How To Use Google Flights With Your Chase Ultimate Rewards

I don’t hide the fact that I was excited to get into the Chase Ultimate Rewards program. The credit card points program has a solid return value and is well-liked by travel hackers. But, what is the easiest way to determine where you can go with those points that you rack up.

And, sure, you can always book directly through the Chase Ultimate Rewards system if you find a route that looks cheap enough. But, sometimes, you get the same flight using less miles when you book directly through an airline using their branded program.

To know which airline points are required for certain flights, I would usually suggest awardhacker… if you know where you want to go.

It’s a simple-to-use search tool that allows you to type in a departing and arrival destination and the easy-to-navigate dashboard indicating what airlines are flying the point values required for flights and how to navigate transferring points to partners.

But what if you don’t know where to go?

This is why I like Google Flights’ explore feature. You can filter your search results to selected alliance programs when you search under ‘airlines’ in the explore tool.

You’ll notice that you can choose between the three major alliance programs – OneWorld, SkyTeam and Star Alliance

So, to determine how to use Google Flights to find flights that you can use your Chase Ultimate Reward Points on, you simply need to know how your Ultimate Reward Points can transfer to airlines.

What makes these partnerships even better, is the fact that Chase Ultimate Rewards Transfer at a value of 1:1 and there is minimal downtime (if any) when you move your points.

You do have to transfer in 1,000 point increments.

So, when you find a flight on Google Flights with one of those airlines, you know that your Chase Ultimate Rewards Points can transfer to cover the flight.

At the end of the day, you will want to compare the cost of the flight through the Ultimate Rewards system versus the airline partner.

But if you really want to crank it up a notch:

You know that not all miles on all flights are created equal. Different routes and different airlines all require a different amount of miles.

It will take some time and searching to know how the partners transfer together, hidden costs and whether the route you are desiring is available.

Still, to get the absolute best bang for your…ugh…miles, you need to know which of these 9 partner airlines are in the same alliance programs.

Here are the current lists of which airlines are part of which partner program.

This knowledge is powerful. When you know how the airlines partner together, your web of possible transfers for your points grows exponentially. This is because you may find that your target airline is not part of a program that you can transfer Chase Ultimate Rewards to…but you’ll notice that each program has some major players.

For example, United, Delta and American Airlines are each in separate programs.

To demonstrate…let’s say you are on Google Flights and find a flight to Philadelphia on American Airlines for $197.

We know that American Airlines is in the same alliance with British Airways… a Chase Ultimate Rewards Partner.

You can first search for the same flight in the Ultimate Rewards System and see that the flight would cost you 15,728 points.

You can then head to the British Airways site and search for the same flight using Avios miles… I can see that I can take that same flight for slightly less Avios than what I would have used in the Chase UR portal.

And..I have to comment on the irony of using British Airways to travel to Philadelphia over the 4th of July… but, I digress.

Basically, if you are willing to do the legwork and some searching in the partner programs when planning your travel…it may just make your hard earned miles stretch that much further.

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