Can you explain this hack? Or should I read the entire thread?
It's a long thread so I'll summarize:
Someone else discussed above but basically you book a
fully refundable AirBnb with your Reserve (CSR), say for example $1500. You pay in full at booking. You don't "pay with points" through the Chase portal, but book directly at AirBNB.
Through 6/30, you get a 1.5x multiplier on points used for AirBnb using a feature called "pay yourself back". It was previously other categories, and pundits think chase will continue extend the program again, possibly with different categories. But for now, we are only concerned with AirBNB
Once the charge posts, you visit the "pay yourself back" tab in the chase rewards website and select that charge. In this example, you can spend 100k points to pay off the $1500 airbnb charge. Within a couple days, chase posts a $1500 credit to your account. Then you cancel the AirBNB and a few days or maybe a week later AirBNB refunds the original $1500. So now you have a -$1500 balance. You can ask chase to cash it out or use it to offset other spending.
The point is that you aren't locked into booking through the chase travel portal to realize the 1.5x CSR bonus. First, I prefer booking directly with airlines and hotels... the chase travel portal is backed by expedia and they kinda suck although I've never had an unresolvable issue (in my case I have a lap infant and I can't book that online I have to call). Second, maybe you don't have any travel planned and want to liquidate your points. Third, even if you wanted to use your points towards travel, if you spend points for a booking through the chase travel portal you don't earn any more points. If you do it this way, you can still book the same trip and get the 3x points on that booking (worth 4.5%)
And bonus I also got the $300 travel credit since I just upgraded.
So you're spending points for the motel but getting refunded in real money (x1.5)? That's great, if so. I got the x1.5 on a few pay yourself back categories, but I was only using it for the SUB so I quit using the card.
And does the reserve have a yearly fee? I'm going to need to downgrade soon, too.
Not sure if we are on the same page but see above. Essentially if you start with a $0 account balance and 100k points, you can end up with a -$1500 account balance and 0 points.
The reserve has a whopping fee of $550. This is offset by the $300 travel credit, and other less tangible benefits like the priority pass, global entry every four years, and 3x earnings on travel and dining, etc. The 3x earnings are not really that great now that a few of the no fee cards earn 5x on travel booked through the chase portal and 3x on dining. It's widely speculated that the CSR is due for a revamp of earnings multipliers/categories but it hasn't come to fruition.
Lets call it a net $250 annual fee vs. something free like the freedom cards. So what makes it worth it? Well lets say you have a lot of points. The 1.5x point multiplier pays for the net $250 if you are cashing out 50k in points that year (your 50k points are worth 75k, so 25k more). Similar math can be applied to the CSP with it's $95 annual fee (for many people the CSP is a better deal).
Personally I'm heavily in the Chase ecosystem so I earn a lot of chase points... easily more than 50k even in years where I don't get sign up bonuses. But at this point, I was looking at a 300k point balance and I'm just not comfortable leaving that on the books. Chase (and other banks) sometimes shut down accounts capriciously. If that happened to me, I'd probably still get 1x value out of the points, but why leave an extra $1500 on the table?
I also had a global entry renewal coming up so I could use that credit this year.*
Another bonus is that the CSR annual fee does not post right away. Some reports are like 3 months later but I'll report back. Not only does that give you "free" use of the benefits, but theoretically you could double dip the travel credit when you cancel the card.
I may have to keep this card more than one year though because I don't really want to burn my relationship with chase. From what I've read, they don't really care about any of the above "hacks" as long as the spend is real.
*There's an Amex Platinum hack for global entry that I've somewhat abused already (free gold authorized users still get a global entry credit.. I've got like 6 at this point but I don't mind burning my amex account)
and with that said, bombs away on step 2 (pay yourself back)