Which Credit Card Should You Buy Points With?

I frequently write about promotions for purchasing airline miles and hotel points, as this can represent an excellent value.

While I generally don’t recommend buying points without a particular use in mind, in some cases you can get outsized value, particularly for aspirational redemptions (whether that’s a five star hotel or first class flight).

While we’ve seen some award costs increase over the years, we’ve for the most part continued to see robust promotions for purchasing points. These often get better and better to account for the devaluations we’ve otherwise seen.

While the main consideration when buying points should be that the deal as such makes sense, in this post I wanted to talk about what credit card you should use when buying points. This might not be as obvious as it sounds, since different programs go about points purchases in different ways.

Using the right credit card can make a material difference in terms of the value you get.

Maximizing credit card rewards when buying points

Using the best credit card to purchase points might not be quite as straightforward as it sounds. This is due to an important distinction with how loyalty programs choose to process these purchases:

• If the airline or hotel program processes points purchases directly, you’ll want to use a credit card that offers bonus points for airfare and hotel purchases; that’s because the purchase of points is processed the same way as an airfare or hotel purchase
• A lot of loyalty programs use points.com to process points purchases, in which case that wouldn’t qualify as an airfare or hotel purchase; in that case you’ll want to use a card that maximizes your return on everyday spending

With that in mind, let’s talk about some of the most popular programs for purchasing points, and how they process those transactions.

Which loyalty programs process points purchases directly?

The following programs process points purchases directly (and therefore points purchases with them qualify as airline spending):

The following programs use points.com for points purchases (and therefore points purchases with them generally don’t qualify as airline or hotel spending):

When points.com processes the purchase, you’ll see a points.com logo at the bottom of the purchase page, as you can see below.

Which credit card should you use to buy points?

As you can see above, some airline programs process points purchases directly. In those instances, you’re best off using a card that offers bonus points on airfare spending.

Those typically include the co-branded credit cards of the respective airline, or otherwise, your best bet would be one of the below, which are flexible cards offering bonus points on airfare purchases.

5x Membership Rewards points
per dollar spent directly with airlines or through Amex Travel, on up to $500,000 on these purchases per calendar year and then 1x

The Platinum Card® from American Express

3x Membership Rewards points
per dollar spent directly with airlines

American Express® Gold Card

3x Ultimate Rewards points
per dollar spent on airfare

Chase Sapphire Reserve®

3x ThankYou points
per dollar spent on airfare

Citi Premier® Card

2x Ultimate Rewards points
per dollar spent on airfare

Chase Sapphire Preferred® Card

As you can see, some cards offer up to 5x flexible points per dollar spent, and I value those points at 1.7 cents each. To me that’s like an incremental 8.5% return on that spending, which is incredible.

Furthermore, for these purchases you can also potentially take advantage of some travel credits offered by cards:

So, the above is my advice if buying points from an airline that processes mileage purchases directly. But what about the other airline and hotel programs, which process points purchases through points.com?

My general advice with points.com purchases is to: