[BlackJack]

Would you have paid $18K to fly to Japan though? The "cents per mile" is high but it's better to measure your WTP (willingness to pay).

BTW, you can regularly get west coast to Japan in business class for ~$3-4k/pp. ex. https://goo.gl/flights/BDTu. If you wait for deals, there was Vancouver - Japan/Hong Kong/SE Asia for ~$2k in business class for a while. Business class prices have been consistently dropping transatlantic (TATL) and we're seeing that transpacific (TPAC) too, albeit more slowly.

I think what you did was smart, but there's really no way to continue to get that kind of value from your miles. You could get the other Amex cards (~150k MR?), and other Chase cards (~150k UR?), but hard to repeatedly get big bonuses like that :P

Totally agree though that keeping one or both of those cards is great for the right kind of spend. It's just not like a free trip to Europe every quarter like it used to be.

[willstrafach]

Not sure how much "willingness to pay" makes sense. This is more about taking advantage of money which would otherwise be left on the table. If you aren't going out of your way to spend on cards, and all you need to do is shift spending onto certain cards for certain purchases during the first X months in order to get a nice point bonus, seems like a nice way to get a free vacation.

[dwaltrip]

It isn't accurate to count it as $18k in realized value from cc points if you would have never spent that much on the thing without the points.

The actual realized value is the amount that one would have been willing spend on the thing with their _own_ money, if they didn't have the points.

[bonesinger]

Yes thats true, I conceded that point in another reply to Sleeep. I did look up tickets just now and they are about $6500/person on ANA. I specifically looked up ANA because I wanted to fly on one of the better airlines. The service I got was absolutely fantastic.