700,000 Points. Not Going.
Seven people, Seoul, and a door that closed while he was still saving.
A friend of mine wrote to me last week. I’ve changed his details, but the numbers are his.
Family of seven. Seoul, late June 2027. Business class, lie-flat, no eye-watering fees. He has 700,000 points across Chase and Amex. He and his wife are both working sign-up bonuses to build more. He is planning almost a full year out.
I want to say this plainly before anything else: he is doing everything the award travel community tells him to do.
His question was simple. Should he branch into Capital One and Citi, or is it too late to bother?
Here’s what happened when I actually ran his numbers.
The Multiplication Problem
United operates US to Seoul Incheon at 100,000 miles per person for business class at the saver level.
Seven people. 700,000 miles.
That is his entire portfolio. One direction. No return. No taxes. No margin.
Most solo travelers never meet this arithmetic, because two seats hides it. Seven seats makes it brutal and immediate. And this is the part I wish more people understood about family award travel: it is not the same problem scaled up. It is a different problem.
The Doors, One At A Time
Air Canada Aeroplan
The traditional family workaround, because United business awards used to sit around 75,000 points one way. But Aeroplan moved United awards to dynamic pricing in 2025. Those same seats now land between 85,000 and 100,000. With a transfer bonus, call it 79,000 a person, one way.
The door narrowed while he was saving. Nobody sent him a note about it.
British Airways Avios
The other way is through Japan. Avios can price remarkably low when a transfer bonus lands. But realistically, for a family this size on those flights, you are looking at economy. To put seven people on Japan Airlines metal he needs JAL miles, and JAL’s transferable partners are Capital One, Bilt and Rove.
He holds none of them.
United MileagePlus
United is the quiet dark horse here. A co-brand card meaningfully lowers his cost, roughly 85,000 to 90,000 a seat rather than 100,000. Across seven passengers that is a real saving, and United does release multiple business seats on this route. I have watched it happen more than once.
Of everything on his list, this is the one that is actually reachable from where he stands today.
And Then The Door That Would Have Solved It
EVA Air prices flat. It does not care whether you are flying to Taipei, Seoul, or elsewhere in North or Southeast Asia. From the US West Coast, business is 75,000. From the East Coast, 80,000.
Seven people at 80,000 is 560,000 miles.
He would finish with 140,000 to spare. Room for taxes. Room for a return. Room to breathe.
And EVA is one of the few carriers that reliably protects multiple business seats for its own members through school-break season. The partner programs often only see that space at the last possible moment, which is useless when you are planning a family trip.
So the answer exists.
It is simply not available to him. EVA does not run on Chase or Amex. He has the number. He has the wrong currency. The 700,000 points sitting in his account cannot buy a single one of those seats.
So he would have to build the right currency from scratch. And that is when I looked at the calendar.
Then I Looked At The Calendar
Today is July 14th, 2026. His trip is late June 2027.
That sounds like a year of runway. It isn’t.
Award space does not appear when you are ready to book it. It appears on a morning the airline chooses, and every Asian carrier chooses its own. Cathay, EVA, ANA, JAL. They are not the same date. None of them are printed on any calendar he is looking at.
I pulled up his departure date and checked it against when his airline opens.
Then I checked it again, because I did not want it to be true.
His window opened last week.
He did not miss it by eighteen months. He missed it by days. And here is the part that has stayed with me: he is not going to find out.
He will keep searching. Next month, the month after, at eleven at night with the laptop on his knees after everyone has gone to bed. He will see nothing, over and over, and he will slowly conclude that there was never any space for a family of seven. That it can’t be done. That the people who pull this off must know something he doesn’t, or have money he doesn’t.
The seats were there. For a morning. And he was writing me an email asking whether it was worth branching out at all.
Award release runs on the airline’s calendar, not yours. The window opens on a date you do not choose. And if your points are not already sitting in the right program on that morning, the seats existed and you simply were not there.
For a solo traveler that is an inconvenience. Shift a week, try again. For a family of seven with a fixed school break, it is the whole trip.
The Thing The Community Consistently Under-Teaches
We argue endlessly about which currency is best, as though the answer were a fixed property of the currency.
It isn’t. The right currency is a function of your departure date. A program that would have been the obvious answer eighteen months ago can be strictly unreachable today, not because the seats are gone, but because the earning window closed while you were still comparing award charts.
Points were never the only scarce resource in this story. Time is. And nobody sends you a reminder when your window opens.
A Points Health Check: Scoring The Portfolio
When I look at a family’s points setup, I score it the same way every time. Five questions, one to five each.
1. Flexible points. Can your points move to more than one airline?
2. Airline match. Do your points work with the airlines that fly your route, at your family size?
3. Enough for the family. Can this fund three, four, six seats, not one?
4. Backup options. If Plan A dies, is there a Plan B?
5. Simplicity. Can you actually manage this?
Twenty-five available. Now score him.
Flexible points: 5. Chase and Amex are genuinely flexible. He got this part right, and he should get credit for it.
Airline match: 1. His currencies do not reach the programs that seat seven people to Korea.
Enough for the family: 1. 700,000 looked like a lot, until we multiplied by seven.
Backup options: 1. There is no Plan B. There is barely a Plan A.
Simplicity: 5. A very tidy setup. Tidy, and stuck.
Thirteen out of twenty-five.
He has more points than almost anyone reading this. Thirteen. That gap, between a large balance and a low score, is the entire point. He does not have a points problem. He has a portfolio with a single point of failure and a trip that cannot move, because school breaks do not move.
It takes about two minutes to score yourself. I would rather you did that than kept reading.
The Cruel Part
The exact thing he is afraid of is the only thing that could have saved him.
He is afraid to open cards outside Chase and Amex. Opening cards outside Chase and Amex was precisely the move, eighteen months ago, so the points would have been sitting there, ready, on the morning his window opened.
I know that fear from the inside.
When I moved to the States, everyone said Chase is gold, protect your 5/24. So I listened. Sapphire Preferred, Ink, Boundless. I was a very good student. I was proud of how careful I was being.
Then winter break came. I sat down to book four ANA business seats for my family, the trip I had been building toward the whole time, and every one of those loyal, carefully earned points was useless to me. Not short. Not almost. Useless. Wrong currency, wrong airline, and a departure date that could not move because my children had school.
I had done everything the internet told me to do, and I still was not going.
I was not behind. I was invisible. The same way I was invisible to the credit system when I first arrived here, and my very first credit card application, a Costco Citi card, came back declined, and I sat on the edge of the bed holding the letter, trying to work out what was wrong with me.
Being careful is what kept me invisible.
So What Does He Do?
There are two honest roads here, and I want to be straight with you: both of them are right.
1.Take United. Fly in 2027.
Book what is genuinely reachable. A co-brand brings him to roughly 85,000 to 90,000 a seat, and United does release multiple business seats on this route. It is not the trip he pictured. But seven people are on the same plane, together, up front, next June.
2.Build properly. Fly in 2028.
He builds the currencies that actually reach the airlines he needs, gets his accounts ready before he needs them, and next cycle he is standing at the window on the morning it opens, with points to spare. He gets the trip he actually wanted. He just does not get it next summer.
Here is the part I cannot do from where I am sitting: I cannot tell you which one is his.
Not because I am holding out on you. Because the answer is not in a transfer chart. It is in his family.
Would they wait a year for the better trip, or is next summer the summer?
Is there a grandparent on this trip who should not be asked to wait?
A teenager who will be at university by 2028 and will not come?
Would they split cabins to make it work?
Are all seven genuinely flying business, or is that an assumption nobody has said out loud yet?
He wrote to me about currencies. But currencies are the third question, not the first. He skipped straight past what is my family actually willing to trade, and that is precisely why he arrived at the wrong question about earning.
This Is What The Summer Asia Strategy Lab Is
Week 1 was the cards. The ones that actually earn Asia-Pacific award seats, and the ones quietly keeping your family in economy. That one has run.
Week 2 is Phantom Awards: the seats you can see, chase, and never actually book. Wednesday July 22, live.
Come to Week 2 live and it is yours. July 22 is also the last day for early bird on the full eight-week Lab. Same date, honestly. I did not plan that, but it does mean if you have been waiting to decide, Wednesday decides it.
P.S. If you are sitting on a pile of points and a trip you cannot seem to book, hit reply and tell me the number, the destination, and the month. This comes straight to me and I read every one. That is exactly how this post happened, and honestly, I would rather find your window early than write about it afterwards.
Talk soon,
Maria
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