Japan on Points (Part 3): When the Unexpected Happens Before You Book Your Trip

Many a time you’re planning your trip and calculating how many points you need, get your strategy in place, and then boom something unexpected happens that changes your plans.  But before we jump in, if you’re new to my Japan on Points series you can read my earlier posts HERE.  If you’re new to the blog altogether then I would recommend you start HERE.  I’m glad you’re here to learn more about points and miles.  And I hope there’s some helpful nuggets throughout my content that will help you on your personal points and miles journey!

Now, sometimes the unexpected event can be a certain brand choosing to devalue their points, which happened to us late 2025 when Singapore Airlines changed the amount of points required for their First Class and Business Class tickets.  This change in points cost means that we went from needing about 750,000 points to now close to 900,000 points.  It was at this point that I decided to switch up the strategy a bit.  I am still aiming to fly First Class to Japan for our trip later this year in the Fall.  But with the increase in points cost I have to be realistic.  I don’t want to start spending money we don’t need to just to get the points because that defeats the purpose of this whole points game.  So, while First Class round trip is still the original goal; a more realistic goal is to go First Class to Japan and Business Class on the return trip home.  Not bad!

This secondary failsafe goal will cost us close to the original 750,000 points and we were well on track to reaching it.  As of the beginning of April 2026, at the time of writing this post, we are 89% of the way towards that goal.  To give you a points amount, we roughly need 81,000 points still to reach this modified goal.  Now we are trying to reach that without opening any new cards to get a sign-up bonus and earn that remaining points purely on spend.  You may be thinking to yourself that this is a lot of points to earn without receiving a sign-up bonus from a new credit card and you’re right.  But that’s not going to stop us from trying.  One main thing that we’ve been doing is putting the spending that we normally do on our Chase cards and my American Express Gold card.  The reason behind that is because Chase Ultimate Rewards and American Express Membership Rewards both have Singapore Airlines as a transfer partner.  So, by putting our normal spend on those cards primarily means that all or majority of our spend is earning us points that will go towards Singapore Airlines. 

But we recently got hit with another little surprise.  This one is my fault for not remembering and it will set us back a little bit but it’s not game ending.  What I forgot is that Singapore Airlines miles expire after 36 months of no activity on the account.  Now back when we went to Japan in 2023 we flew on Singapore Airlines.  Because of that trip I had earned 8,160 Kris Flyer miles that have been sitting in my Singapore Airlines account.  We are now past the 3 year mark that we went to Japan back in 2023 meaning that those 8,160 points are expired.  I found this out when I logged into my Kris Flyer account and thought my points balance looked funny.  It then hit me that points expire when there’s no account activity after a certain period of time.  So, the points from our flights to Japan had already expired and the points earned from the return flight were set to expire shortly after.  I’ll be honest when I saw this, I was a little bummed, but like I said, completely my fault for forgetting that detail.  So now that will set us back 8,160 points which puts us just under 90,000 points that we’ll need to do First Class going and Business Class back.

Does this make the goal more difficult, absolutely!!  But is it impossible, not at all!  We plan to continue putting our normal everyday spend on our credit cards and we’ll shift our focus a bit so that we’re earning our points in either the Chase ecosystem or the American Express ecosystem.  Between the five different cards that we have that feed those two points systems, I’m confident we can make a decent dent in that 90,000 points still needed to make this flight goal to Japan a reality!  I mean who doesn’t like a good challenge right?  Stay tuned for more on our Japan trip in future posts!