Chase Sapphire Preferred: What’s Changing and What You Should Do About It

A few weeks ago I ragged on the Chase Sapphire Preferred in this podcast episode. I pointed out that its only real value was in giving you membership to a very important club: the Chase Ultimate Rewards transfer partners. Chase has long had the most valuable (maybe now second most valuable) points program in the game. And you had to pay a modest $95 annual fee to play.

But the card on its own was very “mid” as my teen would say. For that $95 you got a mostly-unusable hotel credit and a DoorDash Dashpass (which is actually useful).

Maybe Chase was listening? Because let’s just say that my take didn’t age particularly well. On June 10th Chase announced a slew of changes to the Sapphire Preferred that has basically flipped the script.

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Negative changes to the Chase Sapphire Preferred

I’ll start with the negative, because in my opinion it’s a big one. Hot on the heels of Hyatt’s punitive award chart changes, Chase is making it even harder to get the points yet need: if you only hold one of the $95 Preferred cards, your transfers to Hyatt will be at a 4:3 ratio instead of the current 1:1. That means four nights at a category 6 property during a “low” period – like Hyatt Regency Lost Pines or Hyatt Regency Coconut Point – will require 133,333 Chase points. When we first went to Coconut point two years ago it was half that. Ouch.

To be honest, this one change really decreases the value of Chase’s whole program. Hyatt is the only major hotel chain that Chase offers that’s worth transferring to, and most of Chase’s airline partners are available from other banks (United and Southwest are the notable exceptions, but transferring to Southwest in bulk is rarely a good choice). This isn’t to say that you should ignore Chase entirely, but the idea that the Sapphire Preferred is primarily valuable for getting you into Ultimate Rewards just isn’t as true as it was a few days ago.

This change also applies to the Chase Ink Business Preferred, which is unfortunately one of my most-used small business credit cards.

The slightly less dark spot is that if you hold one of the Preferred cards before June 15th, you can keep transferring 1:1 until October.

There’s one other small negative change that’s coming up is that the Chase Sapphire Preferred is losing its “10% anniversary bonus”. Cue the world’s tiniest violin. The Chase Sapphire Preferred hasn’t been a great spending card, so savvy travelers only put limited charges on it. If you racked up $10,000 in a year, the anniversary bonus would give you an extra 1,000 points… which is worth about $15.

Positive changes to the Chase Sapphire Preferred

So now on to the good – and depending on your travel patterns, it might be very good!

Chase took their entry-level card that didn’t really have value on its own and made it much, much more valuable. Without changing the $95 annual fee, they’ve added these great benefits:

• TSA PreCheck/Global Entry credit every few years
• Doubled hotel credit from $50 to $100, making it actually usable
• Apple TV subscription
• Improved travel protections that now include emergency evacuation
• Improved 3x points on gas and vacation rentals

That’s a crazy amount of value packed into a $95 credit card, especially if you’re relatively new to points and miles and don’t already have other cards that provide TSA PreCheck credits and hotel credits.

Clearly Chase wants every award traveler in their ecosystem, and they’re not afraid of paying you to join. This is a great customer acquisition strategy.

In my recent podcast episode I discussed the Capital One Venture X being the better choice for families that prefer true budget travel – driving their own cars to a rented cabin or maybe flight an ultra-low cost carrier.

I think that’s still basically true, but the Chase Sapphire Preferred now makes a solid competitor for families that want to do a mix of travel styles. Let’s say you do one budget trip each year and one “splurge” trip. For the first one, you can drive your car to that vacation rental and earn 3x for both your gas and your accommodations. If you need to stop along the way, grab your night on the road with the $100 Chase Travel credit. But then you can turn around and use the points your earn from that trip (along with your 3x on Kroger Pay, restaurants and Netflix) to transfer to an airline partner for your next trip. Or maybe you’ll look in the Chase Travel portal and see that you can get a “points boost” to redeem at 1.25 cents per point for a hotel on your next trip.

Overall, the point is that the Chase Sapphire Preferred has gotten more valuable in many ways even though I really don’t like the changes for my own specific situation.

For my fellow small business owners: while the Chase Ink Business Preferred is losing 1:1 Hyatt transfer, to the best of my knowledge it isn’t gaining any additional credits or benefits.

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What you should do right now

Here are my thoughts on recommendations depending on where you are in your “points journey” (so to speak).

If you’ve never held the Chase Sapphire Preferred

If you’ve never held the Chase Sapphire Preferred, I recommend that you go get it right now. The current welcome offer is the standard 75,000 points, but if you open this card before June 15th you’ll be able to transfer those points – and any others you earn in the interim – to Hyatt at 1:1 for a few more months.

That said, my spidey sense tells me that we could see a 100,000 point welcome offer (which we’ve seen a few times before) next week when these changes go live. At a 4:3 transfer ratio, that still gives you… 75,000 Hyatt points. Or if you find better value elsewhere, you’d have 100,000 transfer to an airline partner.

So why am I telling you to apply now with fewer points? It’s a small gamble, but in the past Chase has almost always been willing to honor an improved sign up bonus that comes out within ~20 days of your application. You can just send a secure message through your online account once the new bonus becomes available. I don’t have any inside information and YMMV but if I’d never had the card I would go for it now.

Then I would go use the heck out of my Sapphire Preferred and maximize every possible category until my September statement cuts. That’s 2x on most travel, 3x on restaurants, gas, online grocery and vacation rentals. I’d also strategically use the new 10x bonus on Paze to earn a lot of points, whether it’s for concert tickets on StubHub or new threads from Macy’s. And then I’d transfer them all to Hyatt by the October deadline.

If you have the CSP but you’ve never had the Chase Sapphire Reserve

Probably a lot of you reading this already have the Preferred but you’ve never had the Chase Sapphire Reserve – it’s expensive and complicated, so I get it.

But right now there’s a 150,000 point welcome offer on the card, so it could be a good option even if you re-evaluate it after a year (as you should).

The Chase Sapphire Reserve isn’t a very good earning card – the main bonus categories are dining at 3x and direct airfare and hotel bookings at 4x. It comes with some of the same credits that the Sapphire Preferred is getting like TSA PreCheck and AppleTV, so you could product change your old Chase Sapphire Preferred to a no-fee Chase Freedom Unlimited. That card is one of my daily workhorses because it earns 3x on dining and drug stores plus 1.5x everywhere else. It’s also an easy one for my husband and kids to use without worrying about different categories.

The Sapphire Reserve also comes with a slew of new credits to offset the annual fee, and you might find value on them like I did.

If you own a small business

Assuming you hold a Chase Sapphire Preferred or Ink Business Preferred before June 15th (or you will continue to hold one of the Sapphire Reserves), there’s supposedly a new round of welcome offers coming on the no-fee business cards as well: the Chase Ink Business Cash and Chase Ink Business Unlimited. I have and use both of these cards often, and then I move the points on to one of my cards that can transfer points.

The new welcome offers will be 100,000 points after spending $8,000 in the first four months – an all-time high! I would be really excited to jump on these offers… but Chase recently changed their rules so that these bonuses are only once in a lifetime, and only on one of those no-fee cards. Womp Womp.

If you haven’t gotten either card before, be sure to grab one. Which one is the better choice is a personal preference for how you plan to use it. The Chase Ink Business Unlimited is pretty straightforward: 1.5x everywhere.

The Chase Ink Business Cash is more complicated but more valuable: 5x for office supply stores, internet, cable and phone; 2x for gas and dining (which you can skip if you have the Chase Sapphire Preferred); and 1x everywhere else. Anything you buy at an office supply store counts for 5x, whether it’s pens, batteries, toilet paper or random things you’ll find on the racks in the front. If that was confusing, check out this podcast episode with more info:

But whichever you choose, you should be able to bump up your Ultimate Rewards balance by ~110,000 points before October. Again, you can transfer these to Hyatt while it’s still 1:1.

So where does this leave you, me and all the other people looking to travel more by leveraging points?

If you’ve had both personal Chase Sapphire cards

Welcome to my boat! No one in our household can get a welcome offer on either of the Chase Sapphire personal credit cards. We’re also (probably) locked out of the elevated bonuses on the no-fee Ink cards.

Keep reading to see what my strategy is going to be.

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What I’m doing right now

Right now I’m doing… nothing.

September 2026 update: Here’s why I chose to upgrade to the Chase Sapphire Reserve and how I maximized a benefit I hadn’t even planned to use

That’s not entirely true. I’m thinking over my options and my needs. Right now my husband holds the Chase Sapphire Preferred and I hold the Chase Ink Business Preferred. Since we’re current cardholders, we have a few more months to transfer points to Hyatt at a one-to-one ratio.

As a Hyatt Globalist, I’ve been able to make hotel reservations up to 13 months in advance without having the points in my account – they just need to be there a week in advance. As we get closer to October, it’s very likely I will transfer a huge chunk of points from Chase to Hyatt to cover our needs for 2027.

I might even transfer all of them, which would be in the neighborhood of a half-million points depending on how much I can earn with the 10x Paze promotion that runs through the end of this year. Ordinarily I’m not into “speculative” transfers, especially to something like a random Asian airline I’ve never flown before. But Hyatt is a very known quantity: I easily use a few hundred thousand points per year (at least) and have firm plans to redeem in the future. I wouldn’t view them as “stuck” at Hyatt because I know I’ll use them. The screenshot above shows my reservations from mid-June until mid-August, and there are more after that but you get the point.

Beyond that, I’ll keep thinking about what we want to do going forward. Hyatt’s recent award chart changes are pretty bad and already had me reconsidering my hotel strategy. I’m already stretching to keep Globalist status for one more year but don’t plan to do so next year. For Hyatt to stay viable for our family, I’d need to upgrade my Chase Freedom Unlimited to a Chase Sapphire Reserve. The problem is that my Freedom Unlimited started life as a Sapphire Reserve back when the annual fee was much lower. These days it’s $795 per year and under Chase’s new rules, I can’t even get a sign up bonus with that fee!

Normally I wouldn’t consider a personal credit card with that kind of fee… but the credits on the Chase Sapphire Reserve happen to align extremely well with our spending patterns. There’s a $300 annual travel credit (which even works for things like parking), $300 per year toward StubHub (which we’d easily use), $300 per year toward a very limited set of restaurants (which includes a few in town that we visit a couple times per year) and $120 per year toward Peloton membership (which we have). There are other credits I’m less confident in using, but already we’d be a few hundred dollars ahead, and holding the Chase Sapphire Reserve allows us to ignore the lower transfer ratio to Hyatt.

If you don’t currently hold a premium credit card and can use the credits, the Sapphire Reserve might be a great pick up for you since it provides a TSA PreCheck credit and very good lounge access for families. Those things aren’t critical for us because they’re already provided by other premium credit cards we hold.

In theory another option for me is to get the Chase Sapphire Reserve for Business. Starting 6/15 it will offer a 200,000 point sign up bonus (woohoo!) but requires $20,000 in spending in just three months. That’s a real stretch for our spending capacity, especially if nearly all of the expenses are for my business. Plus the annual credits (other than the $300 travel credit) aren’t nearly as compelling for that same $795 annual fee. So I don’t think I’ll go this route, but if that spend works for you it could be a good choice.

If we choose to keep booking with Hyatt, I’m also considering putting our personal Ultimate Rewards earning cards in a sock drawer and going all-in on new challenger Bilt. This program is making waves and the top-level card it offers has a few great benefits and the potential to earn at least 3 points per dollar everywhere. Even better, those points transfer 1:1 to almost all of the programs I use regularly: Hyatt, Alaska, United and more. If you have anything above the entry-level status with Bilt, you can also transfer your Rakuten earnings there at 100 points per dollar which can give you hundreds of thousands more points per year if you’re strategic.

Or we could abandon Hyatt altogether and mostly move away from the Chase Ultimate Rewards ecosystem. I’ve talked before on the podcast (like in this episode and this episode) about some ways to make Hilton make sense, and there are some excellent earning cards within the American Express Membership Rewards lineup – like the personal Amex Gold card – that are great for that approach. I’ve mostly used Chase for hotels and Amex for flights – which I think is pretty common – but maybe that’s going to flip a year from now.

Wrapping up

I know that was a lot of information, but Chase definitely pulled a fast one and some folks will only have a few days to decide what to do. I hope this brain dump helps you make an educated choice.

Don’t miss these additional resources to help you get started with award travel: