point fu

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...

Other than the middle eastern carriers, the international First Class of the 90s and 00s has largely vanished in favor of lie-flat Business Class.  Lately we've seen some airlines installing a few extra-special Business Class seats that they can sell for a premium (eg, JetBlue's Mint Studio , Virgin's Retreat Suite , Singapore's A380 couples seats ).  Taiwanese luxury airline startup Starlux decided to do this on their new planes, but branded this one row of seats "First Class" and are asking 3 times the price for them versus their normal Business seats. (For real, $19,000 round trip LAX-Taipei versus $6000). I rolled my eyes. No amount of Krug and caviar could justify that. Furthermore, they aren't comping people into the seats or offering discounted upgrades to them if they're going to go out empty.  But then i saw this nugget:  Now this is a seldom-seen perk that sounds amazing – never having to enter the normal airport terminal at all . Having e...

I signed up for the BILT Mastercard because I found out that you can pay HOA dues with it, and it has no annual fee. The one downside is that has one of those annoying "you have to make a minimum of 5 transactions per billing period" rules and I didn't notice that until AFTER I'd gotten the card. Still, it's 25,000 United miles a year that I wouldn't earn otherwise, so I'll keep it. They try really hard to make it very Apple Card-like – high design, very App focused, very Apple pay – but they still mail you a physical card. Mine arrived yesterday and they definitely took Apple's clever design energy when they came up with this packaging.  If you want to start earning points paying your rent/HOA dues, I'd love it if you used my referral link . 

We're back from our Japan and Taipei trip and even though it took a lot of finagling , the actual travel was really smooth and pleasant. We've taken this 15 hour flight before, back in 2017 , and it was largely the same.  PROS EVA Air seems to be pricing one ways at half the cost of round trips Espresso onboard! They have new, very nice pajamas and the XL ones fit me now They kept the cabin at a reasonable temp this time (was super hot before) Dual jetways and very orderly boarding Great lounges in Taipei with showers and hot food Super attentive and helpful staff Extensive online menu for pre-booking meals NEUTRAL The flight didn't get any shorter and the plane didn't get any faster, so it's still 15 hours in the air ;) Seat-back entertainment didn't have a ton of good options Oddly-timed flight, you take off at 7pm, sleep a ton (if you're lucky) then land at 10pm and sorta need to go to bed again.  CON Krug is gone (but the Laurent Perrier is decent) Wi-Fi...

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...

Well, we've ticked off another of those plane nerd boxes: flying Singapore Airlines' JFK-SIN flight, the longest scheduled commercial flight in the world (for now...). I know it's nuts, but I've wanted to do this forever, even back when they were flying this route on a specially configured A340 .  So how the heck do you survive nearly 19 hours in the air? Well, let's start with the most important thing, fly Business Class . Normally this flight goes for $7k-ish round trip in Business, but I'd found a relatively cheap points ticket (200k round trip) and decided to go for it. We were actually en route to Sydney, but I booked that as a separate ticket and we spent a couple days on both ends of the trip eating our way around a delicious, new-to-us city.  ( Yes, Singapore Airlines will sell you a points ticket all the way thru to Sydney from NYC, but there were only 'waitlist' seats available, so we opted for a second, cash ticket ) The A350-URL (Ultra Long ...

UPDATE 3/2026 : While not as generous as before, I did just get at 15,000 point retention bonus offer for spending $3000 in 3 months.  == The Amex Platinum has gotten better since the last time I wrote about retention bonuses , but the fee has also gone up, too.  I'd heard that they were now allowing you to request a retention bonus via the online chat app on their website so I gave that a try. Long story short, after 5 minutes of chatting in my web browser with a rep, my card has a "spend $4000 in 90 days, get 55,000 points" bonus/challenge on it.  It seemed like the rep was required to inform me about all of the new options on the card that made it worth the annual fee, but I just politely said things like "well, I don't actually use that very much" to each of the things they rattled off. After about a minute of that they sent me the spending challenge retention bonus, which I had to officially consent to.  We're definitely planning on doing that much ...

The beauty of transferrable points (like Chase Ultimate Rewards and Amex Membership Rewards) is that you can shop around a variety of airlines for an award seat and then instantly transfer your points to the airline where you've found a good itinerary. Given how competitive the battle for award seats is (especially this year!), a delay of even an hour can mean your seats are long gone by the time your points show up.  Chase Marketing (and the travel bloggers who make a large share of their revenue from credit card affiliate links) like to sell you on the idea that these transfers are instant. But if you search through the FlyerTalk forums , it's clear that they're only instant some of the time. In my case, I needed to transfer some points to United for a Business Class flight from New York to Seoul, so I transferred the points, logged out of United.com and logged back in (the usual procedure to make the miles show up), and... nothing. So I waited, and waited... made dinner...

I've seen a bunch of marketing hype from United about how they'll intentionally delay a departure so connecting customers on delayed flights won't miss their plane. I figured it was mostly just hot air and didn't give it much thought. Until Sunday.  Rain delayed the Newark-SFO leg of Tim's trip back to Sydney. His connection was tight to begin with, and once the delay hit 45 minutes, he was certain he'd misconnect. He asks a United agent in the lounge if he could just switch to the next day but she said "we're expecting storms tomorrow too, so that likely won't fix anything."  He decides to just wait it out, and they end up taking off at 8:12 instead of 6:30. He's 99% certain he's going to miss his connection to Sydney, but then he checks his United app as they're about to land in SFO and it has a banner at the top saying "We're about to save the day for a few customers with a tight connection. Thanks for standing by while...

We were excited to hear the news that Japan was raising its daily arrival quota to 30,000 on the 1st of July. Lots of travel blogs and magazines are writing glowing puff pieces about traveling to Japan but they're all VERY light on specifics. We're looking to meet up with Tim somewhere in Asia in October and have all really been hoping for Japan to reopen, so I decided to go looking for the devil in all of those (missing) details.  Long story short: Under current guidelines, you are permitted NO unsupervised time while in Japan.  Yeah, that's a hard no from us. We'd been looking at a Kyushu bike tour for the visit since we've spent so little time in that part of the country. We've all spent enough time in Japan that most of the "Best of Japan" trips that are on offer look completely boring and tedious (none of us needs to be led through the Shibuya scramble crossing wearing matching lapel pins following a lady in a jaunty hat carrying a little yellow...