My Biggest Redemption Yet!
Did you know that you could pay for a cruise with bank points? No, they don't transfer to a cruise line's program, but that didn't stop me!
Ok, if you couldn't tell, I'm pretty excited about this! With the changes in my husband's job situation, our budget has seen some significant changes and I was concerned that I wouldn't get to go on cruises anymore. But thanks to Katie's Travel Tricks, I've learned a great work-around. This won't fund everything I want to do, but it's a great start and I have hopes to learn and earn more options!
So, as I've mentioned before, you can pretty much always convert your points to cash or use them to pay off charges on your card at a $0.01 per point rate. That's not nothing, and if you've got a million points, that might be a good way to go for you. But I wanted to do more with my points, I want them to work for me. Enter the Chase Aeroplan card. I had learned about this card over the spring and when we were considering whether to keep my planned cruise with my son in September after my husband's layoff, this seemed like perfect timing. So I had my husband open the card and planned to meet the $4,000 minimum spend within the first three months in order to receive the 75,000 point bonus by making our final cruise payment.
What is Aeroplan? Well, it's Air Canada's loyalty program. How does a Canadian airline's credit card help me pay for a cruise? I'm glad you asked! You see, the Aeroplan card has the same feature many of Chase's cards do, Pay Yourself Back. As I shared above, most of the time this just means using your points at a $0.01 per point rate, but with Aeroplan, they have a special rate for travel purchases of $0.0125 per point. Ok, 1/4 of a penny doesn't seem like a lot, but bear with me. That means that if I use 10,000 points, instead of paying off $100, I'm paying off $125. And that scales. So, for my recent redemption, I used 200,000 points (the maximum allowable per year per card). That reduced the price of my cruise by $2,500!
But wait, there's more! How did I get 200,000 points on a brand-new credit card you might ask? Well, American Express Member Rewards*, Capital One Rewards*, and Chase Ultimate Rewards* ALL transfer to Air Canada's Aeroplan, but ONLY Chase Ultimate Rewards points that have been transferred can be used for the Pay Yourself Back program. Transferring 200,000 points from Chase would have knocked my bank down significantly, but I'm happy to report that I didn't have to use quite that many. You see, one of the many benefits of the Aeroplan card is that you receive a 10% bonus when transferring points from Chase Ultimate Rewards to Aeroplan. That means 10,000 points transferred becomes 11,000 points on the other side. That's pretty cool, but on top of that, this month Chase was offering a 20% transfer bonus to Aeroplan. That means, with the Aeroplan card, you got a 30% total bonus making 13,00 points from a 10,000-point transfer. This extra 20% transfer bonus is not always available, but it comes up quite frequently.
I didn't remember enough percentage formulas from when I taught my kids math to figure this out the right way, but I played around with it on the calculator and figured out that I only had to transfer 154,000 points from Chase to receive 200,200 Aeroplan points. Yes, that's not exact, but they require that you transfer in 1,000-point increments. In addition, you have to transfer at least 50,000 points to receive the 10% bonus, just as an FYI.
Unlike previous transfers I'd done, this one didn't go through immediately. I did at least get an email confirming that they'd received my transfer request, but the points didn't show up in the Aeroplan account until two days later, and then, some of them were missing! The 20% bonus went through just fine, but the 10% Aeroplan bonus wasn't showing up. I read over the information and saw that it could take 7-10 days for the points to arrive, but I couldn't understand why some of them would show up and not others, so I jumped through phone hoops with customer service only to be told the same thing I had read myself, it could take 7-10 days to show up and I just needed to be patient. And so, I waited, though I can't honestly say I was patient 🤪.
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Sure enough, the next day (or so?) the rest of the points came through and my Aeroplan (ok, my husband's Aeroplan) account was sitting at 200,200 points! The week before I had made my final payment on my upcoming cruise with my son on the Aeroplan card so I had 90 days to "Pay myself back" for the purchase - all the time in the world! Just kidding, pay attention to little rules like that, otherwise, you could miss out! When the points came through and the purchase had cleared the bank, I went into the "Pay Yourself Back" area of the Rewards on the Chase website and chose the purchase. It was pretty easy to find since it was the only one I had made on the card. They asked me how many points I wanted to use, and just to make sure they were really serious about only using 200,000 per year I tried 200,200, but it put up an error message saying that was 200 too many, so I satisfied myself with using 200,000 points. To my joy, it went through right away and I had a $2,500 credit on my (husband's) card toward the purchase! I was so excited that it had actually worked!
Of course the purchase itself earned points on the card, but they wouldn't be available to pay myself back until the purchase had posted, and there's NO WAY I'm paying credit card interest on that! So, after all is said and done, I spent 154,000 Chase Ultimate Rewards Points and I earned 80,854 points for the purchase. That's 4,654 points for the payment on the cruise (it was $4,654 at 1 point per dollar earn), plus the 200 left over points from the transfer, plus the 75,000 sign up bonus (SUB) for the Aeroplan card, plus one of the additional benefits of the card is earning 500 bonus points each month for every $2,000 in spend up to 1,500 bonus points. So, the $4,654 spend earned an additional 1,000 bonus points. That's a net spend of only 73,146 points for $2,500 taken off the price of my cruise. If you do the math on that, which of course I did, that's $0.034 per point spent or 3.4x the value per point of just cashing it out. I'd say that's a win!
The Aeroplan card has additional benefits as well, most but not all of them having to do with Air Canada. It earns 3x points on grocery store purchases (which most people do fairly regularly), dining out, and purchases made directly with Air Canada, then 1x points on any other purchases. You get the 500 bonus points for every $2,000 spent on the card each month, up to 1,500 points per month I mentioned above. When you have an Aeroplan card your Aeroplan points don't expire like they normally would after 18 months of no activity. I hope this wouldn't be an issue, but it's a nice safety net. It automatically gives you 25K Aeroplan Elite Status for this year and the next. That includes Priority Airport Services and upgrades to premium cabins on Air Canada flights. The card also gives you your first checked bag for free on Air Canada flights, no foreign transaction fees when used internationally, and, of course, the opportunity to pay yourself back for purchases. It has a bunch of other travel benefits including: Preferred pricing on Air Canada, $120 Global Entry or TSA Precheck credit every 4 years, trip cancellation and interruption Insurance, baggage delay insurance, trip delay reimbursement, auto rental coverage, and more. And don't forget the 10% anytime Chase Ultimate Rewards transfer bonus.
Nothing in life is free (except the free gift of salvation of course!) and this card is no different with a $95 annual fee, but that's one of the things you can pay yourself back for with points too. That's my plan, but you have to actually pay for the fee before you can pay yourself back, so I'll end up with a $95 credit on my card next month.
Here's the Thing: No, this redemption didn't make my cruise free, but it did make it feasible. My bucket list travel with my kids is so very important to me, and I'm so grateful that God made a way for this to happen!
* We don't have a referral code for the Aeroplan card yet, but I've linked above to it's website so you can sign up that way if you're itching to get started. The other cards I mentioned in this post are linked below:
Capital One Venture X
Amex
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