How I used Credit Card Points To Save $10,000 to Fly Business Class to Southeast Asia

This title is clickbait, in the sense that I would never actually pay $10k out of pocket for a flight. But that’s why I love the points game: they let me have these experiences I’d never pay cash for. Plus, what would the fun be if you didn’t have to work for this a little bit? But these flights in reality would have cost well above $10,000, and in this post I’ll show you how you can use your credit card points to snag these awesome travel deals to start your vacations in style.

Introduction: Where and Which Airlines I Flew

For my first greater-than-one-week vacation since college, I decided I was going to go on a solo trip and try and burn through a chunk of the credit card points I had amassed in the past 3 years of working but not getting the opportunity (PTO) to use them.

My goal was to travel to Southeast Asia, but wasn’t too picky on where I wanted to go specifically. The nice part of awards travel for the indecisive is that award availability can make the decision for you in terms of where you end up – at least your airport of entry (and exit).

I set an alert (more on this later) and pretty quickly found a great business class award option to Hanoi from NYC (Newark) on Air France via Paris (CDG). The first segment was on Air France’s new A350 business class suite, and second was on Vietnam Airlines business class.

I of course needed to return home after that and was able to find a great deal on Finnair that I booked via Alaska Airlines. My final itinerary looked like this (all in business class):

2/15 Air France 63: EWR – CDG (4:30pm > 5:15am +1)

2/16 Vietnam Airlines 18: CDG – HAN (1:10pm > 6:30am +1)

2/27 Finnair 151: HKT – HEL (10:45am > 6:30pm)

2/28 Finnair 15: HEL – JFK (4:55pm > 7:05pm)

Here’s the great circle map of my flights:

All in all, these flights totaled 18,630 miles. The circumference of Earth is 24,901 miles, so these long hauls were almost putting me at one lap around the planet.

Here’s what you’ll find in this post:

How Much I Paid for These Flights

In total, I paid 164,000 points and $514 for the four long-haul business class flights. The fees definitely weren’t cheap, but this was almost entirely driven by Air France charging moderate surcharges on business class redemptions.

The exact breakdown of this for each booking is as follows:

EWR – CDG – HAN (Air France & Vietnam Airlines, All Business Class)

Price: 79,000 Amex Points transferred to Air France (20% Transfer Bonus at the Time): 95,000 Air France FlyingBlue Miles and $447 in taxes and fees.

Note Air France currently (as of March 2025) currently nerfed their FF program with higher rates across the board and basically no saver availability, but hopefully this is temporary…

I earned these Amex points via my Amex Platinum sign-up bonus – see my post here for deciding if that card is worth it to you.

HKT – HEL – JFK (Finnair, All Business Class):

Price: 85,000 Amex Points transferred to Alaska (via Hawaiian) and $67 in taxes and fees

These flights would have been absurdly expensive if I had paid cash. Checking google flights, these exact flights together would have totaled over well over $10,000 choosing random dates off peak in May:

Flight reviews to come, but Air France and Finnair in specific were fantastic (I was glad I got to try out Vietnam Airlines, though. But not sure I’d fly them again by choice). I’ve tried Air France’s old business class product but I chose this flight specifically to try out their new A350 business class suite. I lucked out and was able to choose one of the bulkhead seats with an insane amount of legroom.

I also specifically chose Finnair to try out their unique (and surprisingly comfortable) no-recline business class seat (dubbed “AirLounge”).

How I Found These Flights

Finding these flights was very straightforward. I used Roame to set alerts for award availability to / from NYC and Southeast Asia (you can set regional alerts on Roame to maximize your chances of getting a hit). Within 2 weeks, I got email alerts on the Air France flight (EWR > CDG > HAN) and Alaska flight (HKT – HEL – JFK).

Note I have no relationship with Roame, I just like their alert feature. Seats.aero is also good, but I’d shop around depending on your needs for booking award flights.

I double checked the inventory was real on the Air France and Alaska (Finnair) website before transferring. Once I confirmed the availability was still there, I immediately transferred my points. Amex luckily transfers to FlyingBlue and Hawaiian (Alaska) pretty much instantly, and then I immediately booked the flights.

Stay tuned for the flight and trip reviews!