When Chase replaced the flat 1.5 and 1.25-cent Chase Travel℠ bonuses on its Sapphire cards last summer, it called Points Boost an upgrade.
The pitch was simple: Earn up to 2 cents per point (and sometimes more) on select hotels and flights booked through Chase Travel℠, versus the old fixed redemption on each and every booking.
It hasn't worked out that way. The flight floor has fallen to 1.15 cents per point – below what cardholders were getting before Points Boost launched, and the hotel guarantee Chase marketed at launch was quietly removed within six months, with no notice to cardholders. And for most bookings through Chase Travel, your points are now worth 1 cent apiece.
There's still real value in Points Boost … but it's become a lot harder to find, and Chase certainly isn't helping you look.
What Points Boost Actually Replaced
The old system was simple enough to explain in a sentence: Book any travel through Chase Travel, and your points were automatically worth more. *chase sapphire reserve* cardholders got 1.5 cents per point on all flights, hotels, rental cars, and cruises booked through the portal, while *chase sapphire preferred* cardholders got 1.25 cents.
Points Boost replaced that with a dynamic system: 1 cent per point is the new baseline, with elevated rates available on a rotating selection of flights and hotels. The theoretical ceiling is higher as Reserve cardholders can now earn up to 2.5 cents per point on select hotel bookings, but the elevated rate is no longer guaranteed on anything. Every booking requires a check, and that check doesn't always pay off.
For existing cardholders, the transition is gradual. Points earned before October 26, 2025, can still be redeemed at the old flat rate through October 2027 – but only for eligible bookings during that window. Points earned after that date are worth 1 cent apiece through Chase Travel, unless a boost happens to be active on your specific booking.
How Points Boost Works
Points Boost is a dynamic redemption system: instead of a fixed value across all travel, your points are worth more on specific hotels and flights Chase has tagged as boosted in the portal at any given time.
The eligible inventory rotates (more on why shortly), and the value you can get depends on which card you hold. Chase Sapphire Reserve cardholders can see up to 2.5 cents per point on a small rotating selection of featured properties; up to 2 cents per point on other boosted “The Edit” hotels and select premium cabin flights; 1.65 cents per point on most other Points Boost hotels; and as low as 1.15 cents per point on the lowest-tier of elevated flight offerings.
Meanwhile, Chase Sapphire Preferred cardholders can see up to 1.75 cents per point on boosted premium cabin flights and up to 1.5 cents per point on boosted hotels, with 1 cent per point everywhere else.
Critically, only two categories of travel are eligible: flights and hotels. You'll mainly find Points Boost hotels in Chase's curated “The Edit” collection – more than 1,300 hotels worldwide – plus a rotating selection of others. Booking through The Edit also stacks perks like complimentary breakfast and a $100 property credit on top of any boosted redemption. Note that The Edit is exclusive to Reserve cardholders, and Preferred cardholders are not eligible.
In Chase Travel℠, boosted properties are marked with a blue rocket icon. You can filter results to show only Points Boost-eligible bookings, and the portal displays both the standard and boosted point cost side by side before you commit.
When it comes to flights, premium economy, business, and first class on select airlines are the primary target for Points Boost, and where you'll find the highest boost rates. Economy fares occasionally appear with a boost, but it's rare, and when they do, it's typically at the lowest redemption tiers. Also, not every premium cabin fare on a boosted airline will carry a boost either.
Why Points Boost Inventory Keeps Rotating
Points Boost availability almost certainly depends on which airlines and hotels have cut a deal with Chase.
We suspect Chase negotiates agreements with travel partners to send cardholder bookings their way – and those elevated redemption rates are likely subsidized by the partners receiving that booking traffic. When a deal is active, the inventory appears in the portal. When it expires or shifts, so does the boost.
It explains a lot about how the program has played out in practice. When boosted flights launched last summer, the inventory was almost exclusively United Airlines – Chase's closest airline relationship, not just as a transfer partner but as a co-branded credit card issuer.
The same logic applies to The Edit hotels. The roster shifts when the deals do, which is why what's boosted today may not be there tomorrow, and why cardholders have no reliable way to predict what's coming next.
What's Actually Happened to Hotel Redemptions
When Points Boost launched, the hotel side was genuinely compelling. All 1,300-plus properties in The Edit collection redeemed at a flat, guaranteed 2 cents per point. For non-chain luxury hotels with no transfer partner path, and for mid-to-upper-tier Marriott, Hyatt, and IHG properties where award pricing gets painful, Points Boost often beat transferring to a hotel loyalty program outright.
But that guarantee didn't even last six months. In December 2025, Chase quietly changed the language on its Points Boost page from a flat 2x redemption at The Edit to “up to 2x.”
There was no email to cardholders. No in-app alert. No notice inside Chase Travel explaining that The Edit would no longer redeem at a flat two cents per point rate. Instead, it was uncovered by a cardholder on Reddit who noticed something didn’t add up: the points cost for an upcoming Edit hotel stay had increased … even though the cash price had gone down. That discovery triggered a wave of similar reports from other Sapphire Reserve holders, who checked their own bookings and found the same thing.
Based on an analysis from The Points Guy, which tracked redemption rates across a sample of roughly 150 Edit properties at multiple points in time, the slide has been consistent.
Today, roughly three in four Edit hotels price out at 1.65 cents per point, with about one in four still pricing at 2 cents per point on a given search.
That 1.65 cpp floor is marginally better than the old Reserve baseline, but a long way from what Chase used to sell this benefit when they updated the Sapphire Reserve last summer.
According to Doctor of Credit, Chase currently offers a 2.5 cents-per-point boost on 11 select Edit properties, its highest redemption rate ever. We confirmed that these are still active as of publication, but there's no telling how long that lasts.
Here's the bigger problem: Unless you happen to be searching Chase Travel℠ at the right moment for the right destination, you'd never know these Points Boost deals exist. And that gets at the core frustration with Points Boost.
What's Actually Happened to Flight Redemptions
The flight side of Points Boost has deteriorated just as much, but it's received far less attention.
At launch, Reserve cardholders could expect 2 cents per point on boosted business and first class flights, with a floor of 1.5 cents per point – the same value the portal had previously guaranteed on every booking.
Both of those numbers have since dropped. According to Frequent Miler's hands-on research – conducted by searching actual routes as a Reserve cardholder – the domestic first-class ceiling is now 1.75 cents per point, and the floor has fallen all the way to 1.15 cents per point, lower than what any Sapphire cardholder was guaranteed before Points Boost existed.
The broader picture is even more stark. NerdWallet analyzed more than 13,000 departure options across 81 domestic and international roundtrip itineraries and found that only about 9.5% had any Points Boost option at all.
The Points Boost Discovery Problem
As a Sapphire Reserve cardholder myself, here is my biggest frustration with Points Boost: There's no easy way to know what's boosted before you start planning a trip. The old 1.5 cents per point on all bookings through Chase Travel℠ worked precisely because you didn't have to find anything. Every portal booking was automatically better.
Points Boost flips that entirely and puts the burden of discovery on the cardholder. There's no push notification when a hotel you might like gets boosted, and no email from Chase when the airline roster rotates.
As a Reserve cardholder, the only reliable way to know what's boosted is to open Chase Travel℠ and look before you commit to booking anything. In practice, that means making Chase Travel℠ your first stop before booking a trip – which is precisely what Chase wants.
But for a card that costs $795 a year, having to actively hunt for value that used to be automatic is a reasonable thing to be frustrated by.
Bottom Line
Chase Points Boost had a brief window when guaranteed 2 cents per point redemptions across more than 1,300 hotels made the whole trade-off feel fair. That window has mostly closed, and Chase hasn't communicated much (if any) of it.
There's still value here … when you find it. But that requires making Chase Travel℠ your first stop whenever you book a flight or hotel.
