point fu

Points experts always tell you to never hoard points because they're constantly being devalued. My old man brain sometimes gets stuck in 2013 and thinks "a million points is definitely hoarding!" But given the myriad devaluations of the past decade, the fact that there's 3 of us now, and the heaps of commuting we have to do between Sydney and New York, it's not as hoard-y as it used to be.  In 2026 I've been trying to spend down some of our points balances (while still getting good deals, of course.) I popped over to my spreadsheet yesterday and DANG! we've actually spent nearly a million miles (and almost $4k) in the first trimester of 2026 – just under half our total points balance. first 4 months of 2026 † While this is good and has saved us a ton of cash, all this burnin' means I have to start moving back into earning mode a bit. So what am I doing? asked Amex chat for a retention bonus on my Platinum card and got 15,000 free miles 15,000 United ...

Note to self: When planning a trip, I need to remember that if I find a good mileage fare to just book it — even if my plans aren’t totally finalized, even if it’s not exactly what i want. Points flights are usually free to cancel or change, so there’s no harm in grabbing a Plan B ticket while I’m still looking for Plan A.  I have a friend who constantly does this and I even gave her a drag name for it: Edith D. Itinerary. I tease her that she's not really happy unless she makes a substantial change to an upcoming trip at least once a week. I can definitely relate to the dopamine hit of clicking "Buy" on an airline website, so I get it! While I lovingly tease her for doing it too much, I definitely err on the side of doing it too little.   For this year's annual Sydney Mardi Gras trip I changed that, though! For whatever reason (general ennui?) I just didn't get around to booking it until 3 weeks before the trip. Yeah, flying to Sydney during its absolute peak tou...

I joined Seats.aero a year ago and then quickly realized those instantly-confirmable PlusPoints upgrades are also eligible for Mileage Upgrade Awards. With that knowledge, the need to chase 1k status for PlusPoints and upgrade pecking order basically vanished. That is to say, we've mostly been finding confirmable upgrade seats, paying for an Economy ticket, and then using the Mileage Upgrade Award to instantly upgrade to Polaris (usually 30,000 miles + $500).  Giving a quick glance over these 12 months of flying here's a few things that occur to me: Flexibility is key . Given Kel has an American job with its max-4-weeks vacation and 3 mandatory office badge-ins per week, we've had to buy him tickets on several occasions instead of flexing his date to one with a confirmable upgrade seat. Tim and I have a lot more flexibility so we've been able to take better advantage of those. A Mileage Upgrade is a good deal, but the co-pays and the value of the miles definitely add u...

We're still waiting on Tim's green card (fingers crossed for sometime in Autumn of this year...), but until that happens there's still a lot of back-and-forth happening. Prices to Australia are still sky-high (north of $10,000 for Business) and award seats are still incredibly scarce. I usually search on United.com using Tim's account because he has 1k status, and I noticed this: A bunch of very-discounted fares from SFO and LAX to Sydney and Auckland. Given that the Saver level for Polaris is now 200,000 points each way, this was a steal . I had a few Chase points to transfer in, but I needed to buy points to top off my account.  So, for $2031 and 168,000 miles, I'm going round trip to Sydney in Polaris and spending the depths of winter enjoying Sydney's Vivid festival and Hobart's Dark Mofo . While making notes to myself for this post, I saw that this deal is no longer exclusive to 1k members , so if you're looking to get out of American summer and hi...

UPDATE: We're back!  Turns out we ended up arriving RIGHT as peak cherry blossoms happened  Tim's United 1k status got him a surprise  upgrade to ANA Business Class at the gate  The 27 hour layover in Taipei worked out perfectly Japan is finally open for real again, and we'd love to go back (it's where the 3 of us met, actually!). Here's the constraints I had looking for tickets: We've all seen the cherry blossoms before, so let's go AFTER the cherry blossoms but BEFORE golden week so we can avoid the crowds a bit. Try to go during Easter so we get one "free" day vis-a-vis Tim and Kelly's PTO.  Given Kelly's back and my recent surgery, get us there from New York in Business Class without paying the current going rate of $12,000 each round-trip. We were willing to do one stop if we could find a good deal. Given the similar time zone, shorter flight, and lack of health problems for Tim, get him there on a direct flight from Sydney in Econo...

 ...but only for four hours. Talk about the ultimate tease 😭 I was searching on United.com for points flights to Sydney from New York in August and sorta inadvertently spotted a really good deal in late May flying on one of their Star Alliance partners. Considering that we already have a trip planned for mid-June to meet up in LA from our respective hometowns of NYC and Sydney, I thought, "What if I went out to Sydney early and then flew with Tim on his already-scheduled flight to LA?"  The problem is that I don't have many United points. Nor do I have many Chase Sapphire points to transfer to United. I do, however, have quite a few Amex points, but they're not a transfer partner for United. The flight is actually operated by Amex partner  ANA , but ANA doesn't let you do one-way points redemptions directly . I had some points "marooned" over at Air Canada, so I figured my best bet would be to top off that account with Amex points and book there.  So I ...

In just over a year's time, Jim had 60,000 points – enough to fly ANA even during high season. The second half of the story is how to cleverly spend them…   Booking Booking reward flights can be a bit tricky – award seats are generally added to an airline's inventory either: 11-ish months out or at the last minute if a flight isn't selling well. That means the points game is best when you plan really far in advance or completely last-minute . In Jim's case, doing the spontaneous thing isn't going to work for him. He wants to go in spring of 2020 during cherry blossom season. There won't be many last-minute bargains or empty award seats during such a peak travel time. Once those award seats are added to the airline booking system, every day of delay means more of the seats have been snatched up by other travelers and your options start to dwindle. TIP: Some airlines put restrictions on new accounts, so don't wait until the last minute to crea...

I started this blog because I wanted to help people travel. It's turned out to be a great crutch against my senility, too, but first and foremost I like helping people check things off their bucket lists. A good friend of mine – let's call him Jim – returned from his first visit to Japan in 2016 eager to return "in a couple of years". He asked me for help, and I feel like there were some great lessons for everyone that we learned along the way.   Background Like many millennials, he's got crushing student loan debt and is early in his career so he's not too flush with cash (nor does he have a trust fund or wealthy parents). He does, however, have great credit (above 750), a stable job, and a good credit history with a Chase Freedom card.   Getting to Japan One of the very sweetest spots in the world of airline points is the All Nippon Airways (ANA) reward chart – in low season you can fly round-trip in Economy from the US to Japan for 40,000 miles ...

Given that we paid for the only big international trip we've taken this year, our points balances have been growing. When we got the good news about the Shiki Shimi lottery , our point balances totaled 1.3 million across all programs. Since the mantra is "earn and burn", it was time to blow some of these before the next round of devaluations happens. Starting point   Buy My normal process is to hit up Google Flights to make sure we aren't missing a great deal. Long story short: there were no great deals , even with us being super flexible about how we got there – Manila, Seoul, Singapore, Hong Kong, or Taipei all would have been great connection points. At this point I should mention a couple of general rules about purchasing flights to Asia: One ways cost as much as (or more) than round-trips , so make sure you have some kind of plan for how you're getting back if you decide to buy only one leg on points. Direct flights always cost more . Fly t...

( last update 6/2018 ) We aren't normally the type of travelers who do whirlwind trips, but given that my husband is basically getting one week off between January and Thanksgiving 😡 we're going to, uh, "whirl" a bit with this upcoming trip. We scored those sub-$2000 tickets from NYC to Frankfurt , we're taking a cheap Lufthansa flight from there to Poland for our friend's 50th, then we're taking Wizzair direct to Tel-Aviv. Once we started looking into the top sights in the area, I realized how close we'd be to Petra so we decided this is the time to cross that off the bucket list. UPDATE : Trip report Royal Jordanian Amman – Frankfurt Petra is happening at the tail end of our trip, so we have to find a way back to Frankfurt to connect to our flight home. There are only three border crossing points between Israel and Jordan, and crossing the border is not a trivial matter. The bus ride to Amman from Petra is 4-ish hours long. So I started p...

One of the toughest parts of the points game is actually finding the flights you want once you've gathered enough points. Most people end up with a mix of points across several carriers and maybe a pile or two of transferable points like American Express Membership Rewards or Chase Ultimate Rewards. A great tool for visualizing all of the direct routes from a single airport is flightconnections.com . (The Airlines and Destinations section of Wikipedia is another great resource for this type of thing). If you're just perusing possibilities, AwardHacker.com is great for showing you all of your potential options. You can filter the list so it doesn't show flights with programs you don't have points for. While this is great for brainstorming (and for choosing which new points programs to join), it doesn't show the availability of those rewards , so you'll need to use something different once you're ready to book. Award Hacker (click to enlarge) There...

We started planning the annual pilgrimage to Mexico a bit early this year. We loved Oaxaca so much last year that we basically want to repeat the schedule from last year:    NYC > Oaxca > Puerto Vallarta > NYC . We booked last year in September and many of the food and mezcal tours we wanted to take were already sold out for our late January dates , so we wanted to book a bit earlier this year. There are several challenges in that itinerary, but probably the biggest one is that final direct flight back to New York . United (and Delta back when they used to compete on this route) will charge you USD$1000 per person for that trip whether it's a one-way or a round-trip. I got lucky last year and found a Mexican travel agent who could book the one way for $600-ish. Sadly they couldn't make that happen again this year, so I had try several different tricks but managed to eventually land the one-way for $550 in Business (happy to share how privately). As I discusse...

Since our extended-remix trip there last year , we've been yearning to go back to Japan . It's tough accruing much paid time off (PTO) given that we literally went into a PTO-hole to make last year's trip happen. First we thought we'd chain together the "free" Thanksgiving and Christmas/New Years work holidays with PTO and a bit of remote working to pull off another 3 month visit. But it's been a rough year for us and we ultimately decided we didn't want to spend all of the winter holidays away from our friends and family. So we're shooting for a 3 week trip in October instead . The dream, of course, would be to repeat our ANA First experience but using the Virgin Atlantic "trick" to do it for way fewer miles. Unfortunately the big travel bloggers have been flogging this option for the past few months and availability is basically zero now . 😠 What we ended up doing Used the "Combine Points" option on Chase.com to mo...