A few days ago I was sitting in Kagoshima, a small city in the south of Japan that most points guides pretend doesn’t exist, trying to figure out how to get home to Hong Kong to see my sister-in-law and the kids.
It was a short hop, it should have been simple.
So I did what most people do. I checked the three programs everyone recommends for this part of the world: ANA Mileage Club (ANA’s own program), Air Canada’s Aeroplan, and United MileagePlus. They were the “obvious” names, you see in every listicle and every Facebook group.
Every one of them stung, in one of two ways: either a wild number of points, or an absurd cash surcharge stapled on top. Aeroplan wanted around 52,000 miles for the business cabin I had in mind. United was 45,000 + $41.00 taxes.
ANA’s own program looked lovely at 26,500 miles with $135 in fuel surcharges hanging off it. For one short flight home inside Asia, these were more than double what I’d guessed.
So I checked one more program, the one almost nobody would tell you to touch right now: Avianca LifeMiles. (There’s a real reason nobody’s recommending it these days. I’ll come back to that.)
It was same ANA flight, same Boeing 787 planes flying on same day and time. Booked through LifeMiles, I paid under 18,000 points, and skipped that painful surcharge too. Roughly a third of what the other three programs were asking.
So What Did I Know That They Didn’t?
It wasn’t a secret code nor a glitch. It wasn’t that I had more points than everyone else. It was that I asked a different question than most people ask.
When you’re new to this, the question usually sounds like: “Which airline is best? Which program should I pour all my points into?” And I get it. It feels like there should be one right answer. One card, one airline, one loyalty program to rule them all. Life would be simpler that way.
But here’s what years of expensive mistakes taught me: There is no single best program. There’s only a right program for each trip.
The people who actually get their families across Asia on points don’t have a favorite. They have a way of choosing. They look at the route, the cabins, and the family, and then they match the right points to the right job.
Over the years I’ve collected a small stable of programs: Alaska Atmos, American Airlines AAdventage, and this year, now that I have Star Alliance Gold status, Avianca and its partners too. I’m not loyal to any of them. Each one just happens to be the best tool for a different kind of trip. On this trip, the program that looked “worst” on paper was the perfect choice. On the next one it might be completely wrong, and I’ll reach for something else without a second thought.
Even my own habits keep shifting. For years, my reflex for flying Japan Airlines around the region was American or Alaska. That was simply what I did. This time, with Star Alliance Gold in my pocket, the right answer lived somewhere else entirely. I ask the question fresh every trip.
That move, from “which program is best?” to “which program is right for this?”, is the single biggest thing separating the people who dream about these trips from the people who take them.
Now, About LifeMiles Getting Worse
I said I’d come back to this, and I want to be straight with you: LifeMiles isn’t perfect, and right now it’s slipping.
If you paid for a LifeMiles+ subscription (their Basic tier or higher), one of the best perks was free cancellation. Book an award seat, change your mind, get your miles back at no cost. For a family, that is everything. Kids get sick. Dates move. Someone can’t make it in the end. Being able to cancel without losing a thing is often the only reason you feel safe booking early, instead of waiting, anxious, until the last possible minute.
On June 26, 2026, they quietly changed the rules. Anyone who subscribes from that date forward no longer gets free change and ancellation. There was no announcement. It simply appeared in the fine print. I signed up before the change, so I keep the perk, but only for about another tweleve months.
So why am I still telling you LifeMiles was the right call?
Because “right for this trip” was never the same as “perfect forever.” It was the best tool for getting my family home from Kagoshima, cancellation perk or not. When my window closes next year, I’ll look again, and I may well move on. That is exactly what having a system, instead of a favorite, is for.
Photo Credit: Maria Fung
The Four Decisions
Once I stopped chasing “the best program” and started running a system, everything got less overwhelming and become more doable.
I call the system A.S.I.A., and it’s four pillars of decisions, made in order:
A : Assess your family priorities. (Who needs to sit together? Comfort, or the lowest points?)
S : Select the right airlines and seats. (Premium seats for a family of five are a completely different game.)
I : Intentionally use your points. (Assign the right points to the right job. This is the one that saved me on the Kagoshima trip.)
A : Act with timing and flexibility. (Routes, cabins, and a willingness to fly a little differently.)
I’m not going to walk through how I run each one here. That’s a whole series of lessons on its own, and the reason I paid a third of the price on that Kagoshima booking deserves more than a rushed paragraph. But I wanted you to at least see the shape of it. Because the moment you realize family award travel was never one decision, but four, it stops feeling like something only “points people” get to do.
Three Things to Take With You
- There’s no single “best” program. The right one depends on the route, the cabins, and who you’re flying with. Loyalty to one program is usually what makes you overpay.
- The “obvious” pick isn’t always the smart one. Sometimes the program everyone tells you to quit is the best tool for a specific trip. Don’t hand your decision to a listicle.
- Points aren’t the bottleneck. The decision is. The skill isn’t collecting more points. It’s knowing there’s always more than one way to spend the ones you already have.
Where I’m Teaching All of It
That Kagoshima trip? I’m home now. Sister-in-law, kids, the whole loud wonderful lot of them. The flight cost me almost nothing, because I asked the right question.
Here’s what I want to be straight with you about: SUMMER ASIA STRATEGY LABS
You can learn this the way I did: a few years of expensive mistakes, miles poured into the wrong programs, and more than one trip that quietly never happened because I couldn’t make the points work in time. That road is still open to you. It’s just slow. And it doesn’t only cost miles, it costs the trips you don’t take while you’re figuring it out.
Or you let me hand it to you in eight evenings.
That’s the Summer Asia Strategy Lab: every piece of A.S.I.A., live, one evening a week, no spreadsheet PhD required. The cards that actually earn Asia-Pacific travel. The “phantom seat” problem almost nobody warns you about. Where a family of five actually sleeps. And how I plan real trips to Japan, Korea, Hong Kong, and Vietnam, start to finish, on points.
Early-bird pricing ends July 15. After that it goes from $224 to $464.
If a trip like Seoul with your family next summer is real to you, the moment to start is now, not after another year slips by.
[ Claim my early-bird seat before July 15 → ]
It’s learnable. I promise. Come let me show you.
~~ Maria
Leave a Reply