> Cash tickets on Student Universe for July 25 Hanoi-New York are $700, but on Amex Portal it’s over $1,000.

It’s too late to buy the ticket. Unlike cash tickets, lowest priced award tickets are available in limited quantities. Usually 0-4 seats for business class, and ~20 seats in economy. The remaining seats are priced dynamically, meaning usually much higher. That’s the delta prices you are seeing. (Also delta very rarely makes award tickets available at lowest price).

The best time to buy a July 2024 ticket was between July 2023 and September of 2023. The window of opportunity to grab economy seats is usually longer (sometimes they never run out), but your target date is in the middle of summer, which is when everyone travels. So they run out, and they run out fast.

If you now search for award seats for May 2025-June 2035, you can find:

Hanoi-Taipei-New York EVA Air Economy using 47k Lifemiles+$80 (Lifemiles is an Avianca Airlines points program, and Amex points transfers there)

Hanoi-Tokyo-New York in JAL Economy using 38k American Airlines miles+$64

But seats priced at that range sold out for this summer.

Your last chance is something people call T-14 tickets. Starting 14 days before flight, when airlines feel their airplane is too empty and seats aren’t selling well, they dump the seats into award seat inventory and suddenly you can grab some seats at lowest price. But that may or may not happen for the specific date that you need and it’s not guaranteed.

On the other hand, if you are very flexible with your travel dates (“eh I would prefer to fly on Thursday but I’m okay with flying Wednesday, or Friday, or Saturday, or Tuesday… It’s all good as long as it’s that week” kind of attitude), then a T-14 strategy can yield a decent chance of success. I just ran a search for the week spanning 6/7-6/14/24 and I see the two flights I mentioned above plus a Air France Hanoi-Paris-Newark flight for 35k Air France points plus $210, a Hanoi-Hong Kong-JFK flight in Cathay for same price as JAL above etc.

One last note, you can’t transfer Amex points to American Airlines so the AA examples are meaningless to you. I’m just mentioning them to illustrate the general ideas that I’m talking about.

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Alaska Business approval

Agree with the other comments.

Some side note about value/cpp

“Highest value” could be A) “how do I get the most expensive stuff for the least amount of points” or B) “how do i travel the longest with these points”. That’s.. interesting, because by pursuing A to the max you end up booking super expensive hotels for a lot of points but the “value” is high because its dollar booking cost is even higher.

So you could book a $200 hotel for 10k points,

or you could book a $1,000 hotel for 40k points.

The math says the $1,000 hotel for 40k points is “higher value”, but now you are burning 40k points per night. How short is your trip going to be? Also, 40k in a 5-star hotel is only going to get your their smallest room.. is that worth it? Eh maybe idk..

Theoretical Highest Values

Here are some theoretical highest values:

• 50k+$250 for an Air France US to France business class oneway, transferred during a 20% bonus transfer promo period = 42k MR

• 15k+$0 for a $250/night Hyatt Place/Hyatt Regency 3-4 star hotel (Hyatt doesn’t do transfer bonuses) = 15k UR/night

• 160k+$0 for 5 nights on a $250/night Hilton Hampton Inn 3-4 star hotel. (You’ll need a Hilton credit card for at least Hilton silver status for the 5th night free perk) transferred during a 25% bonus promo = 64k MR for 5 nights. But the Hilton card will come with its own Hilton points sign-up bonus, so you could use that instead.. but that adds more months to your timeline (to meet the SUB spend)

So let’s put together a trip for 2 people:

• 168k MR + $800, transferred to Air France during 20% promo, for round trip business class from the US to Paris

• 64k MR Hilton 25% promo for 5 nights

• 60k UR Hyatt for 4 nights

Or something a bit cheaper for the flight:

• 117k MR + $600 with 20% promo for business oneway and economy oneway, US-Paris

Now, these are theoretical highest values.

What is more likely to actually happen

Most transfer bonuses come around Fall. Some seem to come earlier, and some more than once a year. We don’t know what logic motivates them to run the promos in the schedules they do, but it’s probably related to marketing, supply & demand, etc. What month is it right now? It’s February. You are potentially waiting all the way until October 2024 for some of these transfer bonuses.

And then you have to book a flight using those points. If you get your points in October 2024, maybe you’ll get lucky and find a the business flight at 50k for January or April 2025, or even earlier. Or you won’t get lucky and you’ll only get a flight for September 2025.

But maybe you don’t want to wait that long. You want to go sooner. Or you can’t fly in January, as it’s too cold. You want to travel during summer peak season.

Then you will be traveling for less than the theoretical highest values for your points. And maybe that’s okay. If you have enough points.

Family Pooling

Your points are split between your wife and you. That can be a problem. If you need 160k MR to book a flight, but you have 100k and your wife has 60k, then it’s gonna be complicated.

1. You can each book your ticket separately for the same flight

2. Some airlines allow accounts to pool their points for free. So you can’t pool them on the credit card side, but you can pool them on the airline side. The only airlines that allow this are Air France, British Airways, Air Canada, Jet Blue, and ANA.

   
   

How do you get the employee offer?

From time to time Amex runs employee card promotions for BBP, Biz Gold, and Biz Plat. “Add an employee card for your business card, and spend a minimum of X amount for Yk rewards” is their promo. The latest promo ended recently.

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> If you think $200 is a “measly” amount, why do you care about statement credit clawbacks?

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> We are skeptical that once all credit-card expenses are taken into account, you are not actually saving any money on your expensive business class ticket.

Your surcharge comment is interesting in multiple ways.

First, I’m surprised that major merchants in Australia put a surcharge just for accepting Amex. Second, I’m surprised that the surcharge is so TINY (less than 1%???). Third, it shows that you are not approaching credit card points via the mainstream way at r/churning, which is chasing sign-up bonuses.

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Approved on 1/16 for Alaska Personal hopefully for 75k.

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Using CIC -> Gift Card -> Gift of College -> Student Loan Servicer

Using the Chase Ink Cash in this way nets 10k points for every $2,000 spent, resulting in $59.50 in fees. That’s in addition to the sign-up bonus.

For comparison, if the CIC was used directly through GoC, it would net 2k points for every $2,000 (515×3 + 455) spent, resulting in about $55 in fees. So it’s an extra 24k UR points.

Documenting here how this worked out for me.

As a test, I bought 3x $200 MasterCard Gift Cards from Staples during their no fee period. I haven’t systematically used Gift Cards to pay for things in the past.

I activated them at https://mcgift.giftcardmall.com/. I tried using them without activation and that didn’t work. (Eeek first time trying this)

On Gift of College’s website, there are three ways in which I can make a payment:

1. Under the My Profile tab, after selecting the loan to pay for. “Please select the plan you want to make a contribution to:”. Here, I can make payments to a credit card for up to $500 with a $15 fee (3%). However, the fee doesn’t scale for smaller amounts, and for a $200 payment I’m looking at more than $10 in fees (5%). And it doesn’t let me split a $515 payment over multiple cards. So this option is not optimal for using $200 MasterCard gift cards.
2. Under the “Gift Cards” tab, it lets me buy an online gift card. I buy $194.05, and $5.95 is charged in fees, and it delivers via email. The first one took a minute to deliver, but the second one is taking much longer. Maybe they are manually reviewed. Once they are delivered via email, I get the Gift Code and PIN, which I enter at the GoC website under Profile -> Select Loan -> Redeem Gift Card.
3. The Gift Cards can also be purchased in physical form, to be mailed. Which is unnecessary. It costs the same as #2.

Using the Chase Ink Cash in this way nets 10k points for every $2,000 spent, resulting in $59.50 in fees. That’s in addition to the sign-up bonus.

For comparison, if the CIC was used directly through GoC, it would net 2k points for every $2,000 (515×3 + 455) spent, resulting in about $55 in fees. Or a CIU card would net 3k points. So it’s an extra 24k UR points if the entirety of a $6,000 Chase Ink Cash card minimum spend is met solely through student loan payments. The difference in fees is negligible.

There’s the looming risk of picking up a tampered Visa/MC gift card.. but beyond that risk, this method of payment (instead of option 1 and charging directly to the Ink card) seems worth it.

Lastly, Gift of College takes a few days to pass on transactions to Sallie Mae, which is my private loan servicer. I just hope they don’t mess up and lose transactions because I may have a hard time following with all the amounts being the same.

• $200 on 10/22 -> $200 on 10/23
• $200 and $200 on 11/11 -> shows up as $400 on 11/13
• $200 and $200 on 11/24 -> shows up as $400 on 11/27
• $500+$200+$200 on 11/24 -> $900 on 12/1
• $200 on 12/6 -> $200 on 12/8
• $500 on 12/19 -> $500 on 12/26
• $499 on 12/22 -> $499 on 12/26
• $500 on 12/25 -> on 1/3
• $194 on 1/2 -> on 1/3
• $194.05+$194.05 on 1/2 -> $388.10 on 1/3