THE COMPLETE GUIDE TO CREDIT CARD TRAVEL TRANSFER PARTNERS

Miles and Points
Written By Stacy Mantellini

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Transferable points are some of the most valuable points to earn in the miles and points world. This is because transferable points give you so many options when booking travel. Unlike airline and hotel points that can only be used to book specific airline/hotel awards (i.e., you can only book flights on the American Airlines website if you have AA points), transferable points can be used to transfer to multiple airlines and hotels. This gives you extreme flexibility and so many more options when you’re booking travel.

Each program has their own set of airline and hotel partners and some of them overlap giving us extra opportunities to earn more points. The four main transferable points programs are:

  • Chase Ultimate Rewards® Points

  • American Express Membership Rewards®

  • Capital One Venture Rewards

  • Citi ThankYou® Points

If you are one of the people that earn a lot of credit card points and are still redeeming them in the bank travel portal, you are really missing out on a ton of value by not looking at your travel transfer partners. When you book in the bank travel portal you are barely getting one cent per point vs over two cents when you transfer to the right partner. This makes a huge difference.

 
 

Cards that earn Chase Ultimate Rewards points include:


Read my guide on the Chase Sapphire Preferred Card here and learn all about the famous Chase Trifecta here.

New to credit cards and points travel? Learn all the basics in my FAQ Guide here.

 
 

Cards that earn AMEX MEMBERSHIP REWARDS include:

There are ten cards that earn Membership Rewards points between personal and business cards. Many of them have a very high minimum spend. Some of the most popular for families include: 

  • American Express® Gold Card (click category>bank>American Express)- The best all-around travel rewards card - earns 4x points per dollar at U.S. Supermarkets, on up to $25,000 per calendar year in purchases, then 1x.

  • The Platinum Card® from American Express(click category>bank>American Express)- A premium card with tons of perks and credits that can offset the high annual fee if you use them.

 
 

Cards that earn Capital One Venture miles include:

 
 

Cards that earn citi thankyou points include:

Citi cards that earn ThankYou® points are considered flexible currency. Much like Chase Ultimate Rewards, these points can be transferred to multiple travel transfer partners. 

  • Citi Strata Premier® Card - This is a rebrand of a great flexible earning card with a current sign-up bonus of 70,000 ThankYou points. Earns 3x on travel, restaurants, grocery stores and gas stations.

  • Citi Rewards+® Card (non-affiliate link) - This is a no-annual fee card that earns 2x points on groceries.

which cards have the same transfer partners:

Another great reason to diversify your transferable currency is that many points from the four transferable points programs have the SAME travel transfer partners. That makes it easier when you need to earn a lot of points (for those of us with big families or those that want to book pricey business class awards) and have the ability to earn multiple sign-up bonuses across different card products.

 
 

Let’s say that you want to book five flights on Flying Blue to Europe for your family, but you don’t have enough Chase Ultimate Rewards points. From the chart above you can see that you can earn points from AMEX Membership Rewards, Citi ThankYou and Capital One Venture cards and they all transfer to Flying Blue.

Want to book that business class flight on Emirates with the on-board bar? From the chart above you can see that all flexible points programs transfer to Emirates. That means it’s super easy to earn enough points for multiple people. This is just a couple of examples of how you can use this chart to earn miles from more than one card to transfer to a hotel or airline partner to help you book that redemption.

You found the perfect business class to Europe on United, but you only have Amex or Capital One miles. Now you know you can search on Star Alliance partners Air Canada or Avianca and book business class flights operated by United for much less than what United costs.

FINAL THOUGHTS:

Not sure where to start? There are quite a few (free) award search tools that make finding award flights and hotels so much easier. I recommend playing around with the free versions of a few or paying for just one month to get a lot of practice on how to search and find award flights.

One of the things I always tell my readers is to always have a general idea of what you can do with the points that you’re earning. Start becoming familiar with the travel transfer partner chart above, so when you’re ready to book, you’ll see that you have multiple options to search and book award travel. Flexible points for the win.


Happy Travels!



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Editorial Note: Opinions expressed here are the author's alone, not those of any bank, credit card issuer, hotel, airline, or other entity. This content has not been reviewed, approved or otherwise endorsed by any of the entities included within the post.

 
 
Stacy Mantellini
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