re: Credit Card Rewards and Points Discussion

United Airlines put out an FAQ on their upcoming dynamic award pricing, and it sucks.

At first, they said that on Nov. 15 they were moving to dynamic award pricing for United flights, but would not change award pricing for partner awards. Now they are indicating that they will also be moving to dynamic pricing for partner awards.

--Dynamic pricing is a fancy term for 'we no longer have a set award pricing chart and it will now cost more points to fly'--

This means they are devaluing their currency across the board, which has big implications to Chase Ultimate Rewards points. If United goes the way of Delta, then Chase UR points will be relatively useless for international business class fares (with the exception of Air France/KLM), and really only holds great value if you have the Reserve card and use the 1.5 cents per mile to book domestic or international economy via their travel portal.

This is disappointing. I was planning on dropping my Citi ThankYou Premier card, but now LifeMiles has become a bigger priority for me to secure Star Alliance international business class awards.

And with AMEX, you can transfer points to both LifeMiles and Aeroplan for access to decent Star Alliance international business class awards.

AMEX and Citi have now supplanted Chase, imo, unless Chase goes out and gets another travel partner. After losing Korean, and with United devaluing its currency, Chase is losing its luster... and the Emirates partnership doesn't compensate considering Emirates' value of its currency.