airline at your local airport, as well as a hotel card for your preferred chains. And with each of those, there are often several different cards available that have different bonuses, and you can often claim all of them.

13

My ultimate goal is to not leave anything on the table, really.

14

I think for most people, paying an annual fee for a credit card is not worth it. Instead, go for a fee-free card that returns cash at year end.

15

This is true, but many of the CC companies are cracking down on the churn. It’s still the quickest way to earn lots of rewards points, but it’s not as easy to get several in a short time frame. You need to play the long game for getting multiple cards.

IMO, the way to get the best rewards flights is to keep reviewing what is released by the airlines (typically monthly) and jump on a special fare for low points and fees. If you’re flexible on travel dates you can score great flights for not a lot of points.

The folks who do this a lot also suggest the idea of a “positioning flight” if you can get a low points flight from a different airport than your home airport it may pay to buy a flight and then use the points from there. I’m not willing to go that route just yet, I try to only use direct flights for vacation. A lot of this seems best suited for retired folks who have complete schedule flexibility.

Our Thanksgiving vacation flights to Spain was 64,000 miles but since there was a 20% transfer bonus from Chase to Iberia at the time, we only used 55,000 points. Saved us $1500, so it’s worth it to us. And my wife is off my back about “Why are we saving up all these points? When are we going to use them?”

16

With one credit card, just read its benefits summary (or longer, detailed PDF) a few times and try to remember to use them all.

But yeah, basically this:

Is where the real rewards are at. For that, refer to top scoring links : churning and the manufactured spend guide. You don’t need to watch it every minute of every day, but bookmark it and check once a week or so. That’s if you really want to get into this.

Otherwise, just use your card normally, especially when dining out (3x points) and book travel on Chase. The points will trickle in slowly this way, but it’s a lot less stressful than keeping up with a bunch of different cards and rewards all the time.

17

I’ll recommend looking at the basic low effort perks that you will actually use. What I find useful is:

  1. No foreign transaction fees (useful if you travel overseas).

  2. Global entry fee refunded. I used a card with this perk and the global entry fee was credited to my account about an hour after I paid the fee to the government. Worth $25 per year.

  3. Free checked bags (I think my card allows 2 bags per flight). At $25-$35 per bag, that’s worth something, though the card has a $99 annual fee. It’s an American Airlines affiliated card, which works for me since American offers the best flight options out of my local airport. Additionally, now American has free WiFi for members which they just started offering this year. That makes flights more enjoyable.

  4. Cash back (or statement credits) rather than points (which tend to be deflated over time by airlines/hotels). For this I have a Bank of America Travel credit card. Points are accrued at 1.5 points per dollar spent, and redeemed at 1 cent each against travel related charges (which is pretty broad, it includes hotels, restaurants, gas, parking etc.). And it can be used for any travel related expense you had in the last year, including ones that you may have already paid off months ago (you just the statement credit instead).

  5. Free hotel nights. I have two IHG cards that provide a free night every year. Of course, one card has a $49 fee, and the other a $99 fee. But I have found that although I usually stay at Holiday Inn Express hotels, the reward nights can be used at any IHG property, including really nice ones like Intercontinental Hotels. I get more value out of these than the $148 I spend on fees.

The above perks are simple to use and don’t require that I try to game points or miles. Of course, I do get points and miles that I will use every now and then, but it’s the low effort perks above that make it worth having these cards.

And yeah, lounges are nice but nobody goes there anymore, they are too crowded. Except for business class lounges, but I don’t get in these because of any credit card perk, I get it because I paid for the business class seat.

18

This has been a very interesting discussion. Although I have a premium points card, this is pretty much all news to me. The card I have is affiliated with the Air Canada points program, and all I know is that I can (a) book flights through it, but only through the Aeroplan site which indicates the cost, in points, for each flight and selected class (and the costs are crazy variable depending on Og knows what), or (b) buy merchandise and probably book hotels and stuff, but all through their own portal.

Also, the LCBO (Ontario liquor store chain) offers bonus points when you present your Aeroplan card or keytag with the bar code, in addition to the regular points you get from using an Aeroplan-affiliated card. And they usually ask if I want to “redeem my points”. I’m pretty sure that this is a racket, like I’m going to redeem thousands of Aeroplan points that I could use to buy a flight somewhere in exchange for a bottle of booze!

Back when I was doing a lot of traveling I clocked up many hundreds of thousands of points, which I used to fly the family on a wonderful business-class trip to visit my brother in NYC, buy a Sony flat-screen TV back when they were still very expensive, buy my son an iPad 2 for Christmas back when those were still pretty costly, and buy him a return ticket to Tokyo.

He eventually decided to cancel the Japan trip for the foreseeable future, and I was able to get the points refunded, although there was a nominal charge for that. So I now have points coming out the wazoo and since I’m unlikely to be doing much traveling myself, they await some opportunity for future use. Fortunately, unlike some previous policies when Aeroplan was in the hands of nefarious scoundrels, now that it’s back under Air Canada management at least the points don’t expire as long as the account remains active. Meaning, you don’t have to actually fly anywhere, you just have to keep using the Aeroplan-affiliated credit card.

19

Yeah, this is the reason why many companies deliberately obscure your rewards behind some sort of ever-changing points system instead of just giving you flat cash back (unlike, say, the Apple Card with its flat 2% same-day cash back). The points act as their own currency with fluctuating exchange rates (to the dollar), and depending on the promotions they have at any given time, may or may not be advantageous to use on flights.

Sometimes flights are cheaper with points than cash and other times it’s the other way around. On US airlines, I can open two windows side by side with points vs cash and do the math for the difference — sometimes it’s hundreds of dollars’ worth. I presume it’s all algorithmic and designed to fuck you over as much as possible.

The credit card programs are a big part of airline business and profits, not some side gig: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/06/business/frequent-flier-loyalty-programs-airlines-credit-cards.html

20

To be fair, I don’t think the crazy variable points costs have anything to do with any sort of exchange rate, because they’re crazy variable at any one single point in time, depending on what particular flight and date you choose. IOW, they’re crazy variable in just the same way that airfares are. Both are undoubtedly based on algorithms that reflect demand and available capacity.