Welcome Back!

Hope everyone is doing well 😊

Right now, all the credit card points and miles news is about the rumors around changes to the Chase Sapphire Reserve. The annual fee is expected to go up, with a bunch of new credits coming in. Some of the rumored changes (no more 3x on travel, no more 1.5 CPP redemptions on Chase Travel, etc.) seem bad, but only time will tell. 🤞

While I’d love to talk more on the rumors, I’d rather just comment on the actual changes once Chase officially announce them! Hopefully the changes present good opportunity to come out ahead on the annual fee.

There’s actually another Chase change (a positive one!) I want to discuss, so let’s dive in!

In today’s edition:

• 🏦 Chase’s Improvements! 🏦

• 🏦 Transfer Bonuses ✈️

• 🇪🇸 Iberia Devaluations 🇪🇸

• 📰 Other Stories & Deals 💰️

• 💳️ Best Card Signup Bonuses 💳️ 

🏦 Chase’s Improvements! 🏦

While the rumors about the Chase Sapphire Reserve and its business card counterpart swirl, Chase has gone ahead with what I think is an awesome change: They’ve added a function to move credit limits between cards online 🥳 

Prior to this feature, you had to call Chase to have credit limits moved around. But now, for each credit card in your Chase account, you should see a “Move credit line” option. This is available for both personal and business accounts (well at least I can see it for both)!

I do believe Chase is still in the process of rolling this out, so there could be some errors that pop up, but this is still a hugely welcome change! If you have a big purchase coming up and need to move credit limits around to make it work, you no longer need to phone in! If you are canceling a card but want to keep the credit limit on that card, you can move it to another card before canceling the card without phoning in!

If, hypothetically, the Chase Sapphire Reserve changes are less than ideal and lots of people cancel or downgrade their cards, now, people will be able to move their credit limits around this way instead of over the phone.

To my knowledge, no other bank has this functionality, so this is nice, and hopefully we see it at other banks too 🤞

Now, what this feature doesn’t yet let you do is just decrease the credit limits on your cards without moving them elsewhere - to be fair, not a lot of requests come in for such a thing, but there seems to be an arbitrary 100k credit limit cap on Chase accounts (this is disputed, of course). So sometimes, people decrease their credit limits to get approved for something new. This, you still need to do over the phone.

Just a nice UI/UX change 👍️

🏦➡️✈️ Transfer Bonuses

A chart of transfer partners by bank, along with other information, can be found here!

¹ If you have the Aeroplan credit card via Chase, you get an additional 10%, for a total 30% transfer bonus here.

🇪🇸 Iberia Devaluations 🇪🇸

Well, unfortunately, I bear more devaluation news, although its not too bad…

I’ve talked before about the airline rewards programs that earn Avios: British Airways, Iberia, Aer Lingus, Qatar, and Finnair. Each have their own sweet spots, but a personal favorite of mine was the Iberia business class sweet spot!

Under the old award chart, you could fly from New York to Madrid in business for 34k miles each way! Economy was 17k each way as well, which is pretty decent as well 👍️

I will note that this round of devaluations has pretty much affected only business class flights:

So you’ll see that long-haul redemptions in business class went up by around 20%. For that NYC-MAD sweet spot, the off peak rate went from 34k to 40.5k. Considering other programs (Aeroplan, Flying Blue, etc.) charge 60k each way or higher for their business class awards, this is honestly not too bad. I’d consider this still a sweet spot, just with a little less sugar! 🍭 

Rates for economy class actually largely went down after these changes, which is a silver lining! Yes, people like to use their points for premium cabins (points do unlock aspirational travel!), but still, this is at least somewhat welcome. LoyaltyLobby put together a full comparison of the changes here 📊

So this is a bit of a mixed bag, although for most people, this would represent a devaluation. But again, the NYC-MAD sweet spot is still a sweet spot, imo.

📰 Other Stories & Deals 💰️

• 🧑‍⚖️ Korean Air’s acquisition of Asiana has already taken place, but the integration of their loyalty programs was just blocked by regulators - what is going on?

• RIP to the victims and condolences to those affected by the Air India crash…

💳️ Best Card Signup Bonuses 💳️ 

Again, the usual solid cards:

• Chase Sapphire Preferred^® / Reserve®

• Chase Freedom Unlimited^®/Flex^®

• Amex Gold & Plat

• Capital One Venture X

Do search for public links for the above cards to compare signup bonuses to make sure you get the highest one (incognito mode, Resy, etc.).

For cards with elevated signup bonuses (targeted bonuses are not included), I’ve got:

📤️ Spread the Word! 📤️

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If you do find this newsletter informative, helpful, or entertaining, I’d greatly appreciate you spreading the word about it! If not, please do give me feedback on how I can improve your Sense per Point experience.

Also, if my newsletter helps you to book travel using points, let me know! It’ll make me so happy 😄 

Hope that all makes sense! That’s all for this week’s edition of Sense per Point.

Wishing everyone a wonderful rest of your day and week 😊 

- Sean Kim

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