Written by I don’t fly that often but when I do, it’s either with Southwest Airlines or Alaska Airlines. I received my normal Tuesday email from Southwest announcing their weekly deals and decided to poke around for some prices for my vacation later this year. Plugging in my destination I found Southwest offering $100 tickets for a one way fare. If I were to use Rapid Rewards points, the cost was 5,340 points.
Since I spend most of my time wondering what to do with my Ultimate Rewards points, I looked at the point cost for the flight and thought to myself, “That’s $53 worth of Ultimate Rewards points, and that’s practically a 50% discount off the out of pocket cost.” That just seemed to good to be true. You know what they say…when something seems too good to be true, it usually is.
Knowing that the Chase Sapphire card can transfer to Southwest Airlines on a 1:1 ratio, I decided to do a little more research. A blog post by The Points Guy offers a valuation chart for Rapid Rewards points. Here’s how things breakdown:
- Wanna Get Away fares: Redeem for 1.67 cents per point
- Anytime fares: Redeem for 1 cent per point
- Business Select fares: Redeem for 0.83 cents per point
The Wanna Get Away fare clearly offers you the best value when redeeming your Rapid Rewards points. When you convert your Ultimate Rewards points to Rapid Rewards, you’re gaining 67 cents per point.
Using the example fare from earlier in this post, we get this math:
5,340 Rapid Rewards points x 1.67 cents = $89.17 worth of travel on Southwest
The cost to you in Ultimate Rewards points is $53.40, a savings of $35.77 or 40 percent.
Transferring your points to partners like Southwest and Hyatt can actually increase the value of your points. This is just another example of how you can use your Ultimate Rewards points to your benefit.