Earning points and Miles is the best way to fly more for less. This way I was able to stay on the road for as long — and I also saw the difference it made for my readers.

I write a lot about the best credit cards you can get depending on your destination, but I’ve talked less about how you can use these points.

Today I want to change that because I keep getting emails from people talking about the fact that it takes too many points to book a flight. The reason I’m sticking with this is because you book through the credit card travel portal and rarely if ever should!

Travel rewards cards offer two ways to use the points earned to book a trip:

By transferring points to your travel partners
Via the booking portal of a card issuer

For those who are new to accumulating and using points and Miles, there is a lot of confusion about which is the best Option. Travel credit cards position their portals as the best Option for using your points. But in reality, they are rare.

So let’s talk about why this is the matter.

Travel portals are online travel agencies (OTAs) offered by banks as part of the advantages of owning one of their rewards cards. They work like other OTAs like Expedia or Kayak, where you can book flights, hotels and rental cars by searching for availability through their search engine.

The main difference is that these travel portals are connected to your credit card. This allows you to use your points and Miles when booking. You can also choose to pay partly with points and partly in cash.

Using travel portals basically means using your points as cash back. You get a fixed value per point and you also earn points/Miles for your booking.

Credit card companies position their portals as the best way to use points. They want you to use the portals and stay in their ecosystem so that you can make money from them.

To keep them on their website, they offer incentives that they only receive when they use their portal. These incentives include the following:

Travel Credits – when you use the portal, many cards offer statement credits to offset your purchase. For example, the Chase Sapphire Preferred® card offers a 50 hotel credit when booking through Chase TravelSM, and the Capital One Venture x Rewards credit card offers a 300 annual credit for reservations through Capital One Travel.

Increased EARNING power for rewards – you get extra points when you use the portal. For example, the Capital One Venture X and Chase Sapphire Reserve® cards both offer 10x for hotels and rental cars and 5x for flights when booked through their portals.

Increase in the value of points – you get a small increase in the number of points/ Miles that you can easily redeem through the portal. For example, for Chase Sapphire cardholders, 1 point becomes 1.25 or 1.5 points when booking via the portal (with the Chase Sapphire Preferred and the Chase Sapphire Reserve respectively).

(Although that sounds like a lot, you can usually get a much superior value per point if you switch to travel partners, as I’ll explain below.)
Travel portals are simple and convenient. However, using them is usually not the best value for your points. What you get in terms of simplicity and convenience, you lose the fixed refund value which is usually not the best.

Information about transfer partners

On the other hand, you can transfer points from your account directly to the place where you want to book (such as an airline or a hotel). Although transferring your points to travel partners means a little more work, it allows you to get a lot more value out of your hard-earned points.

However, you only get transferable points with certain cards. For example, with airline and hotel-specific cards (such as the Delta SkyMiles® Gold American Express card or the Marriott Bonvoy Bevy™ American Express® card), you only earn points that can be redeemed with that airline or hotel. They are less valuable because they are less flexible. Transferable points are valuable (and what you should be aiming for) because they are so flexible.

Here are some types of transferable currencies and some cards that earn them:

American Express Membership Rewards: American Express Platinum Card, American Express Gold Card, American Express Green Card.
Chase Ultimate Rewards: the Chase Sapphire Preferred® card, Chase Sapphire Reserve®, Chase Ink Business Preferred® credit card.

Bilt Rewards: Bilt Mastercard.
Capital One Miles: All Capital One Venture Cards.
Citi Thank You Rewards: Citi Premier® Card.