Best Tools for Booking Flights with Points & Miles with Greg the Frequent Miler
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Hello and welcome to All The Hacks, a show about upgrading your life, money, and travel. I'm your host, Chris Hutchins, and today we're going to go really deep to help make sure you know the easiest and best ways to save hundreds or even thousands of dollars when it comes to booking travel with points.

We're going to do that by giving you a full rundown of all the different tools that exist to make the process easier. We'll break down the different use cases, free and paid tools, their pros and cons, and share some insider tips to help you get the best deals. And who better to join me than the author of one of the best blog posts on the topic, Greg Davis Keene, the founder of the FrequentMiler blog and podcast.

Like me, Greg has earned millions of points, traveled the world for free, usually an amazing business in first class cabins, and loves sharing all his hacks and tricks with everyone so they can do the same. In addition to all the best flight search tools, we also covered award search tools for hotels, but the entire conversation was already so long, so I'm going to release the hotel part on Saturday. So stay tuned and let's jump into all the best flight award search tools right after this.

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Greg, thanks for being here. Thanks for having me on. We actually recorded this episode once and then so much changed in the Points and Miles searching tools that we said, let's do it again. And I'm glad we did. And we have a little bit more structure this time.

We do. This time we have a nice outline, but also we just had so much done recording before, figured why not do it again, right? We just wanted to do a better job for everyone listening, and hopefully you will all appreciate it. What we did was we broke the entire landscape of tools that you can use to search for flights and hotels into a couple categories. And...

I added one, but you kind of started this list. So how did you decide to break it up? So first we have flight search tools. You have all these points. You want to book a flight to somewhere. How do you find a good award flights?

There are two broad categories of tools that I think are important to think of differently. One is just flight search, which means you know you want to go from this airport to that airport. You know your dates of travel. Press go and tell me what flights are available, how much they cost with points, which points I should use to book it. That's a basic flight search tool. Another category is flight discovery.

They're not designed to tell you which exact flights to get from here to there, but rather to say, I want to fly to Europe sometime this summer. Or you have a broad idea of what you want to do. These discovery tools help you

to find what are all the best opportunities for that broad idea. Maybe you want to go to Europe, but you don't really care about where you just want the best flights yet there and at the best times where the best flights are available. So that's what flight discovery tools can help you do. It could also be, I just want to fly on a

business class or first class cabin for a great deal. If my vacation takes me to Asia or Europe or South America, so be it. I'll go anywhere. Give me one of those once in a lifetime redemptions for a low value. Absolutely. Yep. Then the next two categories are around hotel searches. So you have hotel points and you want to use them. The most obvious use I'm calling hotel trip planning. And that's where

Basically, you know you're going to be going to Paris during July 6th to the 20th and show me what hotels are available in Paris at that time and how much do they cost with points. The other category is

I'm calling impossible to find hotel awards. So this is where you have your heart set on a particular hotel, but it's a popular hotel. It's rarely available with points. Tools like this will help you find when it is available.

So that's why it's impossible to find hotels award searches. The only one I added was I added a category that we'll get to in flights, which is just some other flight tools. There's a handful of things that don't necessarily fit into search and discovery, but I think are worth quickly running through so people know they exist. I'll add a few of my favorites there. I know you've used a couple of them also. That'll be good. So that'll be the last category is the

miscellaneous other flight search tools. But I think you had some things that weren't really even flight searches, right? It's just miscellaneous other tools, let's say. For anyone who has miles, we're going to do an episode actually with your co-host on the Frequent Miler in the Air podcast, Nick, talking about just general how to search for awards, not the tactical, but how to just think about redeeming your point.

and how to get the most value out of your points and ways to structure that and think about it and how far out to plan. That episode, we're actually going to record at the end of this week. It'll be out a few weeks after. But I wanted this one to come out first because the last thing I want to tell everyone is, hey, here's how to start thinking about it, but not actually give you the tools to use. So we're going to talk about the tools.

And then for anyone who wants to zoom out a little and think, how do I even just start thinking about the best ways to redeem my points? When to look, where to look, how to structure the trip. That'll be coming in a few weeks with Nick. And that one will certainly make reference back to this episode. Yeah, great point. Before we dive into flight search tools, I just want to give some broad background because I think a lot of people think, well, I've got my American Airlines miles, so I

Obviously, the way to search for awards is to just get on AA.com and type in where I want to go and see what comes up. There's a couple of problems with that. You might miss some great opportunities to use your American Airlines miles because you didn't look at other dates or you didn't look at other cities. So, for example, you might be wanting to fly somewhere far away to South Africa, let's say. Maybe you started your search in San Francisco.

But the best flight awards might be available from L.A. And so you might be able to book that first leg separately to get to L.A. and then get that great award flight. And you wouldn't have seen that if you just get on AA.com and do that simple search. The other thing that I think a lot of people don't realize is that you probably have access to a lot of other airline miles than what you know about.

So you might know you have American Airlines miles, but what you might not know is that your Chase Ultimate Rewards points transfer to a bunch of different airline programs or your American Express membership rewards points can transfer to a number of different programs. A big part of what we're going to be talking about is these how these flight search tools will tell you not just what award flights are available, but what

what program you can get those points from. So you could transfer your chase points over to Virgin Atlantic, let's say, in order to book an Air France flight. That kind of complexity is something that a lot of people, I think, are afraid of, but these tools make it pretty easy to grasp, I think.

And I don't know if this is still as much the case as it used to be, but in the past, at least, I remember there are some airlines that you might be able to use your United, Delta, Air France, whatever points on with their partners that don't show up on their website.

I don't know how much that's still true, but there were some partners that you could use points in one program to book, but you had to know that the availability was there from another tool to be able to book it. Yeah, yeah. It's still there. It's not as bad as it used to be. It used to be very, very common. But I think a lot of tools have gotten better about that. The search tools we're going to talk about won't necessarily help you with that.

specific situation. Let's say your United miles could be used for a particular United partner that's not available through United's website. One of these tools might show that that award flight is available with some other points, but it's not going to show that it's available with United. You have to be smart enough to know that's a problem that is not solved by the tools we're going to talk about. All right, so let's dive in. Flight search tools. These are the tools that

look like Google flights or kayak flights or Expedia when you're searching for flights. They ask you for where you're going from, where you're going to, number of passengers, what are your dates that you're traveling and what class of service do you want, economy, business class, first class. So there's a whole slew of tools like this.

And in my opinion, the ones that are best do a number of things. First of all, they search a number of different airline programs. If you just search Delta United American, you're going to miss out on a lot of opportunities for really good priced award flights. The best tools run quickly, run their searches quickly, and they can search a range of dates at once. Now, this is something that you don't normally see anywhere.

on a kayak like tool, the ability to say, I want to leave any day this week, but it's more important with award flights because sometimes if you just look at one day, you might see that the best word flight would cost. I'll make up a number like 400,000 points for one person.

But if you look at a range of days, maybe a couple of days later, there's a flight for 50,000 points. It can easily be that dramatic of a difference. It's very helpful to have a program that can search a range of dates like that. Another thing that's important is

is to be able to search multiple airports at once. This is something not a lot of tools can do, but there's a few that can. And the idea there is you're near multiple airports. And so you want to specify, I'm willing to leave from any of these two or three airports. But also, if

Where you're flying to, you can often find better deals by flying to different airports and you might have to then book another short distance flight, let's say, to get to where you really want to end up ultimately. But the more you do searches, the more you're going to want that capability to put in multiple airports. And just on that note, my wife and I were going to Japan. We really wanted to do it in business.

from Portland, the flights were in business were like one quarter of the cost on the kind of range of dates we wanted as they were from San Francisco. - Yeah, exactly. - It was like 100,000 something round trip from Portland and like 400,000 round trip in San Francisco. And the flight to Portland was like $100 each way. $200 plus, you know, 100,000 points is infinitely better than spending 400,000 points. So I just wanna really highlight how valuable it can be to be able to search

a range of airports that are not necessarily a short drive, but might be a short flight. Terminology wise, we call those positioning flights when you fly to somewhere like Portland in order to get the flight you ultimately want. And that can happen at both ends of your trip, right? Like, so maybe you wanted to go to Kyoto, but

the best deals were to fly to Tokyo. So you fly to Tokyo and then you take either a positioning flight from Tokyo to Kyoto or you take a train. You have different options for positioning, but that's the idea here. One of the most important features, I think,

is the ability to set alerts. Some people might not realize if you sit down and do an award search to see what's available, that's not the end of the story. You may find some good flights, you may not. What's available changes all the time. So if you don't find what you like,

I find it's like critical to be able to set up an alert so that the tool will keep checking the route you're interested in and will email you when something within your parameters becomes available. And then you get the email and then you can jump online and hopefully book that trip.

So that's setting alerts. And finally, some good tools provide detailed instructions. So for beginners who don't know that you can transfer chase points to Virgin Atlantic, like I was talking about before, some tools will actually kind of step you through. Here's how to do it, not just to transfer the points, but then to actually book it once you have the points in the right place. So those are the criteria I looked at and I looked at a number of tools and I'll just list them really quick.

Award logic, award tool, point me, points path, points yeah, and roam.travel. Those are the tools I looked at. Those might have been the ones you gave a full comparison to, but I know we also even talked about looking at Point Hound. We talked about playing around with Oasis' new flight search. So I would say maybe this is the short list that

But I know you've probably played with half a dozen more tools that we're not even putting on the shortlist that we will then take down to like a final set. So I'll just flag that every week, it seems like there's a new tool or a new feature from a tool. There's a handful of other tools that I know you've played with in the past or recently that maybe didn't even make it to this shortlist. But I want to make sure everyone listening knows that we've probably looked at most of them. Reward Flight Finder, I think was another one. So...

There's so many of them. There are. There are so many. And some of the ones that made the list made them because they're very popular tools. You know, I felt like I needed to cover them. Some of them made the list because they have a lot of the capabilities that I'm looking for that I just described.

And some of the ones that didn't make the list, I could see right at a glance that they weren't going to make the top of my list. So there's no reason to do an in-depth comparison with those. Yeah, that makes sense. As things stand right now, there are two tools that check most of the boxes, PointYeah and AwardTool.

They are very similar to each other. They both have alerts. They allow you to do a range of dates. They let you do multiple airports and they're fast and they both have capable free versions. So as long as you sign up, you can do meaningful searches. You can do a range of dates, not as many dates as you would be able to do if you got the pro version.

and you can set some alerts. So there's a lot there, whether you pay for these tools or not. And they're similar priced as things stand now, they're around $90 a year. And a word tool has a $12 per month option if you want to pay for the tools. For anyone that's on video with us, and just to kind of walk people through high level, you can go in and you can say, I'm departing from San Francisco or Los Angeles. It looks like on Pointeat, you can pick two airports,

And you can say I'm going to, let's say, Paris or London. So they've got two, but only two. So that might be a little bit of a change. And then for dates, I can say, let's go from April 1st to April 8th. I can choose a week window for this one-way flight. And I can say economy and premium economy or business at first, which is nice. You don't have to search business separately from first. And you could actually filter the programs. But I hope that people listening have...

tried to build up a points balance in enough places that don't start your search by filtering by the airline. Do that later once you get somewhere and obviously choose the number of passengers you're looking for. And so you'll get a list of all of those flights and the airlines they come from. The main difference, if I remember right, now I'm pulling up a word tool to do a similar thing. I can search 16 airports, a lot more than two. You can, but then it'll let you do up to 16 airports. But if you do 16 airports...

then you can only do a single day. They're basically letting you search 16 vectors, I guess. It's like two airports for eight days, four airports for four days. Exactly. And then they have this mega version of their search, which I have no idea why it's

separate, but that gives you 24 degrees of freedom. So you could do 24 airports or you could do one airport in a 24 day date range, or you could do two from airports to two airports in a 12 day date range. Now, I do know some of these, just to be clear, I think to dial it up to 16 or use mega

You need to be a premium member. Yes. Here's how I'll stack rank it. I'll put a link to all the deals I've gotten for everyone. If I don't have one, I'll put all the links that you guys have gotten to everyone. And if I don't have one of those, I'll just link to the website. Between you and I, we probably have some type of promo or referral or something for all these tools. It's really nice to be able to search a handful of different airlines or airports. Yeah. For me, it's like...

having three or four is sometimes a little better because we just have three in the Bay Area. If I only get two, I can't even add LAX or something that's really close.

For me from Detroit, if I'm flying, let's say to Europe, I look at all the major airports that I can easily get to in one short hop. And so that includes New York City Airport, Chicago, Toronto, Washington, D.C., my short list of airports that I'll put in my from list using a word tool. And yeah, with points here, I can only put in two at a time, which is still better than ones that only allow one.

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Just head to allthehacks.com slash GELT. That's G-E-L-T. Again, that's allthehacks.com slash G-E-L-T to stop overpaying on taxes. I was going to put this in the grab bag list of tools, but for this particular use case, the tool I use the most is called Flight Connections.

I can't remember. There's another tool that has a name that I can't remember. But the thing I love about Flight Connections is I can go in and put, "Oh, I live in San Francisco." And it'll just show me all the direct flights. This is how I think about it. I'm like, "If I want to go to Paris, obviously the perfect flight is SFO to Paris direct." But the game with points and miles is give yourself flexibility on dates, on departure airports. So what I'll typically try to do is say, "Well, I want to start an SFO. I want to look at all the airports in Europe."

And then I'll reverse that search and say, or I'll look at Paris and look at all the places you can get to Paris from the United States. Now, just looking at this map right now, I'm like, well, now I'm well over the six. I might not even be able to do a mega search here. I might have to do two searches, one from all of the U S to Paris and one from all of Europe to San Francisco. And we'll get to that when we talk about discovery. Cause I feel like we're kind of slowly crossing the line into discovery tools.

But I think Flight Connections is the best tool I've found for finding which airlines fly direct from an airport. Yeah, no, I use it all the time for that purpose. Like, so, for example, when I had a flight from Queenstown, New Zealand, I wanted to return home.

So I used flight connections to see, OK, there are nonstop flights from Queenstown to don't check my memory here, but to, you know, within New Zealand, Christchurch and Auckland, but also to some places in Australia like Sydney. Ultimately, I ended up getting a flight back from Sydney. And so I separately booked a positioning flight from Queenstown to Sydney for that.

Okay. Hopefully that's helpful. All these websites, we're gonna put links to the show notes. You could play along at home and kind of play with these tools as we're talking about them. For award tool endpoints, yeah, which were your kind of top two, the free tool gives you some access. Is there a general thought about what pain gives you?

So in both cases, you get a lot more flexibility with how many airports or dates you can search. So for points, yeah, for example, you can only do one airport if you have the free version. I think you could do four day date range on the free version there and

Award tool gives you like four degrees of freedom that you could spend any way you want with four airports or four dates kind of thing. And then that just goes way up when you pay for it. Now, award tool, that mega search thing, even a free version will give you I can't remember the number, but it'll give you a few times you can use that mega search the full power of it. OK, I think you said they're all about the same price.

What would any of these other tools, when would they come into play? Two things that these tools don't do. They're not the best at searching all possible award programs, and they don't provide detailed instructions for a beginner to show you how to move the points from Jace or Amex or Citi or Capital One to an airline program and then how to book it. That kind of detail is something that you'll find in a tool called PointMe.

And PointMe also probably searches the most different programs of any of the tools here. Are there any major holes? Are there any like big obvious gotchas that PointMe or a Word tool aren't doing? Probably the biggest is Singapore. This is very specific, but if your heart's set on flying Singapore Suites, which is amazing, first class...

fully enclosed type of experience. The only way to book that is with Singapore's own miles and you can transfer to Singapore miles from pretty much any transferable points program. So it's easy to get the miles, but among the popular tools, only PointMe actually searches Singapore. So if you're using these other tools and you want to fly Singapore,

Singapore, you either need to use PointMe or log into Singapore's website itself and do your searches there, which is how I do it. I just remembered one thing. So I'm sharing my screen a little bit here. And I was looking at points. Yeah. And I think the same thing is true on AwardTool. One important thing, they all have the same kind of filtering tools. So you can sort them. You can search by airports, arrival airports. How many stops are you taking? What's the max number of points or taxes? What's the max number of points?

One thing that I think is important that a lot of people might forget is this premium cabin thing. I got this flight and I said, wow, I want to go from LAX to Paris. It's only 32,000 points in business class. That's incredible. And then I look and I say, no, it's 21% in business class. It's LAX to London in economy. And then Heathrow to Frankfurt in business. And then Frankfurt to Paris in business.

First off, if you're trying to get from London to Paris, taking a one-stop flight through Frankfurt is one of the least efficient ways that you can get there. But two, I would advise you to set that marker to be somewhere at least over 80% or close. Otherwise, you'll be stuck in a place where you're going to end up finding awards that aren't really what you want. And then the other bummer one is...

that taxes. So I'm looking on this search and it's like, well, now I found San Francisco to London for 38,000 points in business. That's great. But it's on Virgin Atlantic and you can see the fees are $1,000, $998. And so not to say that 38,000 points and $1,000 isn't a better deal than paying for that ticket outright. It probably actually is. But I wouldn't say it's a...

Screaming deal. Absolutely right. Another parameter that I like to set often is the departure time, arrival time, depending on what's going on. If I don't want to get up at three in the morning to catch a flight, I might set the minimum time to a later time.

And especially if I'm doing something where I have to catch another flight or get to somewhere in time, I use that a lot. So those can be really helpful as well. And then as just a little example here, I'm looking at points. Yeah. And it says, oh, you can use these points on life miles. And I'm like, that sounds great. Let's do it. Nice. A lot of these tools all show you here's how many points it's going to take to get there.

your 61,200 life miles. And most of them are looking at the current transfer bonuses. Right now, Citi has a 25% transfer bonus. So they say, if you have Citi points, that's a deal. It looks like they do have a transfer guide here. It's certainly not for everything. And so they have a Citi transfer guide that's a little bit generic. Otherwise, if they don't have one for an airline, it just takes you to the website.

When I go to point.me and I say, show me how to do this, I guess here's the downside. I have to wait for point.me to finish loading. That's the thing. We didn't talk about the downsides to point.me. It is painfully slow. You know, it takes about two minutes, which may not sound bad if you just hear the word two minutes, but running searches, and especially if you want to do a bunch of different ones, I find it excruciating. And it's made worse by the fact that point.me doesn't do date ranges. So if you want to check multiple days,

You've got to run separate searches. It only does individual airports. Again, you want to check multiple airports, that's more searches and it won't do alerts. So a lot of downsides to PointMe, but the fact that it gives such detailed instructions for how to transfer the points, how to book the flight once you have the points is really important for beginners. It totally could be worth someone buying a day pass to use PointMe to step them through that process.

If they found an award through some other tool, you might want to jump over to point me to hold your hand through actually booking it. I'm looking right now. It's like, how do I book this flight on Virgin Atlantic? And this is a multi-step process of here's how to create the account. Here's how to create the account on Virgin. Here's how to search. Here's how to walk you through one by one for each individual transferable currency, how to transfer it.

If I'm trying to walk someone through it, I say, I found you a flight on these dates. Go get a day pass to PointMe so you can see how it works. And then it'll walk you through it. Sometimes I use it as a validator. Not to say I don't trust the other tools, but we didn't talk much about accuracy. But I think that's important. And I feel like PointMe, I've had the least number of issues where it shows me something that's not there. Like, I'm about to book this flight in cash.

I only have one flight I want. It's on these days. It's on these times. I'm not planning on using points. But let's do one search where the dates aren't flexible, the airports aren't flexible, just to see if miles and points are a better deal. And that's where I think Point.me can also do really great is if you have no flexibility and you just want to see, is there a great way to do this with points? I think it's good. Any other things? Yeah, I mean, I think that's a really good point about it. Although...

I had found a Life Miles flight a couple weeks ago.

through a word tool and I didn't see it on point yet. So I checked point me and it wasn't there either. So I thought, oh, it's phantom space. But then I was able to bring it up and book it on LifeMiles. So there's no tool that's perfect. Sometimes you could run the same exact search multiple times and you'll see a flight like the LifeMiles one show up, but then not show up the next time you run it or vice versa. So I don't know why they're unreliable in that way, but there is some

mystery to the results that come back, unfortunately. You know, you briefly mentioned alerts are important. Point.me does not have alerts. Right. If I'm using a word tool and I say, well, I do want to go to Paris and I'd like to do it in business class on a specific date range and there's nothing there, you can say, hey, just let me know. Yeah, exactly. And you can say track prices almost in the same way you would do on a Google flights. But you can also say set an alert for a specific route.

Right. So you would say, I want to go to Paris, look at these date ranges and alert me. If you find a point price that's less than, I'll make up a number, 100,000 points one way. And you could say, by the way, make sure the percentage of premium cabin is more than 60% or whatever. And maybe you want to limit it to, I don't want

Anything more than one stop connections. That's how I use that tool. And you can set the number of people, which I think if you're traveling with three or four people, this whole game is very hard. It looks like you set 25 alerts, but...

similar to the way the search works. I'm looking now at setting an alert from San Francisco to Paris for a date range of four days. That's going to use four of my 25 alerts. It will. So it's all a currency of how many you have access to, whether it's searching or alerts, but at least you have them. You already said this, and I'll just say it again. It's easy to forget that this stuff changes all the time. It really does. And so I would tell someone that said, hey, I want to go to Paris on this three-date window every

six months from now? And the answer is like...

Between the day you want to take off and now, it will probably become available and become unavailable multiple times. That's true. Some routes, some airlines, the chance of it becoming available actually increases dramatically as you get within a few weeks or a few days of the flight, which lends a whole nother fun to people who really want to live on the edge and wait till the last minute to book their flights. I expect that you and Nick will talk about strategies around

That idea of booking good enough flights and then setting alerts for things like this. And if something comes available a few days before your flight,

canceling the original and booking not in that order. You want to book the better one first, make sure that booking works. You don't have any problems booking it, then cancel your original one. If you had to ballpark, you know, these tools didn't always exist, right? You know, it used to be a long process to figure out how to make all of this work out. Calling, asking, what about this date? What about this date? What about this date? What's been the impact of

for the ability for you to get maximum value out of your points by having access to all these tools? It's huge because, I mean, it just makes it so much easier to find what you want. You don't have to be an expert geek at this stuff to find good things. I think that's the biggest change. And finding good things is saving thousands or maybe tens of thousands of dollars by getting the right deal. Right. It's either saving a huge amount of money or...

Probably often it means flying business or first class instead of economy, which you might have done had you not had access to these awards and these tools to help you find those flights. As these tools make it so easy to find these awards, they probably get snapped up faster than they would without the tools. People who knew before how to find these awards might be frustrated by having fewer available because other people are snapping them up.

Now, two quick tools we didn't talk about much. One is PointsPath, which in the last couple weeks, I've actually gotten a lot of use out of. It's a Chrome extension, so it doesn't actually have a website. I mean, it has a website, but you're not using the website. It pops up when you're doing searches on Google Flights.

At first glance, I was like, when am I going to use this? And the example I just searched for did not bear fruit like I had expected. But I recently went to South by Southwest in Austin. I was looking at flights and I had waited too long to book them. And I was like, oh my gosh, flights are really expensive, like $500 one-way flights from San Francisco. And on Google Flights, it popped up and said, hey, just so you know, it's only $12,500 a

AA miles. And I was like, "What?" I blew my mind that I could get such a good deal using points on just a basic domestic flight, direct exact dates I wanted. And I almost assumed that I wouldn't get a good deal and never looked anywhere else. So I think it's a no-brainer to turn the Points Path Chrome extension on because I'm already doing my cash searching on Google Flights.

If it happens to find something, granted, I think it's only searching American United Delta. They just added JetBlue as well. And JetBlue. So it's not searching everything, but it is searching enough that I've actually saved a few hundred dollars just in the past few weeks having that extension on. Yeah.

That's a good commercial for that tool. Yeah, no, I feel the same way. I would never seek out this tool, but having it installed in my browser so that anytime I use Google Flights, it just automatically shows me the point prices of flights I'm looking for anyway. Although I have to say that it's still worth...

In the example you gave, running one of the other tools, Award Tool or Points Yeah, or really any of these other tools that you like that cover a lot of different programs, because you might have found that there was another program that would fly you that same flight instead of 12,500 American miles or might have been one that you could book for 8,000 points with Avios or something.

That happens to me all the time. Domestic flights, find cheap something cheap on United, book it on Avianca for half the price. Exactly. And that's, again, why these tools are so darn useful.

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I just want to thank you quick for listening to and supporting the show. Your support is what keeps this show going. To get all of the URLs, codes, deals, and discounts from our partners, you can go to allthehacks.com slash deals. So please consider supporting those who support us. And then the only other one was Rome travel, but allowed it to make the short list, even though we haven't talked about it yet.

Yeah, the reason it made the shortlist is because it was the first tool to compete with the expensive older tools, AwardLogic and PointMe. And it did sort of the similar things as those tools, but it's free and fast. It was the first tool that was really competitive with those tools.

But then when Pointea and AwardTool came out, Roam.Travel has been kind of left in the dust until I leapfrogged those others. At this point, I don't see a reason to turn to Roam.Travel. All these tools are constantly innovating, and I'd be surprised if we don't see Roam.Travel all of a sudden introduce great new features and then Pointea will have to come back and get better and so on. And so it's good competition for us as consumers of these tools.

Absolutely. Okay. Let's talk about flight discovery. Yeah. The idea here is you want to ask broad questions like, I have a family of four and I want to go to Europe this summer. Or I just want to fly international first class to somewhere. Doesn't matter where, but show me where the good deals are. Things like that.

There are a bunch of tools that do this, and some of them are the same tools we already talked about. And they have like a different mode that does this. What's common across all of them is they use cached search results. So they do their searches ahead of time, they store all this information so they can answer these broad queries like this quickly.

But you have to keep in mind two things. One, they don't have all possible flights in there. They only have the flights that they've looked at. The other thing you need to keep in mind is whatever the tools think they know about what's available might not be true anymore because these are cache and we don't really have visibility usually into how old the data is. But despite those negatives,

It really is possible to find a lot of things super quickly. I looked at a bunch of them. I looked at point.me explore. I looked at Rome sky view tool. I looked at award tool panorama seats.arrow, which is sort of the original tool that does this cash result thing. And ultimately points. Yeah. Their discovery tool is called daydream explorer.

It just kind of beat the pants off all the others in doing the types of things I tested it for. I was able to do like what I thought was a difficult challenge. In my test, I started in Cleveland and look for a family of four to go business class in the summer to Europe. You know, and I thought, oh, that'll be a really hard thing for any tool to find. I found good options immediately through Daydream Explorer and

several other scenarios too. It had the most complete results and the best features. So when

So when I talk about features, one feature that I really like that some of the others don't have is not just being able to say flexibly where you're going to. I want to come from not just Cleveland, but the United States or North America because I'm willing to position to another place. Or maybe for my return travel, I want to say I'm coming from Europe and going to Cleveland, for example. I want that kind of flexibility. And Daydream Explorer gives you that flexibility.

Another thing that not all tools do, and this is kind of unbelievable, but Pointe-Gillette does do, is let you say how many people would be traveling. Doesn't that seem like that's got to be the most basic thing that they would all do, but it's actually fairly rare in this space so far. That's a obviously good, really good feature. And we talked before about the ability to set minimum premium cabin so that you don't want to end up with finding flights that are predominantly economy and

and a short leg in business class that lets you do that. You might know this because I've played with them all logged in, but are a lot of these exploration tools available free? Because I do know that point.me made the explore feature free to everyone recently. And so...

I don't know if the exploration tools are free or not. Yeah, it depends. It varies from tool to tool. But the points you had Daydream Explorer, you get full functionality, as far as I could tell, from the free version. So that's pretty awesome. Okay. I'm playing with them all. Some of the features that we haven't talked about that are interesting, I'm looking right now. A lot of them let you pick the kind of trip you want.

So you could say ski trip or beach trip or that kind of stuff. All they've really done is gone and just categorized all these airports as to what they are. But the ability to go in and say, hey, I want to go to the beach and I want to go nonstop in business class from wherever I am and for four people and come up with something is really cool. It is really cool. And I have to admit, I did not test them to see who could do beach or ski vacations or golf vacations or whatever it is better than the others. Yeah.

I'm dubious about their ability to correctly categorize things. Just about anywhere you go, it may be a way to get to a beach, but might not be the primary beach you want to go to. Well, I'm seeing some great options for four people from San Francisco to go to the beach right now in Mexico, in Hawaii, on nonstop, first in business. So I am inspired. One tool that we haven't talked about yet is Seats.Aero. Yeah. Yeah.

Seeds.aero, this is what I think has started this whole class of discovery tools. It was the first one I knew of anyway, where they would upfront run a million award searches, store all the results, and then let you just explore quickly to see what's available. Now it does it in a very nerdy, you have to understand what

you know, the two letter codes for airlines and airports are and things like that, but credibly powerful. I still turn to it regularly for specific things. So it's not as good as points. Yes. Daydream Explorer for tell me across all programs, where can I fly in business class this summer? That kind of thing. It's not really good for that, but if you have an idea of what,

more specific things that you want. For example, you know you want to use your Emirates miles to Emirates first class. It's a great tool for quickly identifying all of the first class award availability that it has cached. I will say the reason why it's a little confusing to use, and you know this, when you're browsing the website, they have a section called explore and you pick

pick the program and you can do some much broader searching. So you could say, just look at everything I can do with Air France and now I get all these features. Right. But when you do your search on that, you're not going to get any United flights. Right. Or any Lufthansa flights or anything. And so the most flexible searching is within a program. Yeah, exactly. I'll

Also, what you might not realize is that if you want to see Delta flights, picking Air France or Virgin Atlantic is what you want to explore to see Delta flights. It really was designed for people who know what they're doing. The

The author of the tool tells me he's working on some sort of mega-explore feature where it would maybe combine all of those programs together on one massive explore, which I would love that because I'd love the explore how powerful the interface is, but it frustrates me that I have to switch between programs to do a full search.

I did notice recently. So I'm doing a search on my screen. I went to the search tab, which searches all the programs. Yeah. Search US to Europe in, let's just pick July 15th, plus or minus 60 days.

And I can say for at least two people on direct flights and run a search. Now, normally, I thought this search would work. In this case, I have we encountered an unexpected error. So let's lower it to plus or minus 28 days just to see if it works.

So there is the ability to do this. I noticed that depending on your from and your to, sometimes the number of days gets ratcheted down and down. If you search US to anywhere, you can do a plus or minus three-day search. It's funny because we didn't talk about it in the first set of tools for searching flights. We didn't really talk about it in the discovery.

I find that it's actually probably maybe one of the best tools that does both. You just really need to spend time understanding how to use it to get the most out of it. And for a lot of people, this is not going to be that. However, I just searched and I said, hey, I want United States to Europe 28 days within the middle of July, two people direct flights. And I got 17,000 flights there.

Now, if I wanted to filter that down to business, and let's say I don't have any American miles, so I want to filter out American and Alaska, I can do that. I can filter the number of fees. And so you can kind of work your way to get there.

But I would say highest learning curve, but maybe the most ROI if you figure it out. Maybe, maybe. Although I want to point out something of the search you just did that you put you want to fly to Europe. That three letter code only is bringing in what Seats.Aero chose to be as major airports in Europe. Oh, yeah. I'm looking right now and the list is about, I don't know, I'm going to ballpark it at 30 airports, maybe, but not all of them.

Not all of them. When I was doing the pointe de Daydream Explorer thing, one of the best flights that it found for me to Europe was to Lyon, France. And I bet you Lyon is not a major airport in that list. But often flights to smaller airports have better award availability, strangely, or at least at better prices. It's weird but true that like flying, for example, from Detroit to Paris,

Paris on Air France to Lyon is sometimes a lot cheaper than just Detroit to Paris. So the exact same first leg, but adding on a flight to a smaller airport sometimes can lower the price substantially. That's what I was able to find with the Pointier tool and what you wouldn't find with that particular search you just did. So I will say,

I like it. It does a lot of stuff. You've got to get used to how to use it. Once you figure it out, I'm like, oh, this is cool. If you really want to nerd out, I think you can export the results. I think they have an API you can play with. So you could really go as deep as you want. I also love that they have a...

tools menu with some specialty searches that you can do to find things that might be hard to find without having those tools there, like the Delta One Finder as a way to quickly find award flights flying Delta One using like Virgin Atlantic Miles, for example.

I had a friend who had some expiring United Plus points and was like, I got these points that are expiring. I was like, I wonder where you could go with them. And then I just quickly looked up and it's like, oh, you can go to Japan. If you wanted to go to Japan in the next two weeks, you can use your Plus points. And so they built a lot of cool stuff. I think...

At least what I've read about how like point.me is doing their explore tool. They're kind of basing it off of user searches. Yeah. And so I don't know if this is true for all the other tools, but the one thing that I know seats.arrow does is they're running a search for a lot of routes every day. If no one has searched, for example, I'm looking a lot of the best West coast to Europe business class availability this summer seems to be on a

lot flight from LAX to Warsaw. If no one searched for LAX to Warsaw on PointMe, then you're not going to get that in the Daydream Explorer. Even though if you want to fly to Europe from the West Coast, LAX to Warsaw might be a great option in business class.

70,000 points on Aeroplan available on one, two, three, four, five different days in July and August could be great. But a lot of the other tools might not show it because maybe someone hasn't searched for it.

Right. Yeah, that's absolutely true. I was surprised at how many flights Pointia did find. I do wonder, do they supplement their cache with automatically run routes or is there just so many users because they have a capable product that's free? Maybe they have so many users that they are caching a lot of stuff. I don't know. If Seats.Aero doesn't look for the route that you actually want,

you're not going to find anything. So again, back to my Leon example, even if you put in Leon as a destination, you're probably not going to find anything because it probably doesn't have Leon as a route that it searches automatically. They have an option to say, hey, I want to request you start adding this route to your search list. But that's right. You can ask them to add it. So that's good. But as far as like just stumbling upon things that are available, you're not going to be able to do that with something. So yeah, there's pros and cons there. Overall,

For those who are really, really into this stuff, I think Seat Side Arrow is an essential

tool for your toolbox. It's not a beginner tool by a long stretch. No. And the one other thing that's nice is when you look at a flight, I'm looking Las Vegas to Gatwick. When you look at it, it'll say, well, it was last refreshed a day ago. But if you click the little info box, it's like refreshing with the results of the airline. Now, I do like how even though they might not have availability right now, that's fresh. They will go and get it for you without having to jump to another site. I like that, too. That's a really good thing.

Sometimes it can be really slow, that refreshing. And so waiting right now. Yeah, exactly. It'd be nice if they could figure out how to speed that up. But still, at least it does do that. So that's good. Okay. So it sounds like if you need one tool to do it all, Pointe's, yeah, is a pretty high runner.

But if you like doing really complicated 5, 6, 7 airline airport date searches, you might be better off with Award Tool or Seats.Aero or some combo of the two. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's all true. Okay. I think the only thing we failed to mention is that Point.me...

which I found to be very comprehensive, yet slow tool. If you have a Built Rewards account, which is free, by the way, this is not the Built credit card. This is just the Built Rewards account, which anyone can sign up for. In their mobile app, you have the ability to do a search on PointMe account.

for free, but it's restricted only to the airlines that BILT is partnered with, which includes many airlines, but not all airlines. Yes, absolutely. It's great to know about that. Free access through BILT. Also, there is a URL so you could bring that up on the website by logging into your BILT account on a website. Well,

We'll get that URL in the show notes. Yep. And then also, another reason we re-recorded this, since then, Amex has announced a different but very similar partnership where if you have a US-based Amex card, you can also get access to PointMe with Amex's travel partners. So if you had an Amex and a free built rewards account, I haven't done the intersection of, but that probably gets you pretty far with PointMe access with...

without having to pay for it. It might be frustrating when you're trying to decide which to do, because right now, anyway, Bill...

has American Airlines and they've probably added Alaska because that's a new transfer partner. Amex is not going to have either one of those, but it will have things like Delta. It has a lot of more obscure programs that may or may not have better pricing. So you could sometimes get some really good price options through Amex's transfer partners. Okay. That's flights. We

I had the idea of bringing up a couple other flight tools in our conversation. And then I thought we ended up bringing most of them up. I'll share the couple other ones we forgot. So we talked about Seat Sadero. We talked about Points Path.

We talked about flight connections. The other few ones I'll have, there's one different use case which we haven't talked about, which is it's not I want to take a specific route, a flight search per se, and it's not I want to go somewhere. It's there is a flight you want and

And you're willing to be flexible with your dates. But you don't really want to change the from or the to and the airline. And so there are a couple tools, some part of the tools before, and then one we haven't mentioned called Seat Spy, which is very good for a very unique search, which is, I would like to fly from San Francisco to Narita in Tokyo on...

the United flight. Tell me which days over the next 365 days I can take that flight in business class. That's a great example and it does that very well. It doesn't cover a lot of award programs that you might want, but for those that it covers, it does a pretty good job. That is the one search case

that I find myself, now that we have children, thinking, gosh, if we'd love to go to a place, we'd really love the direct flight and we're super flexible with when we would go. So let's create a thing, set an alert and say, just let me know when you find four seats on this exact route. Yeah. Or...

I'm probably less doing the alert and more, "When can we go on this exact route and let's plan a trip around it?" I could probably achieve that search on another tool. But it's the only tool that in a beautiful visual way, gives me the full year in advance.

Right. Totally agree. Seats.aero kind of does that with the routes it tracks, if you know how to use it to do that. It's not as clear what's happening as what you're talking about here. I'm looking at it on Air France right now. One trick, sometimes it shows even when it's very expensive. So I'm dialing back the price of the Air France award from San Francisco to Paris, and you'll see, oh, it looked like there was a lot of availability in business class. Now I dropped the price and it's like, nope, there's not as much.

Still, if you want to plan a trip in January, some great options. If you want to plan it in April, some great options. So I don't know. I find myself using Seatspy more than we gave it airtime for. But it does look like I think Award Tool has a new feature called Routes, where you can pull up a route and look at a calendar for that route. I just think from a UI standpoint, I'm looking at the Award Tool one, and it's like a giant list of...

or I can switch to calendar view, but I'm looking a month at a time for that use case. If it is your use case, I think Seatspy is fantastic. I use it a lot because I have that use case. But you literally, you can't even search San Francisco to Paris and see all of those flights. It is only the ones on Air France and then separately the ones on United. So despite that I use the tool a lot, I wouldn't say I think a lot of people would oftentimes

often be in the use case to use the tool. Right. You might want to look at using seats.aero. It's nowhere near as user-friendly and beautiful the result, but you could use their explore. You could go to the United Explorer and set your from and to airport. And you could even set the airline you want to fly to limit it if for some reason you only want to fly United. So you could do it that way. Results that come up in green are the non-stops. Okay.

By the way, the filtering on SeedSide Arrow, knowing what you can put in that search field is kind of interesting. You can go in and type in like 2024-04 to filter it for April, which again goes back to how easy is this to use? But I will give it a little bit more of a go for that use case and see where we end up.

I will very briefly mention a tool because we've talked about it. If you've searched on the internet, you've probably heard about ExpertFlyer. I will actually go out on a limb and say, for 99% of the people listening, ExpertFlyer is probably not going to be that helpful of an award tool. I don't think I've used it for award searching in the last year.

Where I love it, and I believe it's free, is using it for seat alerts. Especially as a United Silver member who does not get access to Economy Plus until check-in, I find that at check-in, there's never an aisle or a window available. So I just go in and create an alert and say, if there's an aisle or a window in Economy Plus available, email me. And I

I almost always get an email sometime in the 24 hours after check-in before takeoff, and I can log into the app immediately, change my seat, and get a much better seat. That feature is free on ExpertFlyer, so you don't even have to subscribe to get that feature. And when you say seat alerts, we're not talking about award seats. We're just literally talking about you already have the booking, and you want to switch to a particular seat on the airplane. It lets you set up these alerts. That's awesome.

It's not worth a whole episode on flight tools, not for awards, because the only other tool I would mention is for trip monitoring. And there's kind of two tools I've used. One is Flighty and one is TripIt.

And I think Flighty is like a beautiful mobile interface for tracking flights. And TripIt might have an app. I'm sure it's not beautiful. They have a terrible UI. They're now owned by an expense management platform. But it's pretty good at scanning your email, compiling everything into trips, sending you updates and reminders if flights change, or if something happens. And especially helpful, even with Southwest...

at saying, hey, your flight dropped in price. You might want to go rebook it. Yeah. I rely on both of those tools. I use Flighty and I like its features a lot. I haven't learned to rely on it. Yes. But with TripIt, the main thing I do is use it to organize my trips because I'm often booking multiple separate flights, different airlines, and then I'm booking hotels in one place and the other. And I just send all the receipts to TripIt. I

I don't let TripIt look at my email because that's too confusing and I'll explain why in a second. But by emailing TripIt, all of these things, it just automatically puts them into trips. And actually it'll tell me if there's a conflict, but I can visually see, yeah, okay, I'm going to arrive in time to catch this next flight or, oh, I forgot to book a hotel for the first night or whatever. And then I can go take care of that. One time I was traveling with my co-host, Nick,

he was doing the flight planning and I was putting all the stuff into trip it and then I Contacted him and say did you know that we're leaving Dubai before we arrive in Dubai? And that's the type of thing that trip it showed me It's not something you have to do like your date math to figure out yourself. I did not do that and last week had a flight home from Austin in May instead of March and

And had I accurately put it all in, I would have seen that my not three day, but like 63 day trip to Austin and would have quickly made a change. Fortunately, it was the same number of points to get back. So it wasn't a big deal. I just happened to notice it before it got expensive. So I used to let some tools like just look at my email and create trips like TripIt and Google used to do that. I don't know if Google still does that, but I turned it off. I sometimes book...

award flights where I know I'm not actually going to be flying this thing. Maybe I'm testing out how you cancel or how you make changes or something. And so to have all these things like suddenly appearing in my calendar as things I'm going to do is just, I don't like that. I like to be intentional about what goes in there.

Okay. I didn't think we would spend that much time, but I'm really glad we went deep on flights and covered basically everything. I think people will get a lot of value out of this. I wanted to talk about hotels in this episode. But based on where we are, we're going to continue the conversation. And I'm going to put that out in a few days, maybe on Saturday as a little bit of a bonus coming out so that we can have a little separation and we don't go so long today. That's a great idea.

Wow. There is so much that we covered in today's episode. I really hope it helps you get the most out of all the points and miles you've worked so hard to collect. It's

Three quick reminders. One, don't forget to check out the show notes for links to all the tools we mentioned and some deals on them, as well as Greg's blog post on the topic and a comparison spreadsheet of award tools that I found after we recorded. Two, if you want to see some of the tools in action, we actually have a video version of this episode where I was sharing my screen and you can head on over to our YouTube channel to check that out, allthehacks.com slash YouTube.

And last, if you want to go deeper on all things Points and Miles, definitely make sure to check out Greg's amazing podcast, Frequent Miler on the Air. And if you enjoyed this episode and want to hear more about tools for finding hotel awards, keep an eye out for that episode on Saturday. And then Greg's co-host, Nick, is joining me for an episode in a few weeks all about the entire process of finding a hotel.

of redeeming your points for maximum value. So this episode was just about the tools. That episode will cover thinking about where to go, how to plan your trip and everything else. I'm so excited to share that one also. That is it for today. Thank you so much for joining me. Podcast at allthehacks.com. If you want to reach out or share ideas for an episode, I will see you on Saturday.