Portals and points in dollars

The portal guides already on the site cover the travel side: Chase Travel Points Boost against a transfer, paying with points on Amex Travel, bank portal hotel bookings against booking direct and, in this section, cancelling or changing a flight booked through a bank travel portal. The other guides in this section cover the non-travel side, where the question is how many points a retailer or a gift card consumes per dollar.

None of these pages ranks banks or recommends a card. Rates can change at the issuer's discretion, so each table carries a check date and a pointer to the page it came from. Before spending, read the rate on your own screen; the arithmetic in the guide shows how to turn that rate into a decision.

Why printed rates matter more than valuations

A fixed redemption rate is one of the few numbers in this field that nobody has to estimate. The issuer or the merchant prints it, it can be read on a screen, and it can be multiplied by a balance. That makes it the natural floor for any decision about transferring: a transfer that returns less per point on a specific booking than a printed checkout rate is a transfer that needs another reason.

The floor is only a floor. It says nothing about what the same points are worth on a business class seat or a hotel award, and it can change at the issuer's discretion. The guides here therefore carry each rate with the page it was read from and the date, and then do the one thing a rate table cannot: price a real purchase, then compare it with a real booking in the same units.

What is not here

• No ranking of banks and no suggestion that one currency is better than another.
• No card recommendations and no affiliate links.
• No rate that could not be read; cells say so when a bank does not print one.