Does anyone know if you use UR points to book travel and pay the rest with card does the spend qualify towards the annual $300?
Perhaps someone who has actually done this could give you a more authoritative answer, but I canât imagine that wouldnât work. This $300 (all or part) is triggered by a transaction coded travel that appears on your card. The transaction probably has no indication that points were also used. And if Chase Travel isnât coding their transactions as travel, wow ⌠that would be really bad.
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Is there nothing stopping you from upgrading to a CSR when you need it to book a boatload of UR?
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Iâm not sure this question is for me, but Iâll answer it anyway.
As I was preparing an answer for why it doesnât make a bunch of sense to get the CSR for us, I started brainstorming about what would be necessary to make it worthwhile and here is the answer I came up with:
Since we donât want to pay the next yearâs annual fee on our current CSP, we are planning to use our ~80,000 UR points on a trip this year and then downgrade to something fee free. If, in the process of using all of our current UR points, I could time it to where we got the new CSR card before booking the trip (to take advantage of the increased UR point value and $300 credit) AND we were going to take another trip within a year to use the new 50,000 UR point sign up bonus, so we wouldnât have to pay the year 2 annual fee, it does make sense to get the card.
That doesnât seem too hard to do, so now Iâm thinking that will be my new goal for this year. Weâve been talking about where to go recently, so I might apply for the CSR soon.
Thanks for the question. It was the push I needed to figure out this card does make sense short term.
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I had DW product trade from Citi Hilton to DC late last year. No muss no fuss, FWIW
FWIW here is our approach on this matter.
I got the card for myself in Oct and for DW in Nov of 2016, when the 100K bonus was still posting, and the awesome travel credit (which posts on parking and tolls, very usual) was calendar year based, not account-year based.
It doesnât make sense for us to keep both cards, but it certainly made sense to try to harvest the 2018 travel credit on both. So I am keeping the card, and converting DWs to another freedom card, in order to enjoy the pro-rated annual fee refund (which isnât refunded if the card is outright cancelled).
With as much travelling as we do, and the value we put on UR points Iâm comfortable paying a net $150 free for keeping the card for us.
Minor additional point: I also very much value my relationship with Chase (IHG, Hyatt, Amazon CCs all deliver plenty of value), and I figure that if eyes land on my account, it canât hurt that I am not one more âhit it and quit itâ CSR member.
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