Matt and I have been married for just over six months now, after our destination wedding in Catalunya in late August 2024. And we’ve recently been working on planning our honeymoon trip to Asia, which we’re going to take for our one-year anniversary! So I wanted to share the story of how credit card points and a little bit of strategy helped us book two round-trip tickets from Madrid to Tokyo for a total of $457.
I don’t consider myself a credit card points hacker or expert by any means. Actually, despite the amount of travel I was doing from the time I was about 18, I didn’t get my first travel credit card until I was nearly 30. We’ve never flown first class, business class, or even premium economy, and we don’t have status with any airlines to get us anything special.
But our CapitalOne Venture X credit card, which we opened when we had to unexpectedly spend $10,088 on a new HVAC system last summer, had been accumulating points ever since. So we decided it was finally time to put those points to good use.
Searching for Flights to Asia
“Travel Tuesday” is a marketing moniker for the Tuesday after Thanksgiving. Allegedly, it’s a great time to find deals on travel specifically, similar to the ideas behind Black Friday and Cyber Monday. I’m not sure whether that’s really the case, or if airlines just hike up their prices in the lead-up so it can look like there was a big drop on Travel Tuesday. Either way, this all took place on Travel Tuesday because I figured it didn’t hurt to try.
For our honeymoon, we are going to visit Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea. We knew we were going to fly from Spain, so I was looking for round-trip flights from Madrid to Tokyo or Seoul, since we didn’t have anything else booked at that point and were open to starting/ending our trip in any city.
I started by searching Google Flights to see which airline carriers even offered flights between Madrid and Tokyo/Seoul, and what the general price range was for the flights. Then, I had to figure out which airlines were points-transfer partners with CapitalOne.
Turkish Airlines and CapitalOne Partnership
The first flight that caught my eye was Turkish Airlines, specifically because our friend Kelan told us they were his favorite airline. I’d never flown with them before, so I was kind of excited for the idea to try them out. In points, it was 75,000 points/miles each way, per person.
While we didn’t have any Turkish Airlines miles, I knew that CapitalOne was a transfer partner, so I went to look at the conversion.
Turns out, it was a 1:1 transfer, meaning we would need 300,000 miles for the trip, for two people. But we only had 125,000 miles. No Turkish Airlines flights for us.
Air France and CapitalOne Partnership
The next airline I started investigating was Air France. With their Flying Blue rewards program — on the same exact dates I’d put in for Turkish Airlines — I found flights for about 28,500 miles per person, each way. For a total of 113,000 miles for two people, round trip!
I was worried that a flight that “cheap,” especially compared to the Turkish Airlines flights, would have a ton of connections and long layovers. But this wasn’t the case — it was Madrid to Tokyo with one short layover in Paris each way, both with a travel time of under 21 hours. That’s less time than we spent traveling to St. Louis last weekend from Alicante. 😅
With CapitalOne and Air France/Flying Blue’s partnership, which is also a 1:1 transfer, we were able to easily transfer exactly 113,000 miles from CapitalOne into my new Flying Blue rewards account. They appeared in my account within a matter of minutes, and then I used them to complete the transaction.
Of course, we still had to pay airline taxes and fees, which isn’t possible to cover with points. So that was an additional cost of about $229 per person, but there was no avoiding that. But to get two round-trip tickets to Tokyo for less than $500… we really can’t complain. 🙂
Does Travel Tuesday Really Have Good Flight Deals?
It was Travel Tuesday when I booked these tickets — but the same fares were still available a few days later when I was testing it out. So I’m not convinced that Travel Tuesday was responsible for our great deal. I don’t think it hurt, though!
The Secret to Booking Reward Travel with Air France/Flying Blue/KLM Calendar
I found the Air France/Flying Blue website very finicky when it came to finding and booking these flights. It’s like one minute I would find the great deal that we ended up booking, and the next second (when I didn’t immediately pounce on booking, or when I went to CapitalOne to do the points transfer), it would be another price, several thousand points more expensive.
It kept going back and forth, no matter whether we cleared our browser cookies, used a VPN, used incognito mode, used Matt’s computer instead of mine, etc. So it was pretty stressful for a few hours until we actually got it booked.
Also, at some point, I found a great fare calendar on the Air France website that showed which dates had the lowest prices, which was super convenient since our travel dates were flexible. But then I couldn’t get back to it when I wanted it. I had to do some Googling to find a hack on how to get back to the Air France calendar.
First, create a Flying Blue account if you don’t already have one, and then login to your account on the Air France website. Put in your origin and destination.
Then, there are two possible things you’ll need to do. In the date field, either go to the very last available date (typically around a year from today’s date). If it works, it will show you flights for that date, but with the months listed in tabs across the top. You can click on the months to bring up the full-size calendar.
If that doesn’t work, then try putting in no date instead. (That’s what worked for me just now.) That should bring you the full reward travel calendar.
Book Your Reward Travel With CapitalOne
CapitalOne VentureX: Apply here
CapitalOne Venture X Benefits: Learn more
Have you ever used credit card points or airline points to book a major trip? What questions do you have? Let me know in the comments!
-Cathy
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