Good morning everyone, I hope your weekend is going well. A few days ago, I read that Best Western suspends use of points toward gift cards or merchandise and that Southwest Rapid Rewards Can Not Be Redeemed For Gift Cards Due To Covid-19. I did some digging and found out that it is possible to redeem IHG Rewards Club Points, Hawaiian Airlines Miles, and Frontier Airlines Miles for gift cards (both physical and electronic) with Points.com. In this post, I will show you how to redeem points from those 3 programs into gift cards and calculate the value from these redemptions (spoiler: the redemptions are not very good). Here is the complete list of gift card options available as of today (I combined the list into 1 big image).
To get started, create or log into your Points.com account and then click the Redeem button in the upper left corner.
Then select the program you want from the drop down menu.
Unfortunately, there are only 6 options available and I only looked at the top 3 options since I figured most people do not have big balances with the other 3 programs.
For IHG, here are the redemption options and values:
- $25 Amazon eGC costs 17,000 IHG Points (0.15 cents per point)
- $50 Amazon eGC costs 31,000 IHG Points (0.16 cents per point)
- $100 Amazon eGC costs 61,000 IHG Points (0.16 cents per point)
For Hawaiian Airlines, here are the redemption options and values:
- $25 Amazon eGC costs 10,687 Hawaiian Airlines Miles (0.23 cents per point)
- $50 Amazon eGC costs 20,490 Hawaiian Airlines Miles (0.24 cents per point)
- $100 Amazon eGC costs 40,097 Hawaiian Airlines Miles (0.25 cents per point)
For Frontier Airlines, here are the redemption options and values:
- $10 Amazon eGC costs 4,118 Frontier Airlines Miles (0.24 cents per point)
- $25 Amazon eGC costs 9,160 Frontier Airlines Miles (0.27 cents per point)
- $50 Amazon eGC costs 17,563 Frontier Airlines Miles (0.28 cents per point)
- $100 Amazon eGC costs 34,369 Frontier Airlines Miles (0.29 cents per point)
With Points.com, it is possible to convert other miles and points currencies into IHG Rewards Club Points, Hawaiian Airlines Miles, and Frontier Airlines Miles, but those conversion rates are generally not very good. If you want to learn more about the conversion process, please read Using Points.com to Exchange JetBlue TrueBlue Miles into Amtrak Guest Reward Points. Even though I only have IHG Rewards Club Points, I do not plan on cashing out my balance for gift cards. I would consider this a last resort for cashing out my miles and points, but I wanted to make sure you knew about the option. If you have any questions about using Points.com, please leave a comment below. Have a great weekend everyone.
I wish I had paid more attention to the redemption options at Frontier, where I had expiring points but not enough for a ticket. I ended up getting a bunch of magazines when I could have gotten an Amazon gift card. The three Wall Street Journal options were gone the day after I first looked into redeeming my points, so I was not going to dilly dally.
Hi Sara, I’m sorry you weren’t able to redeem your Frontier points for good options. Better to redeem the points for something than to let the points expire worthlessly.
Thanks Grant, this is good to know but the value is so low. I got the 140K IHG for me and my wife and we’ll have 300K in total, less than $500 in value buying Amazon GCs…I hope nobody has to do it.
Yes, I agree the value is really poor, but it is an option if you need it. If you can use the IHG points well (and have the Chase IHG Rewards Club Premier CC), you can get a ton of value from your IHG points.
Agree with everyone here, conversion rates are total are very poor value. You can get a nice room for 60K IHG points at a decent property that is worth $200+ per night vs. $100 GC with this points.com rip-off!
Ya, I totally agree. 61,000 IHG points are easily worth more than $100 when used to book an award stay.