721.956 points, 12x Free Night Certificates, 240,000 Alaska Miles and $152.96 out of pocket.

Flights | Japan Airlines Business Class Rocks!

Japan is without a doubt the hottest destination in 2023.

Normally, an April and May timeframe would be the optimal time to travel for the cherry blossom season, but due to the insane demand that came after the country’s reopening, all award bookings were close to zero and hotel prices were already reflecting that very speculative demand. Luckily, March is an offseason for flights to Japan, as well as off-peak season for hotels in Japan.

This may very well be my last time in Japan for a while, and I wanted to bring my parents along, as our last family trip together in Japan was back in 2016. 8 years later, we’re excited to head back as as family once more!

To begin this planning journey, I had use a plethora of AA miles to book flights back to Asia via Japan Airlines or Cathay Pacific. While the AA award system has moved towards a fluctuating award type of system, Alaska Airlines continues to serve some amazing award redemption on their partner metal. Because Alaska Airlines joined Oneworld officially back on March 31st, 2021, that meant their miles could be redeemed across a series of flights across Asia. And thus, this brings me to the first part of the planning: flights.

My wife and I had accumulated a wealth of Alaska miles that had paid for some portion of our recent trip Seoul, Korea (you can read the travel report here!). Initially, we were stocking up for the reopening of Japan and Taiwan back in 2020 and 2021. To that end, I began my search for two business class tickets from SFO to HND for March 2023, and voila, a series of 60,000 AS mile tickets showed up across their award system. Almost without hesitation, I grabbed two JAL business class tickets for a total cost of 120,000 miles and $36.20 USD for award fees for our flight to Japan.

If you want to know why this flight award game is so fun, look no further than the cash price that I would have had to pay for me and wife: the cash price at time of writing was an absurd $13,458.00 USD! That meant I was getting an insane value out of our miles!

For the return flight, I stuck with using Alaska Miles and found openings for 2 business class seats on Japan Airlines (JL002) once again on March 18th, 2023. Similar to the first flight, the total cost for two business class tickets was 120,000 miles and $116.76 USD. I ran a search on the cash price for 2 tickets on Japan Airlines for business class and came away feeling super successful. You can see that the cash price for the flight is $12,081.00 USD. Again, another beautiful booking for the points to cash price ratio, and another reason why it’s great to amass certain mileage points.

To assume fairness, I utilized the round trip filter from Google Flights to see if the price would drop - the net cost, if paid in cash, would still have been an astounding amount of $22,734.00 USD!

Honestly, I’m a bit shocked at the extreme cash price that one would pay for a roundtrip business class ticket on Japan Airlines - it’s the same level as First Class on Japan Airlines! I saved a whopping $22,581.04 USD for a complete business class flight to Japan and back!

I don’t even want to know what First Class would be…

In short, we spent: 240,000 Alaska Miles + $152.96 for total cash value of $22,734.00!

Hotels | Hyatts Galore

Intercontinental Tokyo Bay

Hotels are usually easier to book, but given that I have to book two rooms for each hotel, this was gonna take a bit more work upfront.

For our first two nights, we decided to stay in Tokyo to offset any jet lag and take the time to explore the nearby gardens and palaces. Since the four of us all had some free IHG certificates that were expiring 12/31/22, we decided to book the Intercontinental Tokyo Bay for March 6th to 8th. Sadly, IHG has cunningly moved a lot of Intercontinental hotels above the 40,000 points threshold by 1000 points (ARGH), which made redeeming for the free night certificate a lot harder than before. However, it’s still a steal to have a 5 star hotel booked for free for the four of us!

As a IHG Diamond Ambassador member, we would be getting free breakfast for the two nights under my name, and we’ll see if we could work something out with the free nights on my parent’s certificates. I don’t expect any glamour or free breakfast, but we’ll see if we get lucky for those nights!

Based on my history with upgrades, I am assuming we may be booked into the 1 King Bed Classic Bay View High Floor, which is around 43,468 yen per night, or $315.99 dollars. With that being said, our 4 free night certificates would net us around $1,263.95 dollars, which I think is a great return. It’s not like the Golden Years of redeeming some ridiculous Intercontinental hotels like the Bora Bora Resort, the Maldives or the London Park Lane, but it’s still pretty good for our timeframe!

Hyatt Place Kyoto

After two days in Tokyo and getting accustomed to the timezone, we aim to head off to Kyoto and plan on visiting all the famed shrines and beautiful landscapes that the city has to offer. Normally, if it was just me and my wife, I would prioritize the Park Hyatt Kyoto or the Hyatt Regency Kyoto while leveraging the suite upgrade. However, given that we had a plethora of Hyatt Free night certificates and that the Park Hyatt made it literally impossible to book two rooms during timeframe, I opted to try out the newly opened Hyatt Place Kyoto.

Early reviews were glowing and the location made it a prime candidate for our group of 4 to travel around the vicinity with ease. Rates were at a reasonable $145 a night so we came out on top with our certificates. I estimate that we probably would end up with either a 1 King Garden View or if we’re lucky a 1 King Premier. Given that the vacancy rate was pretty low during my booking, I think we’re gonna get a bit more value of our free nights when the time arrives!

ROKU Kyoto, LXR Hotels & Resorts

After spending a few days at the Hyatt Place Kyoto, we’ll be heading to the ROKU Kyoto, a LXR Hotel and Resorts luxury property. We had originally booked for Kyoto since 2021 and kept moving this reservation around until we firmly committed to flying to Japan. Unfortunately for us, we weren’t able to keep the 95,000 points per night and ended up shelling out 110,000 Hilton points per night, which costed me 440,000 total points for two nights with two rooms. Nevertheless, I’m excited as a Hilton Diamond member and look forward to seeing how well they treat Diamonds here.

Based on past experiences, I’m thinking our rooms will be at least leveled up to the Premier Deluxe Room King, which would be around 113,190 yen, or $882.69 dollars per night. So assuming both rooms are upgraded, we would be seeing value hovering around $4,040.76 dollars for our stay! I think the 440,000 Hilton points suddenly seem like a good bargain along with the added benefits and comps one would get as a Diamond member.

Hyatt Regency Hakone

Hakone has always been on my to-visit list and this time around, we’ll be able to check it out together as a family. Hakone is famous for their hot springs, insane landscape views for photographer and the famous Mt. Fuji backdrop. The Hyatt Regency Hakone Resort and Spa is considered one of the best hotels around the Hakone National Park area, which also caters to folks like us who are looking to relax in the hot springs, dense forests and view scenic lakes across the beautiful backdrops.

For this trip, we opted to pay 50,000 Hyatt points for each room, since the cash rate was around $600 for two nights, which we thought was reasonable, considering that we were gonna leverage my Hyatt Globalist status for breakfast, late checkout and club lounges. I’ve heard great things about the hotel itself and the breakfast, so this is one hotel that I’m really looking forward to.

Hyatt Regency Tokyo Bay

After resting up in Hakone, we’re gonna head back to Tokyo for our final leg of the trip.

Tokyo Disneyland and Sea has been a place that we’ve wanted to visit for a long time, and now that we’ve visited almost every place in Tokyo, we could gladly book a hotel that is a bit further away from everything in Tokyo. Needless so say, we gladly threw as many free night certificates from Hyatt for our two nights. Here, with a cash price of $121, I wouldn’t necessarily have utilized the free night certificates, but because their expiration dates were all coming up, we decided to use them all.

I do have a bunch of Club Access Lounge certificates that I’m looking to apply for these rooms, so in theory we would also be getting a bunch of perks like free breakfast, snacks and happy hour during our stay here.

The Prince Gallery Tokyo Kiocho

Finally, on the last part of our Japan trip, we decided to leverage some of our Amex points that we had obtained over the last two years. Tokyo luxury hotels in March to May tend to be in the high hundreds to low thousands of dollars per night, and our last two nights were no exception. Prices ranged from $800 to $1,600 and as much as I wanted to stay at the Park Hyatt Tokyo or the Andaz Tokyo, the award bookings were hard to come by for two rooms, as well as using any suite upgrades.

I decided to check out Amex’s Fine Hotels and Resorts program and see if there were any properties that were worth its weight in points. The program actually matches its point to the cash price of the hotels, sometimes at a discounted rate, which meant we could get more value out of the points in certain situations. Interestingly enough, I noted that the Prince Gallery Tokyo Kiocho, an aspirational property from Marriott was asking for 35,900 Amex Points per night - a stark contrast to the 80,000 or 120,000 points for properties like the Four Seasons or Conrad Tokyo.

At the time of booking, the cash price of these rooms were $1,076.00 USD for two nights, which meant that even paying 90,878 Amex points, I would still be ahead due to the benefits that the FHR program provides:

Room Upgrade on Arrival (usually a hit)
Daily Breakfast for Two (I eat for three at times so this is a win)
Guaranteed checkout at 4pm (this is super useful since our flight is at night)
Noon Check-in (also not really a factor)
Complimentary Wifi (come on…)
$100 USD Property Credit (super valuable - about to splurge on this bad boy)

So in reality we’re probably ahead by $400 USD in reality per room, which is a pretty good chunk of money.

So, in summary - for our hotels:

Intercontinental Tokyo Bay: 4x IHG Free Night Certificates
Hyatt Place Kyoto: 4x Hyatt Category 1-4 Free Night Certificates
ROKU Kyoto, a LXR Collection: 440,000 Hilton Points
Hyatt Regency Hakone: 100,000 Hyatt Points
Hyatt Regency Tokyo Bay: 4x Hyatt Category 1-4 Free Night Certificates
The Prince Gallery Tokyo Kiocho, a Luxury Collection: 181,956 Amex Points through Fine Hotels and Resorts

As complex and complicated as this trip was to plan, I’m really excited about heading back to Japan and spending basically close to nothing for all the flights and hotels. It was really fun using all the certificates and finding award availability for hotels that could all of us - it’s not the most luxurious of certain travel reports but I’m really excited about the potential upgrades and surprises we will be getting! Stay tuned!