Anyone cashing out hotel/airline travel points?

[CalGalTraveler]

With so many travel vouchers, TS credits and travel restrictions my family doesn't envision needing many loyalty program points until 2022. So we decided to cash out more than $2000 in cash back from our Chase Sapphire accounts. We left some points in our accounts just in case, but with Chase Rewards we can also pay with cash and points so I realized that having a minimum number of points for a redemption is not critical.

I figured with this environment, we would rather take some chips off the table then allow the points to devalue as people downgrade credit cards to save on annual fees. The Chase Portal with Expedia is also not that great so finding ways to redeem 1.5 points for travel was not easy.

Apparently, I am not alone, several hotel and airline points programs are shutting down gift card redemptions to preserve cash. It now appears that Capital One is the first bank to do so.

Update: Capital One gift card redemptions back (but no hotel cards)

Update 4/30/20: A couple of readers commented yesterday (here and here) to let us know that gift card redemptions are back. Unfortunately, there are not currently any hotel chain gift cards available (including the high value gift card redemptions that were formerly available for some of us). We...

frequentmiler.boardingarea.com

• Are you cashing out/redeeming any loyalty points? If so, which ones and how?
• Are there sweet spots beyond the core use of the program? I would like to find alternative sweet spots for United, Marriott and Alaska redemptions to take some off the table.