point fu

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 t...

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...

Somehow I missed this amazing chart that's been floating around for a couple of years now! It's a visualization of all of the airlines (grouped around the edges by alliance) and the transferable points programs in the middle. Lines connect the various programs so you can quickly see which points can go where.  Somehow this manages to both make my head hurt AND clarify a complex tree all at once. Here's the master post ( scroll down after the click to view ) Very cool welltraveledmile.com ! Click thumbnail to visit the original post and view full-size...

I use my Amex Premier Rewards and Chase Sapphire cards fairly frequently for transferring points to airline frequent flier programs. They both have different transfer partners -- for example Chase can transfer to United, Amex can't; Amex has a long list of transfer partners, Chase has only a few. Transferring points is often instant, but other times it's not. I have a general rule that I only transfer points right before I'm about to book a reward flight, but if there's a lag in the point transfer, it can disrupt the best-laid plans . I found this chart that shows the transfer times for some of the more popular cards. It might be helpful in planning your next trip.