Business Class Flights for Nearly Free to Japan via ANA Award Travel
We get a lot of questions about why we use American Express Membership Rewards points, and the simple answer is: We love to travel to Japan. Every year we visit, so why not take advantage of our daily spending to get some free flights? As we were looking into points, we came across a much better value to take round-trip business class flights! In this article, we’ll talk about using credit card points to get Business Class flights to Japan, and why we chose American Express as our primary credit card provider.
Credit card points over cash back
There are two main options when it comes to credit cards rewards - you can get cash back or you can get points. Cash back cards offer great savings and having a variety of cards with different categories can maximize your return on spend, while points cards will give points on spend (usually every $1 spent = 1 point received) which can be redeemed for various things such as gift cards, products, airline miles, hotel points, and even cash back - though I would only ever recommend using for airline miles and hotels as the gift cards, various products, and cash back options gives a pretty terrible return on spend.
As cash back cards go, the Costco Citi Anywhere is a great example. Not only does it give you 4% on gas up to $7,000 per year, it also gives back 3% on restaurant and travel spending, as well as a 2% cash back on purchases at Costco or through Costco.com. Combining this perk alongside the cash back you get for spending money at Costco with the Executive membership, you can get a pretty substantial check at the end of the year. We actually have the Costco Citi card and had the Costco American Express card, and have used it for quite some time now with great savings.
While cash back is a great way to save money, the points redemption for flights is king for what we want to do. Using points for flights and and hotels can yield anywhere from 1.5 CPP to a whopping 20 CPP!
What is CPP and how do you calculate it?
A good way of looking at the value of your points is what most credit card bloggers call “CPP” which stands for Cents Per Point. CPP is calculated by taking the value of something that you would redeem points for, then dividing it by the number of points used to redeem that item.
For example of a low valued CPP, an iPad costs 111,800 MR points to redeem on American Express’ website. If you were to pay cash for it through Best Buy or the Apple Store, it would be $559.00 (or 55,900 cents). In order to calculate the CPP, you take the 55,900 cents and divide it by 111,800 points and the CPP value comes to exactly 1/2 a cent per point. In this particular example, the value is pretty bad (which is the reason why I said it’s not really a good deal earlier to redeem for gift cards or merchandise). Keep in mind though, this doesn’t take into account what your spend categories are, what your sign-up bonus points were, and what multipliers you might have gotten to accrue your points.
Now, for an example of a great valued CPP, look to redemption for airline tickets. For example, it costs 1 American Express Membership Point (MR) point to redeem 1 ANA Mileage Club (MC) miles. Today, a round-trip business class flight from LAX to TYO with a 3 month advance purchase costs about 553,000 JPY which is about $5,134.65 USD. If you were to book using ANA MC miles, it would cost you between 85,000 - 90,000 depending on the time of year of your travel. So if you were to spend 90,000 miles for one of these tickets, you’d be getting a value of 5.7 CPP (513465 cents / 90000 points).
This is the current price you and I would pay if we were to pay cash from LAX to TYO with a 3 month advance booking through ANA for a round-trip Business Class ticket.
Why did we pick American Express and what are we using the points for?
The short answer is that American Express MR points is a direct 1:1 transfer partner to ANA mileage Club, and with our spend along with our bonuses, we can take business class every year for the next several years. As for first class, it costs 150,000 miles using ANA award booking, but only 110,000 Virgin Atlantic Miles - but we’ll get into that another time. As of writing this article, there are no other credit card points that partner directly with ANA besides American Express. Marriott points do transfer to ANA miles, but at a 3:1 (3 Marriott points to 1 ANA MC mile) transfer ratio, it’s hardly worth it and should only be used for last-resort transfers - plus you should be saving those Marriott points for hotels anyways!
A quick preview for a future article, we’ll be taking a round-trip First Class flight to Japan from Los Angeles using a combination of American Express MR points and Citi ThankYou points!
But back to American Express - using the trifecta strategy to maximize our points, we accrue about 60,000 points per year for each of us, and with the sign up bonuses for all of these cards it will be relatively easy to keep the business class flights going for years to come.
We call this “almost free” - why? Because there are fees and taxes that you’re still responsible for - around $250 per ticket, but when you’re looking at $5,000 seats, $250 seems a pretty fair price.
Thoughts?
I hope that this gave you an idea of why we chose American Express and points - if you wish to join in on some ultra-cheap business class tickets to Japan, feel free to ask us any questions!
