All the major credit card issuers offer a travel portal, providing a simplistic way to redeem points at a fixed value and removing the need for complex reward program navigation. They excel in flexibility, allowing travelers to book without worrying about blackout dates or limited award seat availability.
Most travelers just beginning their point journeys will use the travel portal to redeem their points. However, while it is easy to use your points via the travel portal, it comes with several cons outside of just missed potential redemption value.
This article will cover the pros and cons of using the travel portal to book your flights.
The Pros Of Booking Flights Via The Travel Portal Using Points
Ease Of Use
The biggest pro of the travel portal is its ease of use. Since you're essentially buying flights using cash, every flight that has available seats will be up for grabs. If a flight is cheap to buy on Google Flights, chances are it'll be equally cheap through one of the portals.
This can be especially advantageous for uncommon destinations that don't have a lot of major carriers. For example, there are a lot of smaller regional airports that don't have many award redemption options. However, the portal will have some type of price available for them.
Earn Additional Miles
Since bookings using points are treated the same as paying with cash, you're actually eligible to earn miles as if you were flying the flight as a full revenue fare. This can make for some exciting opportunities, especially if you can find some deals in premium economy/business class, which oftentimes earn a significant number of miles on long-hauls.
For example, I booked a nonstop San Francisco to Singapore seat in premium economy through the travel portal for just 45,409 Chase points using my Chase Sapphire Reserve®. Since this is technically a revenue fare, I can elect to earn Alaska Airlines miles on this flight (about 10,000 total), which makes this flight even cheaper than before.
The Chase Travel Portal. Using a Chase Sapphire Reserve® will get you 1.5 cents per point when booking travel through the portal.
The Cons Of Booking Flights Via The Travel Portal Using Points
The Point Cost Of Flights Scales With The Cash Cost Of The Flight
Since the travel portal is really just displaying flight prices that can be purchased with cash, that means the more expensive your flight is, the more points are required. Using points through a portal gives them a specific, fixed value to them; there is no room for outsized value.
For example, you might be looking at a roundtrip economy flight to Europe from the West Coast. These flights can typically run for about $800–$1,500. Booking via the AMEX travel portal, that flight might cost you 80,000–150,000 points with a fixed 1 cent per point value (that's a lot of points to use for an economy flight).
However, by leveraging transfer partners, you can book that same flight for just 30,000–60,000 points and about $200–400 in taxes. That's a massive decrease in points that you can leverage for a future flight.
Notably, if you have a Chase Sapphire Reserve or The Business Platinum Card® from American Express, you can get this flight for 1.5 CPP, meaning this will only cost 53,000–100,000 points. However, in comparison to the ranges you can leverage using transfer partners, there's still a lot of opportunity to save your valuable points and miles.
Customer Service Is No Longer With The Airline
Travel portals are essentially just third party travel agencies (aka OTAs, or Online Travel Agents). For instance, Amex Travel bookings are just Expedia bookings.
Consequently, that means that booking through the travel portal, whether you're paying with cash or points, subjects you to the mercy of the third party travel agent, rather than the airline directly. So, that deal might seem really good through the portal, but if there's ever an issue at the airport, tough luck. Anecdotally, airport agents won't help you and will defer you to using the travel portal's support team. And a word of caution: most of these support teams aren't amazing.
Cancellation Policies
Since you are essentially booking a revenue fare, your options for canceling and refunding a ticket are pretty limited. Typically, in best case scenarios, your flight will be reinstated as a credit of sorts. However, all sorts of weird stuff can happen with cancellations. For example, booking a flight through the AMEX travel portal and then canceling after will sometimes convert the points directly to statement credits. This means that you won't get your points back, which sucks!
In the case of booking flights using points, some carriers will let you cancel completely for a full refund of your points + fees even up to 1 minute before departure. Others will charge you about $50 to reinstate your points. Regardless, it's clear that it's a lot more flexible to book award travel than using your points via a travel portal.
Pricing Discrepencies
One of the most frustrating things about travel portals is that the prices you see there will not always match exactly what you see on Google Flights. The reason for this discrepancy is because airlines will not always release every seat available to third party OTAs. For example, airlines might prefer to offer basic economy tickets themselves because it makes them appear cheapest on Google Flights, whereas travel portals can only reflect main cabin/standard economy seats.
Screenshots from the AMEX travel portal and Google Flights. The discrepancy here is because United, Alaska, and AA are showing their basic economy/saver fare tickets, whereas the travel portals do not have access to these fares.
Conclusions
Although the world of points and miles can seem intimidating at first, there are several easy ways to redeem your points at greater than our baseline of 1 cent per point. Just by choosing a slightly different, no frills strategy, you can increase the value of your points anywhere from 25-100% on average.
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