Those "instant" Chase Sapphire transfers aren't instant

The beauty of transferrable points (like Chase Ultimate Rewards and Amex Membership Rewards) is that you can shop around a variety of airlines for an award seat and then instantly transfer your points to the airline where you've found a good itinerary. Given how competitive the battle for award seats is (especially this year!), a delay of even an hour can mean your seats are long gone by the time your points show up. 

Chase Marketing (and the travel bloggers who make a large share of their revenue from credit card affiliate links) like to sell you on the idea that these transfers are instant. But if you search through the FlyerTalk forums, it's clear that they're only instant some of the time.

In my case, I needed to transfer some points to United for a Business Class flight from New York to Seoul, so I transferred the points, logged out of United.com and logged back in (the usual procedure to make the miles show up), and... nothing. So I waited, and waited... made dinner, ate dinner... nothing. So I called and the Chase rep told me there was nothing they could do. 

Ultimately I gave up and decided to purchase the tickets with my credit card. 18 hours later my points appeared. But now they're "marooned" over at United. I can't send them back to Chase. 80,000 points that used to be flexible aren't anymore. It's maddening. My only consolation here is that Chase has so few transfer partners left that United is most likely place I would have transferred them anyway.