Too Many Membership Rewards Points

I know this is not a common problem. But P2 in particular has been getting some loving from Amex, and currently has 3 Biz Plats and 2 Biz Golds. The latest Biz Plat had a 300K MR offer, and the 2 Biz Golds had 175K and 150K offers. We’ve earned the SUBs on all of them. So P2 now has over 2 million points, and I have almost 1 million.

I find Chase Ultimate Rewards a lot easier to use than MRs. We like to fly United and occasionally stay at Hyatts. Both options provide a good value for our URs.

Citibank transfers to American Airlines, so easy to get value from our Citi Thank You points.

Bilt transfers to United, Alaska, and Hyatt. Again, easy to get good value.

I’ve been struggling to use the MRs. We’ve successfully used them to book flights with our preferred Airline (United), at a value per point of a little over 1 ½ cents. That’s not bad given how “generous” Amex has been to us.

And I am looking forward to trying their new hotel partner, Leading Hotels of the World, where we should get 2 cents per point. But we don’t have any trips planned right now where they have hotels.

For our trip to Poland in May, I am hoping to transfer points to Air Canada to book our flights, but nothing has appeared that I like just yet. There’s a lot of time for something good to show up. We can book those flights using either my MRs or P2s MRs because we can transfer P2s MRs to my frequent flyer accounts since I’m an Authorized User on P2s cards. That’s a nice feature of Amex MRs.

Since I have a Schwab Platinum, I can cash out my points at 1.1 cents each. That’s not great, but given our huge stash of MRs, and the (increasing) cost of the remodel, cashing out makes sense.

I don’t generally recomend this, but it makes sense for use in our current situation.