You’re in luck, because several of us are planning Japan trips in 2020 and 2021. This thread helped
@Haley R,
who is in Japan right now, accumulate enough points for business class flights on ANA from LAX to Tokyo and a stay at the Hilton Tokyo Bay for her visit to Tokyo
Disneyland within a few months time starting just over a year ago.
However, the game is constantly changing, what cards and bonuses available today may not be tomorrow, everyone earns points at different rates, and the availability of certain redemptions may go up in price. For your best shot at getting the flights and hotels you want, we usually suggest having your points in place a year before your travel dates. For late 2020 or 2021, you’re in good shape. But if you’re eyeing sakura season in late March through early April, know that’s the most popular time for travel to Japan and that may make finding award space on flights and hotels more challenging.
• How many people will be in your travel party?
• What parts of Japan are you planning to visit?
• Do you have a spouse or some other partner who is willing to sign up for credit cards and work on bonuses too?
• Do you have a business or any side gigs (e.g., selling stuff online, selling crafts or baked goods, babysitting, pet sitting or dog walking, tutoring, consulting, independent contracting, driving for a ride share, etc.) that might qualify you for a business credit card? If not, did you have one in the past or could you say you have any plans to start one?
• Would you and any partner be willing to open up business credit cards?
• Would you be interested in joining DISchurners, our private Reddit group, where we share more in depth tips, links to credit card offers, and recap the news and discussion to help you keep up with this fast moving thread?
To open up your options, you may need to take a positioning flight from PHX to LAX, but it sounds like you’re ok with that.
There are lots of points “currencies” (or programs) you can work on to earn miles for your trip. Two of the big ones with lots of points on the table for you to earn are Chase’s Ultimate Rewards (“UR”) and Amex’s Membership Rewards (“MR”). Both are flexible points currencies that can be cashed out, redeemed for travel on their respective travel portals, and most importantly in your case transferred points to points/miles to various other airline and hotel travel partners. Chase URs transfer to United (UA), which flies from LAX to NRT/HND, and Virgin Atlantic (VS), which you can use to book partner awards on ANA that’ll take you to Tokyo. With United’s recent announcement that they’re moving to dynamic award pricing later this year, the VS -> ANA route is a better value in that it’ll require you to earn and spend fewer points.
@Haley R actually focused on earning oodles of UR, transferred them to VS to book her business class flights on ANA. Amex’s Membership Rewards similarly transfers to Virgin Atlantic, which you can use to book partner awards on ANA, and there’s a transfer bonus going on through 7/1/19, which means for every 1,000 points you transfer from MR, you’ll get 1,300 miles with VS (instead of the usual 1,000). Unfortunately, you may not be able to take advantage of this transfer bonus given the short time frame, but these bonuses come around periodically. Amex MR also transfers to ANA directly, and as I mentioned before it is a good value in itself. You did mention you’d like to fly JAL. Neither Chase nor Amex transfer to JAL, but an alternative is to earn American Airline (AA) miles to redeem for partner awards with JAL.
@DisneyMandC is doing this for her flights to Tokyo for next year’s Summer Olympics.
As you can see, you have a lot of options. But where to start? If you saw my post from last night about developing a strategy early on, then you need to play your cards very carefully. You said you’re 1/24 with a Cap1 card. You’ve got 4 slots to play with. If you’re open to business cards, you can get much more than 4 cards and still be in the game with Chase. As you might have read, Chase has some of the most lucrative signup bonuses (SUBs) with their Ultimate Rewards earning cards. But they also have one of the most stringent rules to prevent people from getting their cards if they’ve gotten too many other cards from them or other issuers. That’s the “5/24 rule” — Chase will deny you for any of their cards if they see from your credit report that you’ve gotten 5 or more cards from any issuer in the past 24 months. However, if you’re willing to sign up for business cards, the good news is most issuers don’t report business cards to your personal credit report so Chase doesn’t see them on your credit report and won’t add the business cards against your */24 count. This gives you a lot of room to play your cards right! Chase’s 5/24 rule is why we suggest prioritizing Chase’s cards first, while you’re still under 5/24, because going willy nilly and getting personal cards from other issuers (e.g., Amex, Citi, Barclays, BofA, Cap1) will blow your */24 status in no time and lock you out of Chase for at least two years. (You can still, generally, get business cards from other issuers, as long as they don’t report their business cards to your personal credit report. And we can tell you which ones are safe.) It’s important to consider both the short and long term in developing a strategy because this Japan trip hopefully won’t be your last travel hack; you said you’d like to go to WDW too. Points can take you there and elsewhere for significantly reduced out of pocket costs.
You already have the Chase Freedom (“CF”) which is a good start. Are you maximizing the 5% category this quarter by activating the category and using the CF at grocery and home improvement stores? The CF actually earns its cash back in the form of UR points that can be cashed out. So you may already have UR points that you don’t even know about. However, a better use for them would be to get one of Chase’s more premium travel cards, like the Chase Sapphire Reserve (“CSR”), Chase Sapphire Preferred (“CSP”), and the Chase Ink Preferred (“CIP”) so you have the ability to combine your URs from spending and SUBs and transfer them to one of Chase’s travel partners, like Virgin Atlantic.
Another Chase travel partner that should be on your radar is Hyatt, which has several ah-mazing properties in Tokyo and often is an incredible value when you transfer UR -> World of Hyatt points. Just for example, during sakura season, when you’ll see some peak cash pricing, the Andaz Tokyo Toranomon Hills runs ~$650/night and the Park Hyatt Tokyo, made famous by Lost In Translation, runs ~$900/night, but both are bookable for “only” 30,000 Hyatt points per night (and that’s for Hyatt’s high end categories; lower tier properties will cost less). UR points transfer to Hyatt 1:1, so that’s 30,000 UR, or only $300 if you had cashed out the UR for cash. Chase also has a Hyatt credit card that can earn you (currently) a 50,000 Hyatt points SUB and hotel loyalty status (but again, you need to be under 5/24 to be eligible).
I know some of these numbers may not make much sense to you right now, and I’ve tried not to overwhelm you with too many numbers right off the bat. But just look at the SUBs for some of Chase’s cards: the CSR has a 50,000 UR SUB; the CSP has a 60,000 UR SUB; the CIP has an 80,000 UR SUB; two other Chase business cards, the Chase Ink Cash (“CIC”) and the Chase Ink Unlimited (“CIU”) each have 50,000 UR SUBs. You can run up a lot of points by getting all of these cards! But keep in mind there are rules to applying for these cards, but if you’re willing to listen and learn, we can walk you through how to get all of them, maybe even more than once, while you’re still under 5/24. And if you get a partner involved, you two can double up on these cards, and refer each other for more “support” bonuses, then combine your URs to make some big redemptions.
I’ll leave it here for now. Get back to me with answers to some of my questions and we can better help you. And please please please “watch” this thread, ask a lot of questions and we’ll answer the best we can, stay involved and just chat with us so we can learn a little more about you and we can better tailor our advice, use us as a sounding board for your plans, read and learn from other people’s posts whether they’re about Japan or addressed directly to you or not.
If I can fuel the train of grAAvy via that method, I can use my regular spend to keep drinking from the cup of CIPpy!
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