Saving $30K+ on the Perfect Spring Break Japan Trip with Amy Fox
All the Hacks: Money, Points & Life
Chris Hutchins
4.8 ⢠1.6K Ratings
đď¸ 29 April 2026
âąď¸ 69 minutes
đď¸ Recording | iTunes | RSS
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| 0:00.0 | After five trips to Japan, I'd somehow never been for cherry blossom season, and the reason |
| 0:05.2 | isn't complicated. That week is exactly when every flight to Japan and most nice hotels |
| 0:10.9 | hit their peak demand, and it's also spring break in the U.S. But we still wanted to try this year, |
| 0:17.8 | and the cost proved that story right, The version of the trip we actually wanted, |
| 0:22.0 | direct business class flights for all four of us, a suite at a nice hotel like the Park Hyatt, |
| 0:27.3 | would have run north of $50,000 for 10 days. Without points, and a budget I don't have, |
| 0:34.0 | it'd mean flying coach, staying at an Airbnb on the outskirts of town, or maybe just |
| 0:38.0 | not going. But I don't live in a world without points because they are the reason trips like |
| 0:43.1 | this are possible. So today I'm joined by my wife Amy and I'll break down exactly how the math |
| 0:48.7 | worked, the mechanics behind finding the flights, the Park Hyatt redemption we had, and what changes when Hyatt's |
| 0:54.9 | rumored devaluation lands, and the other important decisions that quietly carried the entire |
| 1:00.1 | trip. Plus, I'll share more about the custom trip planner I ended up building that acted like |
| 1:05.0 | a local guide on the ground, and a handful of lessons that I think apply to almost any trip you take, |
| 1:10.7 | whether it's Japan or not. |
| 1:12.6 | I'm Chris Hutchins. If you enjoy this episode, leave a comment or share it with a friend. |
| 1:16.7 | And if you want to keep upgrading your money points in life, click follow or subscribe. |
| 1:21.6 | All right. We've been home a week. How are you feeling? |
| 1:24.6 | I feel great. I'm still exhausted. I think it's going to take a few weeks to recover, but it was epic. I'm really glad we took it. |
| 1:32.3 | Yeah. So this is probably our fourth or fifth trip to Japan. Maybe I think I had one more than you did in the books. And it was awesome. In some ways, it was better than every other trip because we got to like live in Japan for a week and we didn't plan that much. And in other ways, we missed out on a lot of the stuff we were used to doing. We did one trip before with kids to Europe, but they were a lot younger. And it was a little more packed than we want. We didn't have the learnings we had. So now this was really it. So I think why don't I start |
| 2:01.5 | and walk through the booking process? Because I think that is applicable to any trip, because the |
| 2:07.6 | way we did this was different than every other trip in that this was one of the first trips |
| 2:13.0 | where we booked everything a year out. I don't think we've ever done that. |
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