Quest to Earn Miles... and USE Them
Oct. 2nd, 2025 08:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
canyonwalkerOne of the credit cards I've opened a new account with this year is the United MileagePlus Quest card by Chase. The Quest is a new-ish offering from Chase and United Airlines. It's one of those semi-premium offerings the banks have been coming out with in the past year or so. Semi-premium, of course, means a higher annual fee (AF) in exchange for elevated benefits... benefits that are designed to look attractive while the credit card companies purposefully make them hard for customers to use. I weighed the benefits of this card carefully before deciding it was worth it to take the plunge of signing up— a plunge that cost $350 upfront for the AF. Then today I discovered a minor but intriguing benefit I hadn't noticed before.
The benefit I hadn't noticed before is Pay Yourself Back (PYB). Lots of cards nowadays have PYB schemes. The idea is you spend some of the points you've earned with the card to credit back the cost of purchases you've charged.
On cashback cards this is using some of your cashback points to pay off all or part of your balance. You might think of it as removing the middleman: instead of getting cash back, depositing in your checking account, then paying your credit card bill, you're paying part of the bill directly.
With a co-branded airline or hotel card, the points you're paying with aren't cashback. They're the miles or points you earned in the airline/hotel loyalty program. Normally you'd use them only for buying directly from that loyalty partner. Thus it's intriguing to find opportunities to turn them into cash.
With the Quest PYB program I can't just pay any charge with points. It's limited to United purchases and the card's annual fee. But that whopping $350 AF was sitting right there in front of me so I decided to check what the points are worth.
"How much for how much?" That's always the question when redeeming points. Travel providers and their credit card partners love to give us shitty redemption options. Like, "Here, redeem these points at one-third a cent apiece on these golf clubs instead of realizing 1.1 cents per point (cpp) or more on airline tickets!" You have to know what your points are worth not to get ripped off spending them.
I know United miles are worth a minimum of 1.1 cpp when buying tickets. Thus I was surprised when I clicked through the PYB interface on my Chase card account and saw that it would credit my $350 AF for 25,000 points— a redemption rate of 1.4 cpp!
It's unclear right now if this 1.4 cpp rate applies to United tickets, too. If so, this is a great backdoor way to score better than the 1.1 cpp floor. Potentially it could make all of my United Miles worth more! But I say "unclear" and "potentially" because I checked PYB via another card, where I have some United flight charges eligible, and it offered me credits at a rate of 1.0 cpp. It's unclear if that's down to a difference in cards or if the higher rate is only for annual fees.
The benefit I hadn't noticed before is Pay Yourself Back (PYB). Lots of cards nowadays have PYB schemes. The idea is you spend some of the points you've earned with the card to credit back the cost of purchases you've charged.On cashback cards this is using some of your cashback points to pay off all or part of your balance. You might think of it as removing the middleman: instead of getting cash back, depositing in your checking account, then paying your credit card bill, you're paying part of the bill directly.
With a co-branded airline or hotel card, the points you're paying with aren't cashback. They're the miles or points you earned in the airline/hotel loyalty program. Normally you'd use them only for buying directly from that loyalty partner. Thus it's intriguing to find opportunities to turn them into cash.
With the Quest PYB program I can't just pay any charge with points. It's limited to United purchases and the card's annual fee. But that whopping $350 AF was sitting right there in front of me so I decided to check what the points are worth.
"How much for how much?" That's always the question when redeeming points. Travel providers and their credit card partners love to give us shitty redemption options. Like, "Here, redeem these points at one-third a cent apiece on these golf clubs instead of realizing 1.1 cents per point (cpp) or more on airline tickets!" You have to know what your points are worth not to get ripped off spending them.
I know United miles are worth a minimum of 1.1 cpp when buying tickets. Thus I was surprised when I clicked through the PYB interface on my Chase card account and saw that it would credit my $350 AF for 25,000 points— a redemption rate of 1.4 cpp!It's unclear right now if this 1.4 cpp rate applies to United tickets, too. If so, this is a great backdoor way to score better than the 1.1 cpp floor. Potentially it could make all of my United Miles worth more! But I say "unclear" and "potentially" because I checked PYB via another card, where I have some United flight charges eligible, and it offered me credits at a rate of 1.0 cpp. It's unclear if that's down to a difference in cards or if the higher rate is only for annual fees.
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Date: 2025-12-05 01:05 am (UTC)