Overview
What’s this? An article on a cash back card from a points and miles writer? I thought you said points were better than cash back?
You’re not wrong. But the Chase Ink Business Unlimited® Credit Card is a bit of an outlier in this space, and its current elevated introductory offer is pretty spectacular, making it a strong contender for your wallet.
Currently, this card is offering new applicants $900 in cash back after spending $6,000 within three months of opening an account. But, a quirk unique to this family of cards means that cash bonus can be converted into 90,000 Ultimate Rewards points, worth well over $1,500 by transferring to some of Chase’s outstanding travel partners, like United, Marriott, Air Canada, and more.
And don’t worry, even if you don’t think you’re a small business owner, you may very well qualify for this card.
If your interest is piqued, here are a few exciting ways to use the Ink Business Unlimited’s $900 or 90,000-point intro bonus.
- Best for: Small Business Owners
- Annual Fee: $0
- APR: 17.49% - 23.49% Variable
- Reward Rate: 1.5%
- Recommended Credit: 670-850
Chase Ink Business Unlimited® Credit Card
$900 Cash Back
Offer Details:
Earn $900 bonus cash back after you spend $6,000 on purchases in the first 3 months from account opening.
Why we like it
The Ink Business Unlimited Card shines with its large intro bonus, currently sitting at $900 of cash back. The card has no annual fee and a simple but strong rewards-earning rate, with 1.5% cash back (1.5x points) on all purchases. This means you don’t have to worry about tracking any bonus categories and still know that each time you swipe the card you’ll be racking up points.
Even better, if you have a companion Chase card like the Chase Sapphire Preferred® Credit Card, Chase Sapphire Reserve® Credit Card, or the Chase Ink Business Preferred® Credit Card, you can pool your rewards from the Ink Unlimited and make them more valuable by transferring them to Chase’s travel partners like Hyatt, United Airlines, British Airways, Southwest, and more.
Reward details
1.5% unlimited cash back on every purchase for your business
Pros & Cons
PROS
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For small business owners and freelancers it’s one of the best cards for turning spending into valuable rewards. The welcome bonus alone is worth $900 of cash back and you’ll continue to rack up rewards with a solid earning rate that applies to all purchases.
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It has no annual fee.
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If you have another Chase card like the Sapphire Preferred, Sapphire Reserve, or Ink Business Preferred, you can pool your points and make them more valuable. You’ll be able to transfer your points to Chase’s travel partners like Marriott, Air Canada, Southwest, United, and more.
CONS
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It does lack some of the juicier benefits attached to other business credit cards likes the The Business Platinum Card® from American Express. But with no annual fee, it’s hard to argue with its value proposition.
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It’s subject to Chase’s 5/24 rule. So if you’ve opened five cards in the last two years, you’re most likely not going to be accepted.
Terms Apply
The Card
The Chase Ink Business Unlimited® Credit Card is a no-annual-fee credit card, making it a low-risk option for small business owners. On top of that, its simple earning system allows cardholders to maximize their spending with minimal fuss. Instead of distinct spending categories, it sets a flat-rate 1.5% cash back rate on all purchases.
While this card is normally viewed as a cash back product, it’s also a travel card. This category-straddling is achieved by the ability to turn cash back into Chase Ultimate Rewards points. In effect, this means the bonus is worth 90,000 points for those who wish to use it as such. A bonus that size on a card this approachable is incredible. It also means that its 1.5% cash back rate is equivalent to earning 1.5x points per dollar on all purchases.
There is a catch, though. Turning that cash into transferable Ultimate Rewards points is only possible if you also have one of these three cards: the Chase Sapphire Preferred Credit Card, the Chase Sapphire Reserve credit card, or the Chase Ink Business Preferred. The Sapphire Preferred and Ink Business Preferred are both great travel cards and have a palatable $95 annual fee. Adding one to your wallet is a no-brainer for anyone who wants to maximize their rewards.
If you don’t have one of these cards, you won’t be able to transfer your points to Chase’s travel partners and get outsized value for your rewards.
If you fall into the points category, I hope you grasp how impressive this bonus is. Finding 90,000 points for a comparatively paltry spending requirement on a no-annual-fee card is incredibly rare. You’d typically pay a lot more in annual fees and have a higher minimum spending requirement to earn a bonus this valuable.
Can You Qualify?
When you think of a “small business,” you may envision a revenue amounting to tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars per year, multiple employees, a storefront, etc. But in fact, none of these things are required to get a small business card. You can qualify for the Chase Ink Business Unlimited® Credit Card if you perform services such as:
Freelance writing
Driving for Uber or DoorDash
Selling items on Etsy or eBay
Dog sitting or babysitting
Tutoring
A small business doesn’t even have to be your main job. As long as you’ve got a for-profit venture, you qualify for the card, though whether you’re approved will depend on additional factors.
You also don’t have to have an EIN or be an LLC. You’ll be able to fill out a business card application with the same information as a personal credit card. When the application asks you to enter the legal business structure, you have the option to choose sole proprietorship. And when it asks for the Tax ID type, you have the option to choose your Social Security number.
Best Ways to Use this Bonus
1. Get $900 in cash
We’ll get the simplest option out of the way first and focus on the cash back side of the bonus. Again, if you don’t have any of the three cards mentioned earlier, this is your best option. Not that you’d be complaining, $900 is still a considerable amount of money.
While opting for the cash back route limits your value, it does have the upside of being remarkably flexible. You can redeem it for good old-fashioned cashback, travel booked through the Chase Travel portal, or for an assortment of gift cards.
Of course, using it for travel means your value will be dictated by your destination, the time of year, and the popularity of the place you’re hoping to go. The same applies to hotels and car rentals.
If you have points in other places, I’d recommend keeping hold of the cash back to use as a fallback on a last-minute flight you’re struggling to find a good redemption on. Otherwise, it’s yours to use as you wish. Don’t waste it!
2. Go big on the world’s best business class (worth $10,000+)
To offer some stark contrast to the cash back option, we’ll start our points redemption suggestions with one of the best out there — Qatar Airways’ epic Qsuite. Widely regarded as the best business class experience in the industry, it’s not uncommon for these tickets to cost $10,000 for a one-way flight from the US to Doha and other destinations around the world. But this bonus could let you do it for less than $10.
There are multiple ways to book a Qsuite using points and miles, but the best option comes from an unlikely source, JetBlue’s TrueBlue program. While the points rates are roughly the same as using Qatar or one of its Avios partners’ programs, the taxes and fees offered through JetBlue’s relationship with the Doha-based carrier mean you’ll only pay $7.95 on top of the 70,000 points.
Don’t transfer your points to TrueBlue until you find award availability when you need it, as this can be complicated. It’s far better to find a seat and base your trip around that. Be patient, and use American Airlines’ calendar view to search for award availability. They’re hard to stumble on, but they are there.
3. Grab a weekend in a high-end hotel for nothing
Chase has fewer transfer partners than its competitors, but what it lacks in quantity, it doubles down on quality. World of Hyatt is exemplary of that. The fast-growing hotel giant boasts one of the most valuable award charts in the points and miles landscape, offering incredible hotel stays around the world for a fraction of the points when compared to similar properties under other franchise umbrellas like Hilton and Marriott.
Take the Park Hyatt Maldives Hadahaa as an example. It’s a quintessentially Maldivan resort, with overwater villas, in other words, heaven. A room there runs at around $1,200 a night if you’re lucky, but grabbing an off-peak night will only set you back 25,000 points. That 90,000-point bonus from the Chase Ink Business Unlimited® Credit Card can score you three nights in paradise and potentially save you a whopping $3,600.
To grasp the breadth of Hyatt’s luxury properties, search for its Category 7 and 8 hotels. Standard rooms all run the same rates at off-peak, peak, and normal dates. One of my favorite hotels on the planet, the Hotel du Louvre in Paris, is on there for the same 25,000-point-per-night rate.
4. Enjoy a round-trip business class flight to Europe with Iberia
I feature this redemption a lot because it’s arguably the easiest way to fly business class to Europe. Spain’s flagship carrier, Iberia, offers a startlingly good rate of just 34,000 Avios for flights from the East Coast to Spain.
The only cities currently running the route are Boston and New York, but Chicago often gets included depending on seasonality. Oddly, the Windy City actually falls beyond the mileage threshold but gets to keep the low redemption rate.
As with many business-class redemptions, the tough part is finding award availability. My advice, as always in these scenarios, is to be patient, flexible, and think long-term.
If you’re not in one of those cities, don’t despair. Grabbing a positioning flight for a few thousand points to the necessary airport could still be better value than a business class flight with another airline.
With 90,000 points at your disposal, you could book two one-way business class flights to Europe.
If you need more points to get home, know that you can move Avios from any other airline program that uses the system—British Airways, Qatar, Finnair, and Aer Lingus. In other words, if you have points and miles on other cards lingering around, you can combine them to great effect and keep your relationship intact for a little longer.
5. Level up with United’s Excursionist perk
I’ve written an entire article explaining how to use this to maximum effect, but it’s worth mentioning here, especially as Chase is the only major bank rewards program that allows transfers to United.
Despite using a dynamic pricing system, United retains a lot more value than some of its domestic competitors (looking at you, Delta). And while its saver redemptions can be marvelous in their own right, its Excursionist Perk can take things up a notch.
In short, the Excursionist Perk allows travelers to book a free flight in the middle of a multi-city itinerary. It’s bound by some basic rules:
The first and last flights must originate in the same geographical zone (e.g., North America)
The free flight must be within one zone and separate from the origin and destination zone (e.g., Start and finish in North America, with a free flight within Europe)
The free flight needs to be in the same cabin or lower than the other flights (e.g., you can’t book a free business class when the first one is in economy)
It sounds a little confusing, but once you understand the ins and outs, it’s possible to save thousands of points on larger redemptions. For example, you could book a flight from New York to Paris, then from Paris to Istanbul, then back to New York. In this case, the flight from Paris to Istanbul would be free, save taxes.
It’s one to play around with for sure. I recently used it to find my way to Cape Town from Dubai on an unorthodox route through Ethiopia. In the end, it saved me around $1,000 as direct flights were few and far between.
6. Fly domestic with a bunch of airlines
Another big advantage Chase has over some of its competitors is its domestic transfer partners. It’s possible to transfer points from your account to Southwest, JetBlue, and United, which all offer pretty strong rates when redeeming for domestic flights. As internal flights in the US can be frustratingly expensive, this is a huge perk for those with a lot of shorter routes to run.
Southwest and JetBlue are different from other airlines in that they tie their points values to the cash price at any given moment. In other words, more cash requires more points, and vice versa. But they also don’t have a predetermined number of award tickets; every seat can be booked with points. This gives you a huge advantage when it comes to last-minute flights where availability is low and cash prices aren’t spectacular. It’s unlikely to get you huge value, but it’s almost impossible to get bad value.
But it’s not just the domestic carriers that can get you around the country. Air Canada starts short-haul partner flights on United at just 6,000 points, Virgin Atlantic lets you fly Delta starting at 7,500 miles, and even KLM/Air France Flying Blue has roundtrips to Hawaii for as little as 35,000 points. Depending on how you use the points, you can rack up as many as 12 flights with your Chase Ink Business Unlimited® Credit Card bonus.
7. Enjoy three round-trip flights to Europe with KLM/Air France Flying Blue’s promo deals
KLM and Air France’s joint program Flying Blue is a fickle mistress. One day a flight to Europe is 130,000 points, the next it’s just 15,000. The good news is that there’s generally a lot of the cheaper pricing. In fact, despite its dynamic system, a little flexibility typically allows you to nab a pretty spectacular rate.
That’s never more true than when it’s running monthly promotional redemptions. Generally, these set rates for flights between the US and Europe for 15,000 points, plus any taxes and fees. The cities change on a monthly basis (at the time of writing, Detroit, Boston, and Houston all have discounted offers), but it marks an excellent rate by any airline’s standards.
The taxes and fees will be a little higher than some of the US carriers, but your value per point will still be higher than most other options.
8. Use it on the Chase Travel Portal
As if you needed another reason not to use the bonus as cash back, I’m throwing in one more last resort option, using the Chase Travel portal.
At the beginning of this article, I mentioned you could use the cash back bonus on Chase’s travel portal. If you don’t own one of the paired cards, you’ll be stuck with your points valued at 1 cent each towards travel. But if you own the Chase Sapphire Preferred or Chase Ink Business Preferred, those points will be eligible for Points Boost, which is a feature on the Chase Travel Portal that allows certain bookings to be redeemed for a higher value per point.
These points can be worth up to 1.5 cents per point on eligible hotels and economy flights, and even up to 1.75 cents per point on premium cabin flights. It is important to note that Points Boost offers are dynamic. That means their value and availability change based on the destination, travel dates, and specific card.
The Chase Travel portal acts like any other online travel agency, ie Expedia, where you can book nearly any hotel, flight, or rental car in the world with no blackout dates.
The Point
The Chase Ink Business Unlimited® Credit Card‘s limited-time $900/90,000 point intro bonus is a spectacular offer for a card with no annual fee. Used on its own, the bonus is a flexible cash injection to be used as you wish. But transferred to a valuable travel partner as points, it could be worth more than double.
- Best for: Small Business Owners
- Annual Fee: $0
- APR: 17.49% - 23.49% Variable
- Reward Rate: 1.5%
- Recommended Credit: 670-850
Chase Ink Business Unlimited® Credit Card
$900 Cash Back
Offer Details:
Earn $900 bonus cash back after you spend $6,000 on purchases in the first 3 months from account opening.
Why we like it
The Ink Business Unlimited Card shines with its large intro bonus, currently sitting at $900 of cash back. The card has no annual fee and a simple but strong rewards-earning rate, with 1.5% cash back (1.5x points) on all purchases. This means you don’t have to worry about tracking any bonus categories and still know that each time you swipe the card you’ll be racking up points.
Even better, if you have a companion Chase card like the Chase Sapphire Preferred® Credit Card, Chase Sapphire Reserve® Credit Card, or the Chase Ink Business Preferred® Credit Card, you can pool your rewards from the Ink Unlimited and make them more valuable by transferring them to Chase’s travel partners like Hyatt, United Airlines, British Airways, Southwest, and more.
Reward details
1.5% unlimited cash back on every purchase for your business
Pros & Cons
PROS
-
For small business owners and freelancers it’s one of the best cards for turning spending into valuable rewards. The welcome bonus alone is worth $900 of cash back and you’ll continue to rack up rewards with a solid earning rate that applies to all purchases.
-
It has no annual fee.
-
If you have another Chase card like the Sapphire Preferred, Sapphire Reserve, or Ink Business Preferred, you can pool your points and make them more valuable. You’ll be able to transfer your points to Chase’s travel partners like Marriott, Air Canada, Southwest, United, and more.
CONS
-
It does lack some of the juicier benefits attached to other business credit cards likes the The Business Platinum Card® from American Express. But with no annual fee, it’s hard to argue with its value proposition.
-
It’s subject to Chase’s 5/24 rule. So if you’ve opened five cards in the last two years, you’re most likely not going to be accepted.
by your friends at The Daily Navigator
