2017 Flying

I used JetItUp.com to look at my flying for the year (it interfaces with TripIt) and got some fun stats:

• 26 Flights (11 of them international) on 
• 7 airlines on 
• 13 aircraft types to 
• 6 countries

I've been trying to rebuild our points balances since we booked the big Japan trip, and to that end will probably churn another Chase card now that I'm below their 5/24 cutoff again. I also milked a bunch of holiday promotions and Amex offers so we're now at around 350,000 points split fairly evenly between Amex and Chase. With the constant point devaluations, though, we'll need 300,000-ish in a single account to repeat something like our Taipei trip this year. (Well, unless we find some unicorn-level availability on ANA and pull the Virgin Atlantic trick to access both our Amex and Chase points for a single redemption).

We don't have any big trips planned at this point. We're doing our annual Mexico trip, and we're thinking we'll look for a cheap summer Business Class fare to Europe (i.e., we'll pay in dollars, not points) for a friend's 50th birthday party in Warsaw. I'm thinking the next big trip will be China, but that likely won't happen until 2019.