How I Redeemed 111,000 Chase Ultimate Rewards for Over $6,600 in Travel

Of the millions of Chase Ultimate Rewards® I’ve redeemed, one of my favorite redemptions was in late 2024 when I burned 111,000 points on an upscale European vacation that included a business class flight and a free stopover in Amsterdam en route to my final destination in Sweden.

The trip had a retail cost of $6,613 – a price I never would have paid in cash. But thanks to my Chase Sapphire Preferred® Card, I was able to transfer my points to other loyalty programs and get an incredible redemption value while traveling in luxury.

You might think acquiring that many points is difficult, but for a limited time, it couldn’t be easier. The card has a limited-time offer for new applicants: Earn 100,000 bonus points after you spend $5,000 on purchases in the first 3 months from account opening. With the points earned from your sign-up bonus and the minimum spend requirement, you’ll have nearly enough points for a trip similar to mine!

Luxury in the sky and on the ground

I booked my trip by transferring 66,000 Chase Ultimate Rewards® points to Air France-KLM Flying Blue and 45,000 points to World of Hyatt. The transferred points instantly showed up in each account, allowing me to immediately book travel at a much greater value than the 1.25 cents per point I would have received by booking through Chase’s travel portal with my Chase Sapphire Preferred® Card.

Incredible value with Air France-KLM Flying Blue

Before transferring the points to Flying Blue, I hopped on PointsYeah and found business class award space from Washington D.C. to Stockholm with a layover in Amsterdam. I wasn’t planning to visit Amsterdam on this trip, but because Air France-KLM allows a complimentary stopover on award tickets, I took the opportunity to bike around the city’s wonderful canals for a couple of days before continuing on to Sweden.

The KLM business class flight was a great way to cross the Atlantic Ocean, with a spacious seat and complimentary food and beverages. This one-way ticket would have cost $4,770, but instead only cost 66,000 Flying Blue miles. That’s an outstanding redemption value of 7.2 cents per point, far exceeding NerdWallet’s Flying Blue mile valuation of 0.8 cent.

Saving money with World of Hyatt

I planned to be in Stockholm for five nights and found hotel award availability at Hotel Reisen, part of the The Unbound Collection by Hyatt. Award stays cost 15,000 points per night during my visit, and I transferred enough points from Chase to World of Hyatt to cover three nights of my stay. The hotel is a Category 4 property within the World of Hyatt program, and award nights cost between 12,000 and 18,000 points per night, depending on demand. That also means I was able to use two Category 1-4 free night certificates earned with my World of Hyatt Credit Card for the remaining two nights.

You can typically find rooms at Hotel Reisen for around $300 per night. But when I went, there was a big event at the nearby Nobel Prize Museum and the price was a whopping $617 per night. At 15,000 points per night, that’s a value of 4.1 cents per point during my stay, far better than NerdWallet’s valuation of 2.2 cents each for World of Hyatt points. The points transfer also allowed me to stay in the centrally located section of Stockholm I was hoping for, irrespective of the cash cost. Opportunities like these are the primary reason hotel redemptions are my favorite way to use credit card points.

Spend more at your destination and less on getting there

While in Stockholm, I dined at two Michelin-star restaurants, attended local hockey and soccer games and bought a Swedish wool blanket and other souvenirs to bring home. The thousands of dollars I saved on this trip by using points allowed me to worry less about penny-pinching and more about living my best Swedish life for five days. Hopefully my adventure inspires you to do the same!

Top photo by Craig Joseph.