We're going to Japan to ride the
Shiki Shima train and I've
booked the long legs of the trip: New York to Hong Kong and then Taipei to New York (we're bookending the trip to Japan with long weekends in two of our favorite places). But now we need to book the short legs between those two places and Japan.
One of my weak spots with booking award travel is doing crazy-but-legal routings and stopovers. I'd used British Airways points for the Hong Kong leg, and BA prices all award travel by leg so there were no points to be saved by spending an hour on the phone with a call center trying to get an agent to book me a single flight with a multi-day layover in Hong Kong en route to Japan. (
TIP: There's a great online Avios calculator here).
Hong Kong to Tokyo
I priced out the flights and found a lot of Ultra Low Cost Carriers (ULCC) offering this flight for US$150-ish (a.k.a.
$350 once you
pay the surcharges for seats, bags, oxygen, and toilets), but we wanted to fly in Business Class if I could find a good deal. I was pleasantly surprised to find award space on Cathay Pacific at a convenient time of day. Once you factor in the limited-time
40% transfer bonus to BA from Amex,
I paid 14,500 Amex points + US$42 per person for a flight that was retailing for $1341. So yes, the hypothetical 9 cents-per-point I got there is huge, but we would have found a cheaper option before we'd have paid that much money. But when the price is only 14,500 Amex points, why would I bother with a ULCC or a multi-stop trip?
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| $1300 flight for 14,500 Amex points! |
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| Hooray for the the 40% transfer bonus! |
Tokyo to Taipei
For Tokyo to Taipei we had a similar situation – very high prices on direct flights with top-tier carriers (in both Business and Economy), and very low prices on the ULCCs. Again, I found quite a bit of award space on BA.com with their partner Japan Airlines and
snagged a $1900 ticket for the same low, low price as the other one.
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| 11 cents per point! |
But there's just one small problem: I was dang-near out of Amex points! I have to admit that I still have "old man glasses" on when I look at my points balances –
I see a 330,000 point balance and my lizard brain thinks, "that's a lot of miles!", probably because
it was a lot of miles when I first got into this hobby. But even with the stellar 40% transfer bonus the other legs of this trip had nearly emptied out my account. But all hope was not lost – I hopped on to the Amex website's chat feature and pleaded with the customer service rep there to advance me all of the pending points from my coming billing statement. Sure enough
she was able to advance to me all of the points I had pending for my next account statement and I was able to make the transfer and buy the tickets! Now I have a measly 902 points left.
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| Go to Points Overview > Summary and click View Detail to see pending points |
Quick note here: one of the nice things about British Airways is that they're a transfer partner of both American Express and Chase, so I could have used my Chase points to top off the account as well, but Chase never has transfer bonuses, so I'd prefer to use the Amex ones here.
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