One of the great things about Ultimate Rewards is the flexibility that they give. Want to use them to transfer to travel partners? No problem – they give you a good variety so that you can really travel anywhere. What if you would rather just use the points directly for travel? Yes, Chase lets you do that for a value of 1.25 cents for every point when redeemed for travel through the Ultimate Rewards site.
Related Post: New Ultimate Rewards Website
Ways To Use Ultimate Reward Points
Do you want to use them to receive money back? Yep, you can get cash back at a rate of $1 for every 100 points you have. How about gift cards? Sure, you can get them as well – to a variety of retailers at the same ratio as cash back. In fact, you can even use your Ultimate Reward points for redeeming items from Amazon.
Now, those of us who value our travel redemptions really only consider the travel options as options at all. I mean, getting $2,000 cash back sounds great, but that would require 200,000 points! For that amount transferred to United, you could get 8 tickets anywhere in the US! You could also get 3 tickets to Europe in coach – that could be worth an easy $4,500! There are a lot better ways to realize extreme value with your Ultimate Reward points than using them for cash back.
Using UR Points For Other Than Travel
But, there are some who do not travel much but do like to use the points for the other kinds of rewards. With the bonus of 40,000 Ultimate Reward points from the Chase Sapphire Preferred, for example, that would be worth $400 in gift cards or cash back or Amazon shopping. For someone who does not like to use points for travel, that is a nice benefit.
However, before the refresh of the Ultimate Rewards site, there was another option that could actually present quite a bit of value. The option involved letting you use your Ultimate Reward points directly on products. You would shop online for the products in the Ultimate Rewards Mall and then their partners would fulfill the orders. Electronics, for example, were from Best Buy and based on Best Buy pricing. So, how is that different than getting a gift card to use at Best Buy? A couple Black Fridays ago, they actually ran a promotion where you received an extra 25% value from your points. Not only that, but the sales Best Buy was running were in addition to that extra value. That allowed the Ultimate Reward points to be redeemed at a value of 2 cents per point – on merchandise!
Related Post: Save Up Ultimate Reward Points For Black Friday?
Cannot Use UR Points For Merchandise Through The UR Mall
No more using UR points for merchandise in the mall
Unfortunately, that option to redeem Ultimate Reward points for merchandise through the Ultimate Rewards mall is gone. Now, you can use your points at Amazon, but that is not nearly the same when compared to the promo they had run before. That is a big shame for people that did like to use their points in this fashion. At least you know now that there are not any great sales in store for those points this Black Friday weekend.
I know that many people may not care about this, but I know that a similar opportunity this week as there was a couple of years ago certainly would have tempted me to use some of my UR points for merchandise. Oh well, makes my decisions easier!
I don’t like to redeem for merchandise as it’s usually a poor value. I guess if you want to bad enough you could transfer the points to another program and do that.
Wow that’s a bummer! I wonder if there is any official announcement from Chase about this. How did you find out about this? This sucks as it’s better to have more option than less. I remember back then on Black Friday period the UR mall has heavily discounted price.
Now we can use this as a good excuse to cancel our Chase cards to avoid second year annual fee.
strange. youd think chase would want people to waste UR points @ a 1cent value