Me and my wife just recently each got the chase sapphire reserve card. We are going to easily meet the spending requirements and then some. We should have $1200 worth of travel credit between the two cards ($300/ea card for 2016, and $300/ea for 2017), plus about $3,500 worth of travel by redeeming points. We also will have about 190k points on my IHG hotel account that we can utilize. We are planning to cancel the cards before the next annual fee of $450 is due.
I created another thread here for a different purpose and got some good information:
http://forum.mrmoneymustache.com/ask-a-mustachian/multiple-credit-cards-from-same-company/I would like to take a vacation some time in 2017. We are anticipating to be pregnant, so much of the tropical world is going to be out because of the zika virus. Right now we are tossing around the idea of maybe going to hawaii, or maybe taking an alaskan cruise, but definitely aren't married to either idea. A bonus to the alaskan cruise would be staying with some friends for free in seattle either before or after the cruise, and doing some stuff around that area.
We don't plan on doing any traveling before the end of this year, but I would still like to utilize the $300 annual credit for each card before our december statement of this year. As was brought up in the other thread, and I've confirmed a few other places since, I can purchase an airline gift card which will then be immediately reimbursed to utilize those credits. This will leave us with $600 worth of airline gift cards to use at a future date.
I checked the chase ultimate rewards website for cruises, but it looks like very limited options (also all the cruise dates are nearly 2 years old). No details are given other than you have to call and talk to someone rather than booking it online. I hate talking to people on the phone, and I especially hate talking to someone in a situation like this. I would much rather be able to look at all available options and shuffle it around to see what is the most efficient use of our points/dollars. Does anyone have any experience redeeming their rewards for a cruise? If I'm unable to redeem rewards for a cruise and end up having to pay out of pocket I feel like it's going to ruin the entire plan (ie it's going to cost us a bunch of money, and leave several thousand of rewards unredeemed).
The redemption for flights and rental cars seems much more straight forward and I can change destinations and dates to figure out what makes the most sense. However I feel like I'm going to be committed to a single airline (the airline I purchase $600 in gift cards to this month - unless someone has a better option to utilize our 2016 credit without actually doing any traveling).
We are definitely open to other suggestions on how to utilize/redeem the rewards for a different vacation as well.
My main concerns right now are:
utilizing the $600 in travel credit for the 2016 year in the next 3 weeks without any actual traveling,
staying away from the zika virus at our destination next year,
minimizing actual cash spent and maximizing rewards redeemed. Since we plan on eventually canceling our reserve cards before Oct 2017 we will also lose the 1.5X redemption bonus and transfer the points to the preferred card where we will only get 1.25x redemption on travel. Not quite use-it-or-lose it, but our value will definitely decrease after that.