ISAAC Interview: My Decade with Mileage Points, a Player's Growth and Transformation

About ISAAC

We actually interviewed ISAAC six years ago on August 10, 2019. At that time, he already had a serious understanding of miles. To be blunt, the routes he had completed back then were more extensive than the routes I have flown up to now.

• Expert Interview (4): Isaac

We have stayed in touch intermittently over the years, often discussing credit cards. Only in the last few months did I realize he still has a high passion for award tickets, and his skills have improved by leaps and bounds. He has even built a team focused on booking business class and first class!

His team is made up of several experienced students with the same philosophy, spread across multiple time zones worldwide, providing travel support around the clock. Within the team, travel requests for members and their families are prioritized first so everyone can personally experience the fun and value of award ticket redemption. They have already redeemed international business and first class for a total of 250 families, covering almost all major airlines and key routes.

• Student S has successfully redeemed several difficult business and first class tickets for his elders at home on ANA and Cathay Pacific.
• In the last two years, Student Y has also flown family members in business and first class on multiple airlines, including Delta, AA, and ANA.
• Student V’s most impressive example was swapping out six business-class seats on the same flight for his family in one go.

So we are going to interview ISAAC again and see what he has to say after all these years.

1. How have the credit card and travel-rewards ecosystem and playbook changed compared to a few years ago?

Yes, the change has been huge. When I first got into this in 2014, the entire game and ecosystem were completely different from now.

Back then, the biggest realization was: airline award tickets were not that hard to book. There were already plenty of trans-Pacific flights, and business class award seats were abundant. I had once booked four round-trip business tickets for my family on ICN-JFK, and used AA points to book four Qatar Airways Qsuites business seats to the Maldives; I also helped many friends redeem countless high-quality award tickets. At that time, you didn’t need to plan very early—checking availability and issuing tickets one to two weeks before departure was more than enough. Even with fully manual award searches, you could still handle travel plans.

But the problem then was this: points were truly hard to accumulate. Channels were limited, and you could mainly rely on limited sign-up bonuses and regular spending. If you did not “engineer spend,” you were always short on points.

Then came the pandemic—everything’s dividing line.

From 2020 onward, we entered the “points super-inflation era.” During the pandemic, major banks rolled out back-to-back record-high sign-up bonuses, causing the overall points supply to surge. For example: in 2018, the AMEX Gold sign-up bonus was 60,000 points; now it is 100,000. Platinum used to require tricks to get 60,000–80,000 points, but now you can get 175,000 points with normal spending.

At that time, I urged every friend I could persuade to grab the historic opportunity during the pandemic. For example, one friend in one go secured the AMEX Platinum 150,000-point bonus plus a 20x boost promotion, instantly earning 650,000 Membership Rewards points.

I did the same myself. On Thanksgiving 2021, Amex ran a promotion for five times points on all spend. A few of my students put through $200,000 in tuition-related spend, and I suddenly accumulated well over a million points.

Before the pandemic, my family’s points balance had never exceeded 1,000,000, but after the pandemic ended, I found that I had already amassed 12,000,000 points, and later I even surpassed 20,000,000 points, achieving family travel freedom in one jump.

However, after supply exploded, redemption difficulty also increased dramatically. During the pandemic, routes were reduced, especially U.S.-China direct routes, and two-cabin seats dropped sharply. Saver seats that used to be easy to get became rare and valuable. If any airline were still releasing tickets at pre-pandemic levels, it would be a goldmine for us—so everyone tightened up.

Take Cathay Pacific as an example. They used to be the “conscience pick” for trans-Pacific award tickets. Before the pandemic, it was common for me to check availability in the morning and fly that same night; searching IAD/EWR/JFK–HKG could often yield nine business seats. After March 2023, that pattern disappeared. Nowadays, their long-haul routes usually offer at most 2 J and 2 F seats—far less generous than before.

Cathay is not the only one. Points tickets on China carrier U.S.-China routes are almost zero, except for occasional bug seats. U.S. carriers are similar—UA once had 35,000-milepoint Saver seats on PVG-SFO a few times, and I helped friends secure some too, but after two rounds of devaluation there is basically no real highlight left. AA also offered a few 70,000 business seats on SHA-DFW before the end of September 2024, but those are no longer seen now.

Actually, shortly after the pandemic ended in 2023, there was a brief “short golden period”: cash fares surged, but award prices had not adjusted yet, so many redemptions were extremely good value. I took advantage of this window and helped many people secure high-value trans-Pacific business class tickets, such as exchanging 80,000 ANA points for round-trip business between New York and Shanghai, which was incredibly good value.

In today’s points world, information evolves too quickly, and it is very hard for beginners to get started. For example, two devaluations by United caught Ultimate Rewards users off guard, and Air Canada and Virgin Atlantic later blocked ANA as well. Simple redemption routes got shut down one by one. Many people ask me whether a simple strategy can solve complicated redemption problems. I can only say: no miracles, only a system. Without a structured setup, experience accumulation, and a points cushion, you end up like a headless fly being swept around by information overload.

More realistically, a normal family only travels back home one or two times a year. You have to ask: is it worth building a huge points system for that? That alone is a difficult decision.

2. After playing cards and miles for so long, how do you still keep your passion?

This passion comes from interests I had as a kid. I have always been deeply curious about history and geography around the world. For me, collecting points, earning points, and booking tickets is a way to make my dream of “global exploration” happen.

I often tell the students: cards are not the goal; turning points into high-value tickets to explore the world is what matters.

When you successfully redeem a ticket, you clearly feel one step closer to your destination. Maybe it’s Provence lavender, maybe the Maldives sea, maybe just a beautiful kaiseki meal in Kyoto—it’s still a journey you earned through your own effort.

More importantly, this work creates trust between people.

For example, a friend in Boston called me at 9:00 a.m. to say her parents were not feeling well and needed to return to China immediately. I immediately called around and arranged two business-class seats for Harbin the next day. Another time, two friends in Italy caught COVID while traveling and were panicking; they asked for help, and I got them tickets back to Boston within 24 hours, avoiding expensive cash fares.

Doing this over and over becomes a kind of responsibility. A constant feeling of, “I just can’t not help.”

3. Can you talk about your booking team? How did it develop so quickly over the last one to two years?

The earliest starting point of the group was actually to “train assistants.”

During the pandemic, I helped too many friends return home, and built a reputation in our circle. By summer 2023, after restrictions were lifted, I handled about $1,500,000 worth of tickets for family and friends on my own. But as more people came, I could no longer process everything, so I began standardizing the process, breaking it into steps for students to practice, while I handled only the most core parts.

The whole booking process, I summarized into three steps:

• Clarify the client’s needs: This step is critical. Students need to quickly identify what the customer genuinely wants. Many people start with “anything works,” but once you dig deeper, there are lots of constraints, such as “no overnight stays” or “the child is too young.” The goal of this training stage is to be able to provide a complete solution right after the discussion, without me needing to ask follow-up questions.
• Budgeting and solution design: Choose the best redemption route based on departure city, destination, travel dates, and available points.
• Actual booking and execution: Includes which airline to use, when to ticket, whether it’s a ghost ticket, whether points are sufficient, and so on. This training phase usually lasts about 12 months and requires ongoing mini-tests and hands-on practice to reinforce memory.

Most of my core students are friends I’ve met offline, people I know well. They are enthusiastic, dedicated, and qualified. We are both teachers and peers, often studying advanced techniques together and exploring new methods. We also help each other out. For example, if an AS ticket is found to be a ghost ticket before points are transferred, we can avoid a mistake that cannot be undone—many readers probably have faced a similar issue.

4. What’s the most memorable booking you’ve handled?

The most memorable case is not a single ticket, but a typical scenario: a family of four flying business class round trip between China and the U.S. during summer peak season.

These requests often come through friend referrals or Xiaohongshu DMs. For people I know, I patiently walk them through and draft the plan; strangers are usually more urgent. For example, one brother from Boston messaged me: “Tell me in one sentence, how do I book four business-class tickets from Boston to Beijing this summer?” I asked him to first tell me his point balance, and he said, “Don’t worry about it. I’ve got enough points. Just tell me in one sentence.”

To be honest, four business-class tickets are difficult, but not impossible—because every person on our team has family travel needs too. For instance, last May, my student JX and I together handled two sets of four-person families traveling in business class from the U.S. East Coast to Shanghai.

In situations like this, you must be systematic: check options, budget points, build backups, remove risks, and ensure executability. This cannot be explained in one sentence, and it is not something you can solve by cramming at the last minute.

5. A lot of people look down on ticket agents. How is your team different?

The biggest difference between us and traditional ticket agents is that we are compliant and transparent.

We only provide technical services. Every ticketing case requires customers to provide their own points and a verifiable family proxy relationship. If there is a gap, we also help fill it within the existing framework (for example, by redistributing points among family members).

Second, pricing is reasonable. We charge only to cover the effort and time involved. Process, amount, and payment method are all fully transparent. We first assess feasibility based on project difficulty, and only then quote.

Most importantly, we do not take on every ticket just to make money. If we estimate the success rate as zero, we will clearly tell the client to drop it. People who have worked with ticket agents in the past will recognize this difference.

6. Beyond your current promotion and operating model, what are your plans for future team operations and growth?

Right now, my students are spread across different cities and time zones, and many have already formed offline networks for assisted booking.

Going forward, I’ll continue assigning orders more broadly so each assistant can focus on the scenarios they are best at, while gradually helping them independently handle high-complexity requests. For high-difficulty projects, I will still get involved personally and then turn them into teaching cases for analysis and internal sharing, to improve our entire “knowledge system.”

7. Do you have any specific redemptions or routes you’d like to do for yourself and your family?

Actually, there are no routes left that I “want to fly but haven’t” anymore. Over the past ten years, while earning miles, I’ve arranged our travels, and we’ve already experienced most of the premium cabins worth flying around the world.

But after having two children, our family’s travel style has changed. Before, it was “if there is a connection, we avoid nonstop” and we traveled to sample different aircraft. Now comfort comes first. Our baseline is two international vacations each year and one peak-season China–U.S. round trip with two cabins.

Of course, if a new product launches—such as JAL’s A35K first class released in 2024—I will still prioritize giving my family a chance to experience it first.

8. Do you have any suggestions for our website, Xiaohongshu account, and Knowledge Planet?

I have always been a loyal reader of Mei Card 101, and I maintain close cooperation with the blog owner. I’m very grateful for the invitation to become a Knowledge Planet partner.

In the future on Planet, I’ll keep sharing the team’s real redemption experiences and practical cases, and provide deep technical analysis when complex questions come up. I hope this helps more people make good use of points and turn “card points” into a real “passport to the world.”

My Takeaways

First, I want to especially thank ISAAC for taking the time to interview us while taking on the risk that the first-class tickets could be grabbed by others. It makes me very happy to see our loyal readers stay consistently passionate about this content and even earn money from a hobby they enjoy. I know how difficult persistence can be. The site’s author has changed repeatedly; our readers, too, have grown from scholarship students to people in the workforce. Most have built families and either settled in the U.S. or returned to China. Many are probably already out of this circle and no longer get excited about earning small rebates or being persuaded by another card approval.

From my perspective, this niche has one characteristic: each step may not seem highly rewarding on its own, but the effects compound. When you do normal card spending, the points you earn are only a few thousand bank points, worth just a few dozen dollars. But with signup bonuses, that can be enough to redeem a round-trip economy fare between China and the U.S., and the value becomes $1,000+. With some technique, you can redeem business class and that value rises to $5,000+. First class can go up to $20,000+. If you book first and business class for your family and get praise from them, that feeling is priceless.

Finally, ISAAC is now a regular presence in our Knowledge Planet. He will not only share flight experience photos from friends, but also his own ticketing stories, and post key information on mileage ticket swaps and large-scale China–U.S. mileage release opportunities. Their assisted ticketing service is also available to Planet members as part of member benefits. If you’re interested, you can join our Knowledge Planet to share information and enjoy exclusive services.