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I forget when I more seriously got into credit card points, probably this time last year? I'm proud to say that I did my first redemption for tickets to China next year. It was stressful and not the greatest value, but it does feel great to put previous spending to use.

My first mistake when signing up for the credit cards is not checking who the transfer partners are. I signed up for the Delta card since I thought I was going to be in Atlanta for a while. Then I signed up for the Chase card since it's well regarded overall. And finally the Aeroplane card now that I'm back in Canada. I was naive and thought Chase could transfer to both Delta and Air Canada...but that is not the case. So I was stuck with roughly 80k Chase points, 80k Delta points, and 35k aeroplan points.

My initial plan was to transfer from Chase to Delta and buy round trip business card tickets. This would have worked out since the total was 170k points but alas there's no direct transfer "orz The only way is through Marriott, but it's a 3:1 ratio to Delta which is definitely not worth. Instead I focused on getting a one-way business ticket back through Delta, and redeemed the Chase points through their own reward portal for premium economy tickets there. Unfortunately this meant I only got 1.5x the value of the Chase points, when TPG values then at 2x.

However I was still short ~5000 Delta points. I admired defeat and transferred some Chase points into Marriott. But transferring points takes time, and there was only 2 seats left to redeem. I literally had 3 consecutive nightmares about missing out on the tickets on the day I transferred my points "orz One day passed and my points haven't shown up in my Marriott account. I start panicking more...and decided to calculate if I actually had enough Marriott points to not wait for my transferred Chase points. Turned out I did, so I needlessly slept badly "orz So I transferred my existing Marriott points to Delta, and felt pretty hopeful since the internet said it usually takes less than 24 hours.

Except it didn't. 2 whole days passed and it still didn't show up. On the third day, I looked at a different section of the app and noticed the transfer showed up in recent activity, but not in my total points. I took a gamble and booked the tickets anyways. Except the reservation didn't go through. I ended calling customer service to resolve the issue (turns out it was a backend problem), and finally breathed a sigh of relief.

I tried to calculate the valuation of my Delta points, but the same flight is no longer available. The cheapest business flight on the same day is a ridiculous 6k USD, which equals a crazy 7 cents per point. I highly doubt my flight was that expensive, but I'll stick to the 7 cents to feel better.