CNBC launched a segment about using credit card points to fly to South Africa. They found an expert named Jason Stauffer. His job is explaining how to convert the rewards from your Chase Sapphire Reserve into a middle seat on a 15-hour flight.
The premise rests on a beautiful assumption. You have points. Tens of thousands of them. You earned them by spending money you definitely had on things you definitely needed. Now you get to redeem them for a flight that costs less than the annual fee on the card that generated the points in the first place.
Stauffer walks you through the process. New York to Johannesburg. You need 70,000 miles if you book six months out on a Tuesday during a lunar eclipse. Or 160,000 if you want to leave on a date that works for you. The math is simple. Spend $80,000 on groceries to earn enough points for a $1,200 ticket. Congratulations on your financial literacy.
The article does not mention that you could also just buy the ticket. With money. The thing you used to get the points. This would involve fewer steps and zero phone calls to customer service representatives in Manila who are pretending the award seat you see online does not exist.
But that misses the optimization. The game. The thrill of sitting in seat 43E knowing you paid nothing except the $550 annual fee, the $89 in foreign transaction fees you forgot about, and the absolute destruction of your credit utilization ratio.
Jason Stauffer has turned airline loyalty programs into a career. He is the guy at the dinner party explaining how he flew to Cape Town for free if you don't count his time as worth anything. He is the prophet of a religion where the reward is coach.
South Africa is beautiful this time of year, assuming you survive the journey calculating whether to transfer points to Virgin Atlantic or book through Air France Flying Blue while the award chart still has availability in 2027.
Photo by on Unsplash
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