Chase losing Korean Air as a transfer partner

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Well this blows. It's now confirmed that Chase is losing Korean Air as a transfer partner. This is my preferred method of spending Ultimate Rewards points from our Chase Sapphire cards – we've already taken several flights this way, and were actively saving to repeat our 747-8 upstairs experience sometime next year. 

I'll wait and see if they pull a rabbit from their hat and add another transfer partner to make up for it (Alaska Airlines would be a great option), but if not, this very likely means we'll cancel one or both of our Sapphire Reserve cards when they're up for renewal.

There's a very active discussion happening over on /r/churning right now – lots of fun speculation about the future and reminiscing about great trips taken over the years. The reason I loved them so much is that they had great award seat availability. Yes, I'd heard that the popularity of the Sapphire card caused that to decrease a bit, but even last week I'd been doing some speculative flight shopping and there were plenty of Korean Business Class seats on nearly every day I looked at. Meanwhile I can't find a single free seat on ANA Business any time other than the deepest, hottest part of the summer. Bloggers love to obsess over amazing deals like the ANA/Virgin Atlantic one, but honestly what good is a 14¢ per point award flight if you have almost zero ability to control when you fly? Korean, your amazing award availability will be sorely missed.

I'll update this page as I learn more.

 

UPDATE (18 August)

The more I've thought about this the more I think the very best thing in the long run would be for Korean to leave the transferable points game altogether. I used them to book trips before the insanely-popular Chase Sapphire Reserve came out and millions of people started trying to use Korean's site to make Delta (or SkyTeam) redemptions with their Chase points. The fact that Korean's partner award chart allowed 25k redemptions to Hawaii from the continental US was instrumental in drumming up a lot of interest.

I've had a Korean SkyPass Visa before, and would happily get one again if Korean's award inventory returned to its previous levels after all of the Chase Sapphire users got the boot. Reliably-available seats on the dates you actually want to fly is the holy grail of the points game.

Another favorite Korean trip: First Class on their A380

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