Trying to figure out if this was actually a decent Chase redemption/travel hack strategy or not.
Booked flights totaling $1,603.93.
I redeemed about $821 at 1.25 cpp through a 25% Chase bonus redemption, and the remaining balance at the normal 1 cpp rate.
Total points used for the whole trip came out to ~143,961 points, but I’ll earn back ~6,108 Chase points from the airfare spend(4x), bringing net points used closer to ~137,853.
That makes the effective redemption around ~1.16 cpp overall.
I thought about booking through the Chase portal for 8x instead of direct with the airline for 4x, but I didn’t want to deal with potential third-party booking headaches if anything went wrong.
Was this actually a decent strategy overall, or would most people here have transferred to partners instead?
(Qatar portion was 680 and united 843 the Rest was from a small airline in the country)