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by Harrison Pierce Harrison is a full-time digital nomad and award travel writer who's visited or lived in more than 35 countries on six continents. He travels everywhere with his cat, Isabelle, and when he isn't traveling, he's cooking, reading, or learning Spanish.

Hi, Reader.It’s taken me a long time to get on board with AI, but I’ve finally found a use case that can make earning and redeeming points and miles a bit more efficient. If you use an AI tool like Claude or ChatGPT, you can reverse-engineer the best credit card for a specific trip.

Start by entering your trip information and current list of travel credit cards, then request a detailed report on how to optimize your credit card strategy. You can then easily identify which credit card to open before you start booking your travel without having to compare a dozen different cards yourself.

I’m heading to Amsterdam in late 2026, so I got a full analysis on how to strategically use credit cards for this vacation.

What to give your AI tool

Here’s a sample prompt you can input into your AI tool of choice:

What this looks like in practice

Before I entered this prompt into Claude, I asked it to estimate my expenses for a week-long trip to Amsterdam from Charlotte, North Carolina, at the end of the year.

Claude's estimate for one traveler:

• $600 for economy flights
• $1,120 for seven hotel nights
• $560 for dining
• $200 for activities
• $80 for local transport
• $200 for shopping

About $2,760 all in. I think this is a reasonable estimate of spending, so I used these values along with the prompt above.

Claude recommended that I apply for the Chase Ink Business Preferred card. I like this recommendation — I’ve actually considered applying for it for some time now.

Claude cited the card’s 100,000-point welcome bonus and 3x earning on travel, shipping, internet, phone, and social media ads. It noted that since business cards live in a separate ecosystem from personal Chase cards, holding a Sapphire card doesn't affect Ink bonus eligibility. The Amex Business Gold came in as runner-up.

All told, Claude projected roughly 113,000 Ultimate Rewards points from the welcome bonus plus trip spend — enough for a round-trip economy award to Amsterdam via Flying Blue, with points to spare.

Always fact-check what AI tells you

AI can give you recommendations and an outline, but you’re always responsible for double-checking the information it gives you. For instance, Claude told me to use my Chase Sapphire Reserve to pay for transit purchases because these “code” as travel and would earn 3x Ultimate Rewards points. But Chase removed the Sapphire Reserve’s 3x general travel bonus category in 2025, so these purchases would now earn just 1 point per dollar.

Similarly, Claude recommended I use the Ink Business Preferred on a hotel to earn 3x Ultimate Rewards points. While this would make sense if I were working toward the welcome bonus, I’d earn 5x Membership Rewards points using my American Express Platinum Card to book prepaid stays through Amex Travel or 6x bonus Marriott Bonvoy points with my Marriott Bonvoy Bevy if I chose a Marriott property, so those would be a better bet.

It also recommended I transfer all of my points to Flying Blue, even if an economy award costs far less than my total point balance. I’m not sure why it recommended this, since it’s risky to keep your rewards in an airline account that can be subject to no-notice devaluations. You should only transfer exactly what you need to book your flight.

Despite those misses, I like Claude’s recommendation. The Ink Business Preferred would allow me to earn 3x on general travel purchases, which is better than anything else in my wallet. From my test, I enjoyed the baseline recommendation and structure of the analysis.

If you want to replicate this for yourself, I recommend exporting the report as an Excel file and swapping out the information as needed to build a more complete (and accurate) plan for your trip.