How to turn Amazon purchases into travel

Nearly every person we talk to has an Amazon account and makes somewhat regular purchases. The convenience can be too much to pass up!

For people interested in travel hacking, however, Amazon is a tricky category because it’s often one of the hardest to stack. Normally, we use our Chase Freedom Unlimited on Amazon purchases because it earns 1.5x Ultimate Rewards points on all purchases compared to most cards that are a 1x baseline for points. While we don’t have one, the Venture Rewards card from Capital One also offers 2x miles for every dollar, making it a better option than 1x cards for Amazon.

If you have a Chase Freedom or Freedom Flex, you can earn 5x Amazon points by following the steps below through December 31st.

Here’s how:

On all purchases, the Freedom or Freedom Flex offers 1x points per dollar. Every quarter, however, they have 5x categories (usually 3 of them) for cardholders to earn up to 7,500 points on $1,500 worth of spend.

One of the Q4 categories is PayPal, which you can use to buy Amazon gift cards. The easiest website we’ve found to do this on is Best Buy. What’s nice about Best Buy is that it is also on the popular airline shopping portals (United, American, Southwest, & Delta) and Rakuten, so you can stack the points you earn.

Walk through it

First, you need to make sure you have a PayPal account. If not, create one (it’s free) and set your Freedom or Freedom Flex as your default payment method.

Next, go to the Best Buy website and activate your chosen shopping portal. Ours is usually United unless the points are significantly better on Rakuten. Search Amazon gift card. Best Buy allows you to purchase them in the amounts of $25, $50, $100, and $200 dollars.

Choose your desired amount and load it into your cart. When you go to check out, select pay through PayPal and make sure your Freedom card is selected.

Check out and wait for the Amazon gift card to hit your account. Then, load it to your Amazon account for future shopping.

Note – we’ve found that Best Buy will limit the number / amount you can buy, so if you know you’re going to use it, we would recommend starting with the $200 gift card. That $200 gift card earns you 1,000 Ultimate Rewards points when purchased via PayPal.

Just remember that Chase does cap the quarterly earnings on the 5x categories at $1,500, so if you’ve already spent that on the Q4 categories, this will not earn you 5x and will only earn the typical 1x.

Summary

For relatively low effort, you can turn frequent spend into more travel.

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