5 ways to use 100,000 Chase Ultimate Rewards points from the Ink Business Preferred credit card
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- Getting the Ink Business Preferred® Credit Card is a great way to earn Chase Ultimate Rewards points.
- It’s offering an all-time-high bonus of 100,000 points after you spend $15,000 in the first three months.
- Even if you’re not traveling, there are plenty of ways to get at least $1,000 in value from the bonus.
- Read Insider’s guide to the best small-business credit cards.
In terms of cards that earn valuable Ultimate Rewards points, the Chase Sapphire Reserve® and Chase Sapphire Preferred® Card usually get most of the attention. But if you’re in the market for a small-business credit card, the Ink Business Preferred® Credit Card is one of the best options available and can help you rack up even more Ultimate Rewards points.
What’s more, the Ink Business Preferred® Credit Card actually offers more points as part of its sign-up bonus than either of the two personal products. Right now, you can earn 100,000 points after spending $15,000 on purchases in the first 3 months from account opening.
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That makes it just one of a handful of cards that offer over 100,000 points or miles to new applicants.
We’re focused here on the rewards and perks that come with each card. These cards won’t be worth it if you’re paying interest or late fees. When using a credit card, it’s important to pay your balance in full each month, make payments on time, and only spend what you can afford to pay.
How to use the Ink Business Preferred sign-up bonus
Ink Business Preferred® Credit Card
If you were to meet the spending requirements while also hitting some of those bonus categories, you could end up with over 115,000 bonus points at the end of the introductory period. However, for our purposes, let’s just focus on the 100,000-point bonus alone, and all the ways you can put it to use.
Insider’s points and miles valuations peg Chase Ultimate Rewards points as worth, on average, 1.8 cents apiece. However, the value you’ll receive depends on how you redeem your points — as well as what other Chase credit cards you have in your wallet.
$1,250 (or more) toward travel
One of the easiest ways to redeem Ultimate Rewards points is simply to use them for reservations booked through Chase’s online travel portal. Just log into your Ultimate Rewards account, click on the tab to “Earn/Use,” and then click on the plane icon for “Travel.”
From there, you should be able to see the options. Cardholders can use their points for flights, hotel stays, cruises, vacation rentals, car rentals, and experiences. So even if there are no cruises to take at the moment, and you’re not ready to hop on a flight, you can still find ways to cash in your points for other travel needs, such as a hotel room or a rental car for a road trip.
Redeemed this way, Ultimate Rewards points from the Ink Business Preferred® Credit Card are worth 1.25 cents apiece. That makes the sign-up bonus worth a cool $1,250 in value. Framed against the $15,000 spending requirement, that’s like getting an 8.3% return on your spending.
However, if you also have the Chase Sapphire Reserve®, you can combine your points with the ones you earn on that account, and they become worth 1.5 cents apiece toward travel. That brings your bonus value up to $1,500, or a 10% return on your spending.
$1,250 (or more) through “Pay Yourself Back”
Back in May, Chase launched a new feature for certain cards called Pay Yourself Back. Points earned with the Chase Sapphire Preferred® Card and Chase Sapphire Reserve® are redeemable at 1.25 and 1.5 cents apiece, respectively, for dining, grocery, and home improvement purchases as well as donations to eligible charities through April 30, 2021.
The categories offered by the Ink Business Preferred® Credit Card, by contrast, are more limited. Points are still worth 1.25 cents apiece, but at the moment you can only redeem against charitable donations to participating organizations. At the end of 2020, though, cardholders could also use the feature for charges like online advertising and shipping, so we’ll see if that returns.
As with direct travel redemptions through Chase, if you have the Chase Sapphire Preferred® Card or Chase Sapphire Reserve®, you can combine points across your accounts and open up those other redemption categories. Plus, in the case of the Chase Sapphire Reserve®, you’ll also be upping your per-point value.
$1,000 in cash back, or for gift cards and Apple products
Though it’s not ostensibly a cash-back credit card, you can still redeem Ultimate Rewards points for cash back with your Ink Business Preferred® Credit Card. Points are worth 1 cent each this way, so the 100,000-point bonus would be worth $1,000. While this isn’t the best value you can possibly get, it might come in handy if you need to burn through some points to pay off a statement occasionally.
Points are also worth a cent apiece toward gift card purchases in the Chase portal at merchants like Macy’s, Target, Nike, and Amazon. Likewise, you should see the ability to redeem points for Apple purchases through your Ultimate Rewards portal, and you also get 1 cent in value per point this way.
$800 in Amazon purchases
Amazon has made it easy to link your Ultimate Rewards points to your Amazon account and redeem your points for purchases directly at checkout.
You only get 0.8 cents per point this way, so the sign-up bonus is only worth $800. If you are interested in using your points for Amazon purchases, it’s better to use your card for the purchase, and then redeem points for cash back at the higher rate of 1 cent apiece.
$2,000 or more via Chase airline and hotel transfer partners
Insider’s valuation of Chase points as worth 1.8 cents apiece is based, in part, on the ability to transfer them to 10 airline and three hotel partners.
Chase Ultimate Rewards transfer partners
- Aer Lingus AerClub
- Air France-KLM Flying Blue
- British Airways Executive Club
- Emirates Skywards
- Iberia Plus
- JetBlue TrueBlue
- Singapore Airlines KrisFlyer
- Southwest Rapid Rewards
- United MileagePlus
- Virgin Atlantic Flying Club
- IHG Rewards Club
- Marriott Bonvoy
- World of Hyatt
While the value you get from these partners will depend on which ones you can maximize for your specific travel needs (and whether you’ll be able to do so anytime soon), you can reap some tremendous value with a well-timed transfer. Here are a couple of strategies to consider.
British Airways Avios
British Airways has a distance-based award chart, so you can usually find excellent options redeeming them for short-haul flights on the airline’s partners, such as American Airlines and Alaska Airlines in the US, Qantas in Australia, and Cathay Pacific in Asia.
Flights under 650 miles require just 6,000 Avios each way. One popular option is to redeem just 13,000 Avios in each direction for flights between the West Coast and Hawaii on either American or Alaska – far fewer miles than you’d need from either of those carriers’ own frequent flyer programs.
Let’s say you earned 104,000 points from the Ink Business Preferred® Credit Card bonus and some spending. That would be enough for four round-trip tickets, or around $2,000 in value given these flights usually cost around $500.
Southwest Rapid Rewards and JetBlue TrueBlue
Don’t forget about these partner programs. Rapid Rewards points are worth around 1.5 cents each on average based on Insider’s valuations, and JetBlue TrueBlue points are worth around 1.4 cents each toward airfare.
The advantage of both programs, though, is that you don’t need to worry about award availability — if there’s a seat for sale, you can redeem points for it. The Ink Business Preferred® Credit Card’s 100,000-point bonus would be worth up to $1,500 this way.
World of Hyatt
On the hotel side, your best transfer bet is probably World of Hyatt. That’s because award nights start at a mere 5,000 points each — meaning you could book a Category 1 hotel for 20 nights by transferring the 100,000 points from your Ink Business Preferred® Credit Card welcome bonus alone.
Why not use 90,000 of them instead for a three-night stay at a luxurious Category 7 hotel such as Ventana Big Sur, where all-inclusive room rates start at a whopping $1,450 per night. You’d get a jaw-dropping $4,350 in value … and still have 10,000 points left.
Bottom line
Although you might not be spending or traveling as much as you normally would due to the pandemic, there are still a lot of reasons to sign up for the Ink Business Preferred® Credit Card. If you have a small business and regularly make $5,000 or more in purchases per month, you might want to open the card in order to earn its incredible 100,000-point bonus.
Not only that, but its strong 3x earning on travel and other work-related categories makes it a potential top earner in your wallet. While Ultimate Rewards points are most valuable when redeemed for travel, the sheer variety of ways in which they can be used, including for simple cash back, make them extremely versatile.
Basically, if you have them, you’ll find a way to use them. And after all, isn’t the best reason to rack up lots of rewards with a particular points program knowing that you’ll be able to use them for what you want down the line? In that respect, the Ink Business Preferred® Credit Card and the 100,000 Ultimate Rewards points you can earn with it are well worth considering.
Eric Rosen is a travel and credit card expert who has been helping readers reap the rewards of loyalty programs for over a decade. Eric is based in Los Angeles, though you’ll often find him globetrotting to destinations like Australia, Kenya, and Laos on assignment.
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Please note: While the offers mentioned above are accurate at the time of publication, they’re subject to change at any time and may have changed, or may no longer be available.
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