Flexible rewards cards is the most complicated category of travel cards, but also the most powerful.

Rewards earned through flexible travel cards or transferable points cards can be used in a variety of ways. Most commonly rewards are redeemed through the bank's travel portal or through transferring rewards to bank transfer partners.

These are often some of the best cards to start with because they have so many options.

What's a Travel Portal?

With flexible points, most banks offer the option of booking travel through their own portal. These portals operate like Expedia or Orbitz — essentially they are an online travel agent. Redeeming rewards through a travel portal is fairly straightforward. Banks will assign a value to your points (typically 1 cent per point) and when you find a booking you want in the portal — airline, hotel, car rental, etc — then you can choose to apply your points to offset all or part of the cost.

Booking through a travel portal can have higher earning rates, too. If you have a Capital One Venture X, for instance, any rental car or hotel booked through Capital One Travel will earn you 10 miles per dollar.

See the pros and cons of booking in a travel portal here.

The Secret to Unlocking Value: Transfer Partners

Transfer partners are airlines and hotels that have partnered with a bank so that you can move your rewards into their loyalty program. Each bank has a different set of transfer partners.

When you redeem points for cash back or through a travel portal, the value of the point will be set by the bank. When you transfer points to transfer partners, your points can be worth two to three times as much. If you are booking business or first class airline tickets with points (which is not something we cover in this course), the value can be much higher.

Points are not always worth more when you transfer them to a transfer partner so do your research and double check that you're using fewer points to transfer than you would in a travel portal before transferring points.

After you earn rewards through credit card spend and bonuses, you will be able to log into your credit card account and choose to transfer your rewards to a transfer partner loyalty program.

Transfers are often instantaneous and then you can use those miles or points to book hotels or flights directly through that loyalty program. For example, if you have Chase Ultimate Rewards^® and transfer those to Southwest Airlines, you will now have Southwest Rapid Rewards that you will immediately be able to use to make an award booking.

Rewards typically transfer at a 1:1 ratio (so 1,000 Chase Ultimate Rewards will become 1,000 Southwest Rapid Rewards), but there are some exceptions. Check out our blog article with dynamic charts to see where and how to transfer points from your favorite flexible rewards card to a transfer partner.

Example: Chase Ultimate Rewards

Chase Ultimate Rewards are one of our favorite credit card currencies. In fact the whole first season of our podcast was dedicated to it!

If you hold one of the Chase Ultimate Rewards earning cards with an annual fee (Chase Sapphire Preferred® Card, Chase Sapphire Reserve®, or Ink Business Preferred® Credit Card), you can unlock incredible value by strategically transferring your points to one of Chase's transfer partners.

Our favorite Chase transfer partner is World of Hyatt. You can find out why we love the World of Hyatt so much in Easy Hotel Strategy: Focus on Hyatt Hotels.

Whereas redeeming Ultimate Rewards for cash back will get you one cent per point, it's easy to get 2+ cents per point value when you transfer Ultimate Rewards to Hyatt.