Japan on Points (Part 4): Spending Over a Million Points on Japan
Since our last trip to Japan in 2023, I’ve been diligently saving our points for the day we would return to the Land of the Rising Sun. And now we’re getting ever so close to making our next trip! If you haven’t read my Japan On Points series, please be sure to give it a read HERE. Throughout this short series I have talked about how I’ve been strategically trying to earn points to not just make our trip close to free, but to also fly better than economy and stay in pretty nice hotels when we can. Has it been an ambitious goal? Yes. Was it impossible? Not by a long shot. Now we are getting close to booking our trip to Japan so I thought it would be a good time for an update on where we are from a points perspective.
The Dream
For those that have followed the series, you may recall my original goal was to fly First Class to Japan. Prior to October of 2025 that goal seemed achievable. The reason I say prior to October of 2025 is because after that Singapore Airlines had a devaluation of their points making a First Class flight cost significantly more points per person, per leg of the trip. On top of that because I hadn’t flown with Singapore Airlines in three years, the few points I did have in my account expired. To say the least, there have been a couple of setbacks but nothing that was going to deter me from trying to reach this goal. As of last week, we finally cleared our last hurdle before we could start looking to book our trip to Japan….we got my daughter’s passport! Now we have all our documents in order and it’s just a matter of planning our trip.
The original goal of flying First Class roundtrip has since been updated to attempting to fly First Class to Japan and Business Class on the return journey. Again, this is due to the devaluation that I mentioned above. That still leaves us needing roughly 750,000 Singapore Airlines points and as of the beginning of this month (July 2026) we’re within 30,000 points of reaching that milestone. That’s still a tall order, but because we had been waiting for my daughter’s passport to arrive it has given us some time to hold out and earn as much on our credit cards with our everyday spend. Now that it’s here, I’ve started looking at flights! Because we’re thinking to go this fall, another challenge has presented itself, availability of the flights (particularly the class) that I’m aiming for due to how close we are to our travel date. If First Class becomes too hard to book for when we want to go, I’m perfectly happy taking Business Class roundtrip as a consolation prize. While First Class was the goal, the nice thing about doing Business Class for both legs is that it would significantly bring down the points cost of our trip. Why is that significant? We would not be wiping out our entire points balance meaning we wouldn’t have to start saving from zero points for our next big trip and maybe we could consider doing business class for our next trip abroad too.
The Strategy
So, what is the points deployment strategy for our upcoming Japan trip? Well, all of our points that are under Chase Ultimate Rewards or American Express Membership Rewards will be going towards our flights. Then, I have roughly 662,000 Hilton Honors points plus two Hilton Free Night Credits that will cover a good chunk of, if not all our hotel stays while we’re in Tokyo. On top of the free night credits and all the points I have, I plan on taking advantage of Hilton’s 5th night free on redemption stays perk. This should dramatically reduce the points cost of our trip meaning that frees up more of our money for things we do while we’re in Japan. I’ll be honest it is going to be hard to spend all the points since it took so long to accrue them, but I know that you can’t just amass a huge number of points and never use them. Points are meant to be earned and then used. The longer you hold onto them, the more likely you are to face devaluations (like I have) and that means your points won’t go as far as they could have gone had you used them sooner.
Now you may be wondering how we were able to amass so many points since our last Japan trip 3 years ago. We aren’t frivolous spenders and we’ve burned some points (mainly Hilton points) to help with our travels to Europe the last year. A big part of the strategy was making sure to use a credit card to its strengths. A few years back I mainly ran the Chase Sapphire Reserve and the Hilton Honors Surpass cards. I would use the Sapphire Reserve for all our dining and travel purchases, while the Surpass card was used mainly for buying gas, groceries and then as a catch all card. Then about 2 years ago, the American Express Gold Card came on my radar. A big reason for that was because I wanted to take advantage of being able to convert my cashback earned on Rakuten to earning Membership Rewards points instead. You can read my post about that HERE. But in order to do that you have to have a credit card that earns Membership Rewards points as its currency. The Gold Card made sense because it wasn’t as expensive as the Platinum card and it would give me a 4x multiplier on Gas and Groceries. On top of that, the Gold Card and Sapphire Reserve have some overlap in transfer partners that I felt would benefit me and my wife when we travel.
I decided to pull the trigger and was able to secure a 100,000 point sign-up bonus using Google Chromes Incognito mode trick. I hit the spend requirement and got the 100,000 points which was a huge boost to our points savings. After that it was really just continuing to use each card to its strengths. The Gold Card was now used for Groceries and Dining. The Surpass card was used solely for gas and catch all spending. And the Sapphire was used for Travel and Dining (when a vendor didn’t accept Amex). Then last year I added the Chase Ink Unlimited card for my business ventures spending, but it also gave me another catch all option in case I wanted to earn more transferrable points because it earns 1.5 points per dollar at a minimum. For my wife I had her get the Chase Sapphire Preferred which we were able to get a 100,000 point bonus, plus I got another 30,000 points for having my wife use a Rakuten link when she signed up. This was more so my wife had a credit card with no foreign transaction fees when we travel. She still mainly uses her Freedom Unlimited card for most things. My wife also got the entry level Hilton Amex because there was a high sign-up bonus and that way we can create a pool and we can pool points from both of our Hilton Honors accounts.
If It Ain’t Broke Don’t Fix It
For a while now our credit card setup hasn’t changed. It’s just been about going through life as we normally would and choosing to spend money on our smaller trips out of pocket. By doing this, it helped us take advantage of multipliers which helped earn more points toward the bigger trip. There was also a time where I travelled a decent amount for work, and I was able to use my personal cards which gave me tons of points as well. At this point now, we pretty much have a credit card for any type of expense, for the most part, and that means we can earn points towards our travel for just spending money on things we have to spend on anyways to live our lives. Not to get too much into the finances, but this also a benefit because it means we don’t have to set aside as much money from our salaries to go towards travel. In my mind, it’s a way to have our cake and eat it too!
Conclusion
Will I get another credit card? I’m sure I will eventually, but for now I find myself pretty content with how our system works because, like I was mentioning, I pretty much have a funnel for majority of our expenses. If the result of all that is that my family can enjoy great vacations, I’ll always be all for that!
