The majority of people I know have decided that they will cancel the CNB card when their AF is due. Like most of them, I had around 80K points left. I had no big travel plans and didn’t want to cash out into gift cards at .85c of value. Since I’m based out of Seattle, we fly Alaska a lot and thus ideally, I’d like to move the points to Alaska flights to get the full 1.1-1.2c of value. I also don’t have GOLD status with Alaska and so cancellations are charged $125 for non-members. However, when Alaska waived cancel and change fees due to the coronavirus, that was a great opportunity for me to cash out my remaining CNB points.
Your travel has to be before June 30 (and you have to book by March 31st,) and so I found an Alaska flight that cost about ~$1000 round trip. I also booked MAIN instead of SAVER (not necessary, but just in case.) I waited over 24 hrs so that it wouldn’t refund back to my CNB points. However, when I went to do the online cancellation, all the cancel options were wanting to charge me $125 for the change/cancel fee. I was freaking out at this point because I thought maybe it was only on flights booked DIRECTLY through Alaska. I called up AS customer care and the lady was able to cancel the flight and bank the $1K credit to my AS wallet without any pushback.
If you still have floating WF, CNB, or ML points out there, have no status with Alaska, but plan on flying within a year, this is a good way to cash out the points fully.