Revisiting this for 2020 MFs... someone check my logic/arithmetic.
Old AMEX Bonvoy - $18K MF generates 5x points for total of 90K Bonvoy Points - PointsGuy.com value @ .08 = $720
- I'm sitting on two 5-Night Cat 4 certificates that expire July 2020 and hope to extend another year, and 350K Bonvoy points.
Chase Sapphire Reserve - $18K generates 3x Ultimate Reward Point for total of 54K points - PointsGuy.com value @ .02 = $1080. (or about $800 in airfare)
I guess if you know how and really leverage your MR/Bonvoy points and/or get 6x on the new AMEX card the choice is Marriott, but for buying business class tickets the Chase card seems to be the way to go for us.
Missing anything obvious here?
TXT, I think this is a good analysis. My only comment from recent experience is that using pure POINTS to purchase airline
premium seats i.e. Business Class is sometimes a better bargain than paying cash even with UR 1.5x cash value. The ability to convert MR points to almost any major airline or airline partner program is a nice flexibility to have.
Here is my example. Earlier this year, I used a MR 5 night travel package with a Cat 8 hotel and 80,000 points on Air France Flying Blue program. I supplemented those points with Amex points transferred from my Platinum Amex Rewards account to put 230,000 points into Flying Blue. I used these points to purchase 2 RT business class seats from NY to Paris for the specific dates I had the hotel certificate booked for (pre-Aug '18 program change). Those same tickets on a cash basis would have cost $19,000 (One direction of the flights had a ridiculously high cash price).
So figuring that the MRP portion of the Flying Blue points paid for about 1/3 of the cost of these tickets, that's a bit over $6,000. If I'm doing the math right, I would have needed 400,000 UR points to receive $6,000 of Travel rewards (1.5x points).
I know its not always going to be this type of exchange rate, but if you check enough airlines, you can sometimes find sweet spots for point redemptions that make the math work out pretty well and better than paying cash.