Best Tools for Booking Flights + Hotels with Points & Miles with Greg the Frequent Miler

00:00:00.000 | - We broke the entire landscape of tools

00:00:02.500 | that you can use to get maximum value out of your points.

00:00:05.420 | How did you decide to break it up?

00:00:06.740 | - So first we have flight search tools.

00:00:09.500 | So press go and tell me what flights are available,

00:00:12.060 | how much they cost with points.

00:00:13.540 | Another category is flight discovery,

00:00:16.100 | and that's where the tools are broader.

00:00:18.460 | Then the next two categories are around hotel searches.

00:00:21.820 | So you have hotel points and you wanna use them.

00:00:24.300 | The other category...

00:00:25.780 | - What's been the impact for the ability for you

00:00:28.540 | to get maximum value out of your points

00:00:30.580 | by having access to all these tools?

00:00:32.100 | - It's huge because...

00:00:34.080 | - Greg, thanks for being here.

00:00:36.620 | - Thanks for having me on.

00:00:38.020 | - We actually recorded this episode once

00:00:39.980 | and then so much changed

00:00:41.460 | in the points and miles searching tools

00:00:43.600 | that we said, let's do it again.

00:00:45.420 | And I'm glad we did.

00:00:46.820 | And we have a little bit more structure this time.

00:00:48.900 | - We do.

00:00:49.740 | This time we have a nice outline,

00:00:51.900 | but also we just had so much fun recording before,

00:00:54.900 | figured why not do it again, right?

00:00:56.260 | - I know, usually it's audio problems, video problems,

00:00:59.340 | and you're like, oh, we lost it, we gotta record here.

00:01:01.180 | It's like, nope, it all worked.

00:01:02.660 | We just wanted to do a better job for everyone listening

00:01:05.120 | and hopefully you will all appreciate it.

00:01:07.040 | So what we did was we broke the entire landscape of tools

00:01:11.300 | that you can use to search for flights

00:01:14.380 | and hotels into a couple categories.

00:01:16.760 | And I added one, but you kind of started this list.

00:01:19.820 | So how did you decide to break it up?

00:01:21.620 | - Yeah, so first we have flight search tools.

00:01:25.980 | So you have all these points,

00:01:28.300 | you wanna book a flight to somewhere.

00:01:30.420 | How do you find a good award flights?

00:01:33.780 | There are two broad categories of tools

00:01:37.380 | that I think are important to think of differently.

00:01:40.400 | One is just flight search,

00:01:42.780 | which means you know you wanna go from this airport

00:01:46.900 | to that airport, you know your dates of travel,

00:01:49.940 | press go and tell me what flights are available,

00:01:55.300 | how much they cost with points,

00:01:57.140 | which points I should use to book it.

00:01:59.100 | That's a basic flight search tool.

00:02:01.120 | Another category is flight discovery.

00:02:05.300 | And that's where the tools are broader.

00:02:08.720 | They're not designed to tell you

00:02:12.940 | which exact flights to get from here to there,

00:02:15.860 | but rather to say, you know,

00:02:19.300 | I wanna fly to Europe sometime this summer,

00:02:23.100 | or, you know, you have a broad idea of what you wanna do.

00:02:26.660 | These discovery tools help you find

00:02:30.940 | what are all the best opportunities

00:02:34.420 | for that sort of broad idea.

00:02:36.900 | 'Cause maybe you wanna go to Europe,

00:02:38.660 | but you don't really care about where,

00:02:40.840 | you just want the best flights to get there

00:02:42.740 | and at the best times where the best flights are available.

00:02:46.020 | So that's what flight discovery tools can help you do.

00:02:49.140 | - It could also be, I just wanna fly on a business class

00:02:52.820 | or first-class cabin for a great deal.

00:02:55.140 | And like, if my vacation takes me to Asia

00:02:57.620 | or Europe or South America, so be it.

00:03:00.380 | I'll go anywhere, but give me one of those

00:03:04.900 | once-in-a-lifetime redemption for a low value.

00:03:07.720 | - Absolutely, yep.

00:03:08.860 | Then the next two categories are around hotel searches.

00:03:14.340 | So you have hotel points and you wanna use them.

00:03:17.260 | The most obvious use I'm calling hotel trip planning.

00:03:20.960 | And that's where basically,

00:03:23.220 | you know you're gonna be going to Paris

00:03:25.280 | during July 6th to the 20th,

00:03:30.280 | and show me what hotels are available in Paris at that time

00:03:35.000 | and how much do they cost with points?

00:03:37.500 | That's what I'm calling hotel trip planning.

00:03:39.980 | The other category I'm calling

00:03:43.780 | impossible to find hotel awards.

00:03:46.120 | So this is where you have your heart set

00:03:48.780 | on a particular hotel, but it's a popular hotel.

00:03:53.780 | It's rarely available with points.

00:03:57.080 | Tools like this will help you find when it is available.

00:04:01.040 | And so that's why it's impossible

00:04:03.040 | to find hotels awards searches.

00:04:05.560 | - The only one I added was I added a category

00:04:08.180 | that we'll get to in flights,

00:04:10.080 | which is just some other flight tools.

00:04:12.480 | There's a handful of things that don't necessarily fit

00:04:15.060 | into search and discovery,

00:04:17.600 | but I think are worth kind of just quickly running through

00:04:20.420 | so people know they exist.

00:04:22.260 | And so I'll add a few of my favorites there.

00:04:24.660 | I know you've used a couple of them also.

00:04:26.220 | - Yep, yep.

00:04:27.260 | That'll be good.

00:04:29.060 | So that'll be the last category

00:04:30.500 | is the miscellaneous other flight search tools.

00:04:35.300 | But I think you had some things

00:04:36.260 | that weren't really even flight searches, right?

00:04:38.940 | So it's just miscellaneous other tools, let's say.

00:04:41.460 | - For anyone who has miles,

00:04:42.980 | we're gonna do an episode actually with your co-host

00:04:46.360 | on the Frequent Miler in the Air podcast, Nick,

00:04:48.700 | talking about just general how to search for awards,

00:04:53.140 | not the tactical,

00:04:54.260 | but how to just think about redeeming your points

00:04:56.580 | and how to get the most value out of your points

00:04:58.720 | and ways to structure that and think about it

00:05:01.100 | and how far out to plan.

00:05:02.580 | That episode, we're actually gonna record

00:05:04.320 | at the end of this week.

00:05:05.320 | It'll be out a few weeks after,

00:05:07.420 | but I wanted this one to come out first

00:05:09.740 | because the last thing I wanna tell everyone is,

00:05:11.980 | hey, here's how to start thinking about it,

00:05:13.700 | but not actually give you the tools to use.

00:05:16.820 | So we're gonna talk about the tools.

00:05:19.020 | And then for anyone who wants to zoom out a little

00:05:21.580 | and think, how do I even just start thinking

00:05:23.700 | about the best ways to redeem my points,

00:05:26.100 | when to look, where to look, how to structure the trip,

00:05:28.860 | that'll be coming in a few weeks with Nick.

00:05:31.020 | And that one will certainly make reference

00:05:33.220 | back to this episode.

00:05:34.640 | - Yeah, great point.

00:05:36.720 | Before we dive into flight search tools,

00:05:40.900 | I just wanna give some broad background

00:05:43.620 | because I think a lot of people think,

00:05:46.340 | well, I've got my American Airlines miles.

00:05:48.580 | So obviously the way to search for awards

00:05:52.220 | is to just get on aa.com and type in where I wanna go

00:05:56.940 | and see what comes up.

00:05:58.700 | And there's a couple of problems with that.

00:06:03.140 | One is that you might miss some great opportunities

00:06:08.140 | to use your American Airlines miles

00:06:10.380 | because you didn't look at other dates

00:06:13.540 | or you didn't look at other cities.

00:06:15.740 | So for example, you might be wanting to fly

00:06:18.940 | somewhere far away to South Africa, let's say,

00:06:21.980 | and maybe you started your search in San Francisco,

00:06:26.040 | but the best flight awards might be available from LA.

00:06:32.220 | And so you might be able to book that first leg separately

00:06:36.940 | to get to LA and then get that great award flight.

00:06:40.300 | And you wouldn't have seen that

00:06:41.420 | if you just get on aa.com and do that simple search.

00:06:44.540 | The other thing that I think a lot of people don't realize

00:06:47.900 | is that you probably have access

00:06:50.740 | to a lot of other airline miles than what you know about.

00:06:55.240 | So you might know you have American Airlines miles,

00:06:57.380 | but what you might not know

00:06:58.740 | is that your Chase Ultimate Rewards points

00:07:02.020 | transfer to a bunch of different airline programs

00:07:04.740 | or your American Express Membership Rewards points

00:07:08.340 | can transfer to a number of different programs.

00:07:10.740 | And I think a big part of what we're gonna be talking about

00:07:15.020 | is how these flight search tools

00:07:18.300 | will tell you not just what award flights are available,

00:07:21.740 | but what program you can get those points from.

00:07:24.580 | So you could transfer your Chase points

00:07:26.180 | over to Virgin Atlantic, let's say,

00:07:28.340 | in order to book an Air France flight.

00:07:30.860 | And so that kind of complexity

00:07:35.820 | is something that a lot of people I think are afraid of,

00:07:38.900 | but these tools make it pretty easy to grasp, I think.

00:07:43.900 | - And I don't know if this is still

00:07:45.460 | as much the case as it used to be,

00:07:47.220 | but in the past, at least,

00:07:49.400 | I remember there are some airlines

00:07:51.040 | that you might be able to use your United, Delta, Amac,

00:07:53.940 | or Air France, whatever points on,

00:07:56.640 | with their partners that don't show up on their website.

00:08:00.020 | And so I don't know how much that's still true,

00:08:03.540 | but there were some partners

00:08:05.080 | that you could use points in one program to book,

00:08:07.980 | but you had to know that the availability was there

00:08:10.460 | from another tool to be able to book it.

00:08:12.700 | - Yeah, yeah.

00:08:13.740 | It's still there.

00:08:14.580 | It's not as bad as it used to be.

00:08:16.180 | It used to be very, very common.

00:08:17.980 | But I think a lot of tools have gotten better about that.

00:08:22.320 | And the search tools we're gonna talk about

00:08:27.460 | won't necessarily help you with that specific situation.

00:08:32.900 | So for example, let's say your United Miles

00:08:36.460 | could be used for a particular United partner

00:08:38.740 | that's not available through United's website.

00:08:41.060 | You might, one of these tools might show

00:08:45.220 | that that award flight is available with some other points,

00:08:48.760 | but it's not gonna show that it's available with United.

00:08:50.780 | You have to be smart enough to know,

00:08:52.540 | oh, United's a partner with that airline,

00:08:54.420 | so I could use my United Miles.

00:08:55.940 | And so that's a problem that is not solved

00:08:59.380 | by the tools we're gonna talk about.

00:09:01.380 | - Okay.

00:09:02.860 | All right.

00:09:04.260 | All right, so let's dive in.

00:09:05.260 | Flight search tools.

00:09:06.420 | These are the tools that look like Google Flights

00:09:11.580 | or Kayak Flights or Expedia

00:09:13.820 | when you're searching for flights.

00:09:15.620 | They ask you for where you're going from,

00:09:18.140 | where you're going to, number of passengers,

00:09:20.440 | what are your dates that you're traveling,

00:09:22.540 | and what class of service do you want,

00:09:24.160 | economy, business class, first class.

00:09:26.380 | So there's a whole slew of tools like this.

00:09:30.220 | And in my opinion, the ones that are best

00:09:34.100 | do a number of things.

00:09:35.540 | First of all, they search a number

00:09:37.440 | of different airline programs.

00:09:39.580 | If you just search Delta United American,

00:09:42.980 | you're gonna miss out on a lot of opportunities

00:09:46.300 | for really good priced award flights.

00:09:48.940 | The best tools run quickly, run their searches quickly,

00:09:53.380 | and they can search a range of dates at once.

00:09:57.880 | Now, this is something that you don't normally see

00:10:00.680 | on a Kayak-like tool, the ability to say,

00:10:03.880 | I wanna leave any day this week, or that kind of thing.

00:10:08.640 | But it's more important with award flights,

00:10:11.280 | because sometimes if you just look at one day,

00:10:14.560 | you might see that the best award flight would cost,

00:10:17.800 | I'll make up a number, like 400,000 points for one person.

00:10:22.100 | But if you look at a range of days,

00:10:23.640 | maybe a couple of days later,

00:10:26.440 | there's a flight for 50,000 points.

00:10:29.040 | And it can easily be that dramatic of a difference.

00:10:32.880 | And so, it's very, very helpful to have a program

00:10:39.000 | that can search a range of dates like that.

00:10:41.220 | Another thing that's important

00:10:45.400 | is to be able to search multiple airports at once.

00:10:49.140 | This is something not a lot of tools can do,

00:10:51.200 | but there's a few that can.

00:10:52.440 | And the idea there is a couple of things.

00:10:57.440 | Maybe you're near multiple airports,

00:11:01.080 | and so you wanna specify,

00:11:03.000 | I'm willing to leave from any of these

00:11:05.200 | two or three airports.

00:11:06.720 | But also, where you're flying to,

00:11:11.040 | you can often find better deals

00:11:13.560 | by flying to different airports.

00:11:15.800 | And you might have to then book another short-distance flight

00:11:21.560 | , let's say, to get to where you really

00:11:24.880 | wanna end up ultimately.

00:11:26.240 | But the more you do searches,

00:11:29.080 | the more you're gonna want that capability

00:11:30.840 | to put in multiple airports.

00:11:33.120 | - And just on that note, my wife and I were going to Japan.

00:11:37.020 | We really wanted to do it in business.

00:11:39.200 | From Portland, the flights were in business

00:11:41.120 | were like one quarter of the cost

00:11:43.520 | on the kind of range of dates we wanted

00:11:45.280 | as they were from San Francisco.

00:11:47.080 | It was like 100,000-something round trip

00:11:50.480 | from Portland and like 400,000 round trip in San Francisco.

00:11:54.960 | And the flight to Portland was like $100 each way.

00:11:58.400 | - Yeah.

00:11:59.240 | - So like $200 plus 100,000 points

00:12:02.360 | is infinitely better than spending 100,000 points.

00:12:06.280 | And at the time we had no kids,

00:12:07.680 | so the extra stop was not nearly as much work

00:12:11.120 | as it would be with kids.

00:12:12.320 | So I just wanna really highlight how valuable it can be

00:12:15.880 | to be able to search a range of airports

00:12:18.480 | that are not necessarily a short drive,

00:12:22.320 | but might be a short flight.

00:12:23.760 | - Yeah, great point.

00:12:25.380 | Terminology wise, we call those positioning flights

00:12:29.520 | when you fly to somewhere like Portland

00:12:32.360 | in order to get the flight you ultimately want.

00:12:35.360 | And that can happen at both ends of your trip, right?

00:12:38.040 | Like so maybe you wanted to go to Kyoto,

00:12:41.160 | but the best deals were to fly to Tokyo.

00:12:45.760 | So you fly to Tokyo

00:12:47.000 | and then you take either a positioning flight

00:12:48.840 | from Tokyo to Kyoto, or you take a train.

00:12:52.880 | You know, you have other,

00:12:54.200 | you have different options for positioning,

00:12:56.800 | but that's the idea here.

00:12:59.320 | One of the biggest features,

00:13:01.800 | or most important features I think,

00:13:04.040 | is the ability to set alerts.

00:13:06.140 | So what some people might not realize

00:13:09.720 | is if you sit down and do an award search

00:13:12.840 | to see what's available,

00:13:15.280 | that's not the end of the story.

00:13:17.600 | Like you may find some good flights, you may not,

00:13:21.000 | but what's available changes all the time.

00:13:25.960 | So if you don't find what you like,

00:13:28.640 | I find it's like critical to be able to set up an alert

00:13:32.200 | so that the tool will keep checking

00:13:34.800 | the route you're interested in,

00:13:37.040 | and will email you when something

00:13:39.320 | within your parameters becomes available.

00:13:41.920 | And then you get the email and then you can jump online

00:13:45.000 | and hopefully book that trip.

00:13:47.720 | So that's setting alerts.

00:13:48.880 | And finally, some good tools provide detailed instructions.

00:13:53.760 | So for beginners who don't know

00:13:56.880 | that you can transfer chase points, Virgin Atlantic,

00:14:01.360 | like I was talking about before,

00:14:03.520 | some tools will actually kind of step you through,

00:14:06.160 | here's how to do it, and here's exactly what to do.

00:14:10.040 | Not just to transfer the points,

00:14:11.440 | but then to actually book it

00:14:12.600 | once you have the points in the right place.

00:14:15.520 | So those are the criteria I looked at.

00:14:18.320 | And I looked at a number of tools

00:14:21.560 | and I'll just list them really quick.

00:14:24.040 | AwardLogic, AwardTool, PointMe, PointsPath, PointsYeah,

00:14:29.040 | and Roam.travel.

00:14:31.360 | Those are the tools I looked at.

00:14:33.040 | - Those might've been the ones

00:14:33.880 | you gave a full comparison to,

00:14:35.240 | but I know we also even talked about looking at PointHound.

00:14:38.440 | We talked about playing around

00:14:39.760 | with Oasis new flight search.

00:14:42.040 | So I would say maybe this is the short list,

00:14:46.000 | but I know you've probably played

00:14:47.480 | with half a dozen more tools

00:14:49.120 | that we're not even putting on the short list

00:14:51.280 | that we will then take down to like a final set.

00:14:54.160 | So I'll just flag that every week,

00:14:57.120 | it seems like there's a new tool

00:14:58.840 | or a new feature from a tool.

00:15:00.960 | And so there's a handful of other tools

00:15:04.160 | that I know you've played with in the past or recently

00:15:07.120 | that maybe didn't even make it to this short list,

00:15:09.200 | but I wanna make sure everyone listening knows

00:15:11.160 | that we've probably looked at most of them.

00:15:13.760 | Reward Flight Finder, I think was another one.

00:15:16.200 | So there's so many of them.

00:15:17.840 | - There are, there are so many,

00:15:19.640 | and you're absolutely right.

00:15:21.480 | Some of the ones that made the list made them

00:15:26.080 | because they're very popular tools.

00:15:29.320 | And so I felt like I needed to cover them.

00:15:32.640 | And then some of them made the list

00:15:35.560 | because they have a lot of the capabilities

00:15:38.000 | that I'm looking for that I just described.

00:15:40.400 | And some of the ones that didn't make the list

00:15:43.320 | are ones that are new or new to me.

00:15:46.040 | And I looked at them briefly,

00:15:47.440 | saw, oh, they don't let me do a range of dates.

00:15:49.840 | They don't let me set alerts, you know?

00:15:52.320 | So there wasn't anything that I could see right at a glance

00:15:57.320 | that they weren't gonna make the top of my list.

00:15:59.680 | So there's no reason to do an in-depth comparison with those.

00:16:03.040 | - That makes sense.

00:16:04.000 | - Cutting it down right to the end point here,

00:16:08.080 | so which tools are best for given all those things

00:16:11.440 | I talked about?

00:16:12.440 | And the truth is, as things stand right now,

00:16:17.320 | there are two tools that check most of the boxes,

00:16:20.920 | Pointia and AwardTool.

00:16:23.640 | They are very similar to each other.

00:16:25.960 | They both have almost all of those things I mentioned.

00:16:32.360 | They have alerts, they allow you to do a range of dates,

00:16:37.160 | they let you do multiple airports, and they're fast.

00:16:42.160 | So those are cool things about both of those tools.

00:16:46.600 | And they both have capable free versions.

00:16:49.520 | So as long as you sign up, even for the free version,

00:16:53.680 | you can do meaningful searches, you can do a range of dates,

00:16:56.920 | not as many dates as you would be able to do

00:16:59.600 | if you got the pro version, but still,

00:17:03.760 | and you can set some alerts.

00:17:05.080 | So there's a lot there,

00:17:07.680 | whether you pay for these tools or not.

00:17:09.640 | And they're similar priced, as things stand now,

00:17:13.920 | they're around $90 a year.

00:17:16.120 | And AwardTool has a $12 per month option

00:17:18.960 | if you wanna pay for the tools.

00:17:20.520 | - So I'm pulling up Pointia,

00:17:23.880 | just for anyone that's on video with us.

00:17:26.480 | And just to kind of walk people through high level,

00:17:30.160 | you can go in and you can say,

00:17:31.720 | I'm departing from San Francisco or Los Angeles.

00:17:35.200 | It looks like on Pointia, you can pick two airports.

00:17:39.320 | - That's right.

00:17:40.240 | - Right now, and you can say I'm going to,

00:17:43.080 | let's say Paris or London.

00:17:46.320 | So they've got two, but only two.

00:17:48.720 | So that might be a little bit of a change.

00:17:51.120 | And then for dates, I can say,

00:17:53.320 | let's go from April 1st to April 8th.

00:17:55.840 | I can choose a week window for this one-way flight.

00:17:59.080 | And I can say economy and premium economy,

00:18:01.600 | or business at first, which is nice.

00:18:04.080 | You don't have to search business separately from first.

00:18:06.640 | And you could actually filter the programs,

00:18:09.160 | but I hope that people listening have,

00:18:13.120 | you know, tried to build up a points balance

00:18:15.000 | in enough places that don't start your search

00:18:17.600 | by filtering by the airline.

00:18:19.920 | Do that later, once you get somewhere.

00:18:21.800 | And obviously choose the number of passengers

00:18:24.040 | you're looking for.

00:18:25.040 | And so you'll get a list of all of those flights

00:18:28.280 | and the airlines they come from.

00:18:31.080 | - Yeah, yeah.

00:18:32.080 | - The main difference, if I remember right,

00:18:33.920 | I'm looking, now I'm pulling up a word tool

00:18:36.000 | to do a similar thing.

00:18:37.200 | I can search 16 airports.

00:18:39.760 | Lot more than two.

00:18:40.680 | - You can, but then, so award flights,

00:18:44.760 | award tool, sorry, award tool,

00:18:46.360 | which you're looking at now.

00:18:50.320 | It, yeah, it'll let you do up to 16 airports,

00:18:54.800 | but if you do 16 airports,

00:18:57.120 | then you can only do a single day.

00:19:01.080 | - Yeah, they're basically letting you search 16 vectors,

00:19:05.560 | I guess.

00:19:06.400 | It's like two airports for eight days,

00:19:08.680 | four airports for four days.

00:19:10.400 | - Exactly, exactly.

00:19:12.400 | And then they have this mega version of their search,

00:19:16.440 | which I have no idea why it's separate,

00:19:20.800 | but that gives you 24 degrees of freedom.

00:19:24.120 | So you could do 24 airports,

00:19:25.920 | or you could do one airport in a 24-day date range,

00:19:30.480 | or you could do two, from airports to two airports

00:19:35.480 | in a 12-day date range.

00:19:38.320 | - Now I do know some of these, just to be clear.

00:19:40.200 | I think to dial it up to 16 or use mega,

00:19:44.520 | you need to be a premium member.

00:19:46.040 | - Yes.

00:19:47.120 | - Here's how I'll stack rank it.

00:19:48.280 | I'll put a link to all the deals I've gotten for everyone.

00:19:50.880 | If I don't have one, I'll put all the links

00:19:52.440 | that you guys have gotten to everyone,

00:19:53.800 | and if I don't have one of those,

00:19:54.640 | I'll just link to the website.

00:19:55.760 | But I know that between you and I,

00:19:58.320 | we probably have some type of promo

00:20:01.080 | or referral or something for all these tools.

00:20:04.640 | And it's really nice to be able to search

00:20:06.680 | a handful of different airlines or airports.

00:20:09.840 | - Yeah.

00:20:10.680 | - For me, it's like having three or four

00:20:12.320 | is sometimes a little better

00:20:13.760 | because we just have three in the Bay Area.

00:20:16.680 | So if I can only get two, I can't even add LAX

00:20:20.120 | or something that's really close.

00:20:21.840 | - Yeah, yeah.

00:20:23.480 | - So I like that.

00:20:24.320 | - Yeah, I like that too.

00:20:25.640 | For me from Detroit, if I'm flying, let's say to Europe,

00:20:28.840 | I look at all the major airports

00:20:32.160 | that I can easily get to in one short hop.

00:20:36.120 | And so that includes New York City Airport,

00:20:38.960 | Chicago, Toronto, Washington, DC.

00:20:43.960 | That's my short list of,

00:20:46.600 | and sometimes I'll throw in Boston,

00:20:48.200 | but my short list of airports,

00:20:51.400 | in addition to Detroit itself,

00:20:53.280 | that I'll put in my from list using a word tool.

00:20:56.880 | And yeah, with points here,

00:20:58.280 | I can only put in two at a time,

00:21:00.400 | which is still better than once I only allow one.

00:21:04.380 | - I was gonna put this in the grab bag list of tools,

00:21:07.540 | but for this particular use case,

00:21:10.600 | the tool I use the most is called Flight Connections.

00:21:14.680 | I've heard, I can't remember,

00:21:15.880 | there's another tool that has a name that I can't remember,

00:21:18.880 | but the thing I love about Flight Connections

00:21:22.240 | is I can go in and put, oh, I live in San Francisco,

00:21:24.800 | and it'll just show me all the direct flights.

00:21:27.400 | And so, if I'm starting off thinking

00:21:29.760 | I'd love to go to Europe, my usual choice,

00:21:32.440 | this is how I think about it.

00:21:33.360 | I'm like, if I wanna go to Paris,

00:21:35.420 | obviously the perfect flight is SFO to Paris direct.

00:21:38.900 | But the game with points and miles

00:21:42.320 | is give yourself flexibility on dates,

00:21:44.520 | on departure airports.

00:21:47.040 | So what I'll typically try to do is say,

00:21:48.500 | well, I wanna start an SFO and I wanna go to,

00:21:51.680 | I wanna look at all the airports in Europe,

00:21:54.640 | and then I'll reverse that search and say,

00:21:56.800 | or I'll look at Paris and look at all the places

00:22:00.800 | you can get to Paris from the United States.

00:22:03.280 | Now, just looking at this map right now,

00:22:05.340 | I'm like, well, now I'm well over the 60,

00:22:07.000 | I might not even be able to do a mega search here.

00:22:08.660 | I might have to do two searches,

00:22:10.320 | one from all of the US to Paris

00:22:12.240 | and one from all of Europe to San Francisco.

00:22:16.840 | And we'll get to that when we talk about discovery,

00:22:18.980 | 'cause I feel like we're kind of slowly

00:22:21.200 | crossing the line into discovery tools.

00:22:23.840 | But I think Flight Connections is the best tool I've found

00:22:26.960 | for finding which airlines fly direct from an airport.

00:22:31.520 | Yeah, no, I use it all the time for that purpose.

00:22:34.760 | So for example, when I had a flight

00:22:38.720 | from Queenstown, New Zealand, I wanted to return home.

00:22:42.920 | And Queenstown is a pretty small airport,

00:22:46.320 | and so I used Flight Connections to see,

00:22:49.480 | okay, there are nonstop flights from Queenstown to,

00:22:54.480 | and don't check my memory here,

00:22:58.180 | but to within New Zealand, Christchurch and Auckland,

00:23:02.760 | but also to some places in Australia like Sydney.

00:23:06.200 | And ultimately, I ended up getting a flight back from Sydney

00:23:11.200 | and so I separately positioned,

00:23:14.880 | booked a positioning flight from Queenstown

00:23:17.240 | to Sydney for that.

00:23:19.160 | - Yep.

00:23:20.000 | - I see it right now.

00:23:21.440 | - Okay.

00:23:22.280 | - Yeah, so. - There you go.

00:23:23.480 | - Hopefully that's helpful.

00:23:25.200 | You know, you could be playing along.

00:23:26.600 | I should mention, all these websites,

00:23:28.480 | we're gonna put links to the show notes,

00:23:29.900 | you could play along at home and kind of play

00:23:31.840 | with these tools as we're talking about them.

00:23:34.320 | For many of them, for award tool endpoints,

00:23:36.720 | yeah, which were your kind of top two,

00:23:39.040 | the free tool gives you some access.

00:23:41.680 | Is there a general thought about what paying gives you?

00:23:46.120 | - So in both cases, you get a lot more flexibility

00:23:50.120 | with how many airports or dates you can search.

00:23:54.320 | So for points, yeah, for example,

00:23:55.720 | you can only do one airport if you have the free version.

00:24:00.200 | And I think you could do four day date range

00:24:02.120 | on the free version there.

00:24:03.240 | And award tool gives you like four degrees of freedom

00:24:07.320 | that you could spend any way you want

00:24:08.720 | with four airports or four dates kind of thing.

00:24:12.440 | - Okay.

00:24:13.280 | - So that just goes way up when you pay for it.

00:24:17.440 | Now award tool, that mega search thing,

00:24:20.760 | even a free version will give you a few,

00:24:23.960 | I can't remember the number,

00:24:25.140 | but it'll give you a few times you can use that mega search,

00:24:28.640 | the full power of it from,

00:24:32.080 | I can't remember a few a day or a few a month or whatever,

00:24:34.760 | but yeah, I think it's a few a day.

00:24:37.180 | So that's pretty good right there.

00:24:39.820 | - What would any of these other tools,

00:24:41.680 | when would they come into play?

00:24:43.000 | - Two things that these tools don't do is they don't search,

00:24:48.000 | they're not the best at searching

00:24:50.040 | all possible award programs.

00:24:52.620 | And they don't provide detailed instructions for a beginner

00:24:56.540 | to show you how to move the points from Chase or Amex

00:25:01.540 | or Citi or Capital One to an airline program

00:25:05.320 | and then how to book it.

00:25:07.000 | That kind of detail is something that you'll find

00:25:10.800 | in a tool called Point Me.

00:25:13.000 | And Point Me also probably searches

00:25:16.040 | the most different programs of any of the tools here.

00:25:21.040 | So Point Me--

00:25:22.480 | - Are there any major holes?

00:25:24.080 | Are there any like big obvious gotchas

00:25:28.080 | that Points Yeah or Award Tool aren't doing?

00:25:32.520 | - Probably the biggest is Singapore.

00:25:37.120 | So if, and this is very specific,

00:25:41.520 | but if your heart's set on flying Singapore suites,

00:25:45.440 | which is amazing, first class,

00:25:48.920 | fully enclosed type of experience,

00:25:54.480 | the only way to book that is with Singapore's own miles.

00:26:00.000 | And you can transfer to Singapore miles

00:26:03.580 | from pretty much any transferable points program.

00:26:06.800 | So it's easy to get the miles,

00:26:08.640 | but among the popular tools, only Point Me,

00:26:13.640 | if I'm remembering right, actually searches Singapore.

00:26:17.440 | So if you're using these other tools

00:26:20.040 | and you wanna fly Singapore,

00:26:21.680 | you either need to use Point Me

00:26:22.900 | or log into Singapore's website itself

00:26:25.440 | and do your searches there, which is how I do it.

00:26:28.400 | - Yeah.

00:26:29.240 | And I'm just, I just remembered one thing.

00:26:30.920 | So I'm sharing my screen a little bit here

00:26:33.120 | and I was looking at Points Yeah,

00:26:35.080 | and I think the same thing is true on Award Tool.

00:26:37.400 | One important thing,

00:26:38.960 | they all have the same kind of filtering tools.

00:26:41.240 | So you can sort them, you can search by airports,

00:26:43.800 | arrival airports, how many stops are you taking?

00:26:47.400 | What's the max number of points or taxes?

00:26:50.120 | One thing that I think is important

00:26:51.560 | that a lot of people might forget

00:26:52.600 | is this premium cabin thing.

00:26:54.460 | I got this flight and I said,

00:26:56.680 | "Wow, I wanna go from LAX to Paris.

00:26:59.080 | It's only 32,000 points in business class.

00:27:01.760 | That's incredible."

00:27:03.040 | And then I look and I said,

00:27:03.940 | "No, it's 21% in business class.

00:27:06.400 | It's LAX to London in economy

00:27:09.840 | and then Heathrow to Frankfurt in business

00:27:12.840 | and then Frankfurt to Paris in business."

00:27:14.680 | - Yeah, yeah.

00:27:15.520 | - So like, first off,

00:27:16.960 | if you're trying to get from London to Paris,

00:27:18.940 | taking a one-stop flight through Frankfurt

00:27:21.280 | is probably one of the least efficient ways

00:27:23.440 | that you could get there.

00:27:25.300 | But two, I would advise you to set that marker

00:27:28.880 | to be somewhere at least over 80% or close.

00:27:32.800 | Otherwise, you'll be stuck in a place

00:27:34.680 | where you're gonna end up finding awards

00:27:37.520 | that aren't really what you want.

00:27:39.540 | And then the other bummer one is that taxes.

00:27:44.200 | So I'm looking on this search and it's like,

00:27:46.760 | "Well, now I found San Francisco to London

00:27:49.480 | for 38,000 points in business.

00:27:52.320 | That's great."

00:27:53.320 | But it's on Virgin Atlantic

00:27:54.720 | and you can see the fees are $1,000, $998.

00:27:59.400 | And so not to say that 38,000 points and $1,000

00:28:04.400 | isn't a better deal than paying for that ticket outright.

00:28:08.860 | It probably actually is,

00:28:10.520 | but I wouldn't say it's a screaming deal.

00:28:14.700 | - Yeah, yeah, absolutely right.

00:28:17.400 | And another parameter that I like to set often

00:28:21.080 | is the time of day, like departure time, arrival time,

00:28:25.460 | depending on what's going on.

00:28:27.040 | If I don't wanna get up at three in the morning

00:28:30.400 | to catch a flight,

00:28:31.720 | I might set the minimum time to a later time.

00:28:35.520 | And especially if I'm doing something

00:28:39.120 | where I have to catch another flight

00:28:40.480 | or get to somewhere in time, I use that a lot.

00:28:45.320 | So those can be really helpful as well.

00:28:48.720 | - Yeah, and then as just a little example here,

00:28:52.080 | I'm looking at points here and it says,

00:28:54.300 | "Oh, you can use these points on life miles."

00:28:56.360 | And I'm like, "That sounds great. Let's do it."

00:28:58.960 | Nice, a lot of these tools all show you,

00:29:01.720 | here's how many points it's gonna take

00:29:03.320 | to get your 61,200 life miles.

00:29:07.720 | And most of them are looking

00:29:09.280 | at the current transfer bonuses.

00:29:10.840 | Right now, Citi has a 25% transfer bonus.

00:29:13.240 | So they say, "If you have Citi points, that's the deal."

00:29:16.520 | It looks like they do have a transfer guide here,

00:29:19.480 | but it's certainly not for everything.

00:29:22.600 | And so they have a Citi transfer guide

00:29:24.640 | that's a little bit generic.

00:29:26.840 | Otherwise, if they don't have one for an airline,

00:29:29.060 | it just takes you to the website.

00:29:31.200 | When I go to point.me and I say, "Show me how to do this."

00:29:36.200 | I guess here's the downside.

00:29:38.000 | I have to wait for point.me to finish loading.

00:29:40.200 | - That's the thing.

00:29:41.020 | We didn't talk about the downsides to point.me.

00:29:43.480 | It is painfully slow.

00:29:46.560 | It takes about two minutes, which may not sound bad

00:29:50.840 | if you just hear the word two minutes,

00:29:52.240 | but when you're running searches,

00:29:55.040 | and especially if you wanna do a bunch of different ones,

00:29:57.840 | I find it excruciating.

00:29:59.560 | And it's made worse by the fact

00:30:01.040 | that point.me doesn't do date ranges.

00:30:03.160 | So if you wanna check multiple days,

00:30:05.600 | you gotta run separate searches.

00:30:08.000 | It only does individual airports.

00:30:10.000 | Again, you wanna check multiple airports,

00:30:12.040 | that's more searches, and it won't do alerts.

00:30:14.520 | So a lot of downsides to point.me,

00:30:16.760 | but the fact that it gives such detailed instructions

00:30:21.520 | for how to transfer the points,

00:30:23.580 | how to book the flight once you have the points

00:30:26.520 | is really important for beginners.

00:30:28.120 | And it totally could be worth someone buying a day pass

00:30:33.120 | to just use point.me to step them through that process.

00:30:38.840 | - Totally.

00:30:39.960 | - Even after they've,

00:30:41.440 | if they found an award through some other tool,

00:30:43.600 | you might wanna jump over to point.me

00:30:45.720 | to hold your hand through actually booking it.

00:30:49.600 | - Yeah, I'm looking right now.

00:30:50.440 | It's like, how do I book this flight on Virgin Atlantic?

00:30:52.600 | And this is a multi-step process

00:30:55.800 | of here's how to create the account.

00:30:57.840 | Here's how to create the account on Virgin.

00:31:00.240 | Here's how to create the account.

00:31:01.260 | Here's how to search.

00:31:02.140 | Here's how to walk you through one by one by one

00:31:05.160 | for each individual transferable currency,

00:31:07.880 | how to transfer it.

00:31:09.000 | So I would definitely say,

00:31:12.360 | the way I use point.me is,

00:31:14.140 | if I'm trying to walk someone through it,

00:31:16.600 | I say, I found you a flight on these dates,

00:31:18.840 | go get a day pass to point.me so you can see how it works

00:31:21.960 | and then it'll walk you through it.

00:31:24.860 | Sometimes I use it as a validator.

00:31:27.440 | Not to say I don't trust the other tools,

00:31:29.460 | but we didn't talk much about accuracy,

00:31:31.800 | but I think that's important.

00:31:34.000 | And I feel like point.me,

00:31:36.960 | I've had the least number of issues

00:31:38.860 | where it shows me something that's not there.

00:31:41.120 | And then sometimes it's that like,

00:31:43.960 | I'm about to book this flight in cash.

00:31:46.320 | I only have one flight I want.

00:31:48.160 | It's on these days.

00:31:49.320 | It's on these times.

00:31:50.800 | I'm not planning on using points,

00:31:52.740 | but let's do one search where the dates aren't flexible,

00:31:55.640 | the airports aren't flexible,

00:31:56.720 | just to see if miles and points are a better deal.

00:31:59.760 | And that's where I think point.me can also do really great

00:32:02.160 | is if you have no flexibility and you just wanna see,

00:32:05.120 | is there a great way to do this with points?

00:32:07.480 | I think it's good.

00:32:08.440 | Any other things?

00:32:12.320 | - Yeah, I mean, I think that's a really good point about it.

00:32:15.400 | Although I had found a Life Miles flight

00:32:20.400 | a couple of weeks ago through a word tool

00:32:24.160 | and I didn't see it on points yet.

00:32:26.360 | So I checked point.me and it wasn't there either.

00:32:30.400 | So I thought, oh, it's Phantom Space,

00:32:31.940 | but then I was able to bring it up and book it on Life Miles.

00:32:35.120 | So there's no tool that's perfect.

00:32:39.160 | And I don't know why even with these tools,

00:32:45.120 | sometimes you could run the same exact search

00:32:48.320 | multiple times and you'll see a flight

00:32:50.400 | like the Life Miles one show up,

00:32:52.120 | but then not show up the next time you run it or vice versa.

00:32:55.280 | So I don't know why they're unreliable in that way,

00:33:00.280 | but there is some mystery to the results

00:33:05.780 | that come back, unfortunately.

00:33:07.280 | - Yep, and you briefly mentioned awards

00:33:10.960 | or alerts are important.

00:33:12.680 | Point.me does not have alerts,

00:33:14.760 | but if I'm using a word tool and I say,

00:33:17.600 | well, I do wanna go to Paris

00:33:18.920 | and I'd like to do it in business class

00:33:20.920 | on a specific date range.

00:33:23.200 | And let's say there's nothing there.

00:33:26.020 | You can say, hey, just let me know.

00:33:27.960 | - Yeah, exactly.

00:33:28.800 | - And you can say track prices almost in the same way

00:33:31.600 | you would do on a Google flights,

00:33:34.820 | but you can also say, set an alert for a specific route.

00:33:38.920 | - Right, so you would say, I wanna go to Paris.

00:33:44.240 | Look at these date ranges and alert me.

00:33:46.640 | If you find a point price that's less than,

00:33:50.140 | I'll make up a number, 100,000 points one way.

00:33:53.340 | And you could say, by the way,

00:33:56.980 | make sure the percentage of premium cabin

00:34:00.760 | is more than 60% or whatever.

00:34:04.280 | And maybe you wanna limit it to,

00:34:07.960 | I don't want anything more than one stop connections.

00:34:12.800 | That's how I use that tool.

00:34:14.760 | - And you can set the number of people,

00:34:15.840 | which I think if you're traveling with three or four people.

00:34:18.680 | - Oh, that's critical.

00:34:19.520 | - This whole game is very hard,

00:34:21.400 | but you could set, it looks like you set 25 alerts,

00:34:24.680 | but similar to the way the search works,

00:34:27.180 | I'm looking now at setting an alert

00:34:28.980 | from San Francisco to Paris for a date range of four days.

00:34:32.440 | That's gonna use four of my 25 alerts.

00:34:35.520 | - It will.

00:34:36.360 | - So it's all a currency of how many you have access to,

00:34:39.880 | whether it's searching or alerts,

00:34:41.340 | but at least you have them.

00:34:43.440 | And I don't think it's hard.

00:34:44.840 | I think it's easy to forget.

00:34:46.680 | You already said this, and I'll just say it again.

00:34:48.980 | It's easy to forget that this stuff changes all the time.

00:34:52.360 | - It really does.

00:34:53.200 | - And so I would tell someone that said,

00:34:54.800 | "Hey, I wanna go to Paris on this three date window,

00:34:58.800 | like six months from now."

00:35:01.080 | And the answer is like,

00:35:02.520 | between the day you wanna take off and now,

00:35:04.800 | it will probably become available

00:35:06.640 | and become unavailable multiple times.

00:35:09.240 | - That's true.

00:35:10.480 | And on some routes, some airlines,

00:35:14.200 | the chance of it becoming available

00:35:16.120 | actually increases dramatically

00:35:18.100 | as you get within a few weeks or a few days of the flight,

00:35:21.720 | which lends a whole nother fun

00:35:25.560 | to people who really wanna live on the edge

00:35:27.440 | and wait till the last minute to book their flights.

00:35:30.600 | But I expect that you and Nick

00:35:32.480 | will talk about strategies around that,

00:35:34.600 | around that idea of booking good enough flights

00:35:39.660 | and then setting alerts for things like this.

00:35:42.620 | And if something comes available a few days

00:35:44.820 | before your flight,

00:35:46.140 | canceling the original and booking the,

00:35:48.180 | not in that order,

00:35:49.140 | and booking the better one.

00:35:51.760 | So let me re-say that.

00:35:53.180 | You wanna book the better one first,

00:35:55.300 | make sure that booking works,

00:35:57.700 | you don't have any problems booking it,

00:35:59.500 | then cancel your original one.

00:36:02.460 | - If you had the ballpark,

00:36:05.580 | these tools didn't always exist, right?

00:36:07.780 | It used to be a long process

00:36:10.520 | to figure out how to make all of this work out,

00:36:12.860 | calling, asking, what about this date?

00:36:15.700 | What about this date?

00:36:16.540 | What about this date?

00:36:17.900 | You know, what's been the impact

00:36:20.060 | for the ability for you to get maximum value

00:36:23.460 | out of your points by having access to all these tools?

00:36:26.860 | - Oh, I mean, it's huge because,

00:36:30.220 | I mean, it just makes it so much easier

00:36:32.100 | to find what you want.

00:36:34.480 | You don't have to be an expert geek at this stuff

00:36:37.840 | to find good things.

00:36:39.160 | I think that's the biggest change.

00:36:41.840 | - And finding good things is saving thousands

00:36:45.160 | or maybe tens of thousands of dollars

00:36:47.440 | by getting the right deal.

00:36:49.040 | - Right, it's either saving huge amount of money

00:36:51.960 | or probably often it means flying business

00:36:56.560 | or first class instead of economy,

00:36:58.320 | which you might've done had you not had access

00:37:00.880 | to these awards and these tools

00:37:02.920 | to help you find those flights.

00:37:04.840 | So yeah, it's huge.

00:37:08.880 | Flip side is, as these tools make it so easy

00:37:11.320 | to find these awards,

00:37:12.840 | they probably get snapped up faster

00:37:16.360 | than they would without the tools.

00:37:18.380 | And so people who knew before how to find these awards

00:37:23.380 | might be frustrated by having fewer available

00:37:26.680 | because other people are snapping them up.

00:37:29.400 | - Yeah.

00:37:30.420 | Now, two quick tools we didn't talk about much.

00:37:33.480 | One is PointsPath, which in the last couple of weeks,

00:37:37.060 | I've actually gotten a lot of use out of.

00:37:39.400 | And it's a Chrome extension.

00:37:41.080 | So it doesn't actually have a website.

00:37:42.800 | I mean, it has a website, but you're not using the website.

00:37:45.360 | And it pops up when you're doing searches on Google Flights.

00:37:50.360 | And at first glance, I was like,

00:37:53.980 | "Hmm, when am I gonna use this?"

00:37:55.640 | And the example I just searched for did not bear fruit

00:38:00.280 | like I had expected.

00:38:01.820 | But I recently went to South by Southwest in Austin,

00:38:05.140 | and I was looking at flights,

00:38:06.820 | and I had waited too long to book them.

00:38:08.660 | And I was like, "Oh my gosh, flights are really expensive."

00:38:11.780 | Like $500 one-way flights from San Francisco.

00:38:15.640 | And on Google Flights, it popped up and said,

00:38:17.240 | "Hey, just so you know, it's only 12,500 AA miles."

00:38:22.240 | And I was like, "What?"

00:38:23.860 | Like, I blew my mind that I could get such a good deal

00:38:27.420 | using points on just a basic domestic flight,

00:38:30.740 | direct, exact dates I wanted.

00:38:33.520 | And I almost assumed that I wouldn't get a good deal

00:38:36.960 | and never looked anywhere else.

00:38:38.760 | So I think it's a no-brainer

00:38:40.760 | to turn the PointsPath Chrome extension on

00:38:43.560 | because I'm already doing my cash searching

00:38:45.580 | on Google Flights.

00:38:47.000 | If it happens to find something,

00:38:48.800 | granted, I think it's only searching

00:38:51.240 | American United Delta.

00:38:53.520 | - They just added JetBlue as well.

00:38:55.360 | - And JetBlue? - Yep.

00:38:56.320 | - So it's not searching everything,

00:38:59.560 | but it is searching enough that I've actually saved

00:39:03.880 | a few hundred dollars just in the past few weeks

00:39:06.120 | having that extension on.

00:39:07.400 | - That's a good commercial for that tool.

00:39:09.000 | Yeah, no, I feel the same way.

00:39:10.200 | I love having it, not because I would...

00:39:12.680 | I would never, ever seek it out.

00:39:16.480 | If they had a website,

00:39:18.120 | search here for these four programs.

00:39:21.240 | I would never seek out this tool,

00:39:22.880 | but having it installed in my browser

00:39:25.800 | so that any time I use Google Flights,

00:39:27.480 | it just automatically shows me the point prices

00:39:30.200 | of flights I'm looking for anyway,

00:39:32.760 | I find really, really valuable.

00:39:35.740 | Although I have to say that it's still worth,

00:39:39.800 | in the example you gave,

00:39:42.080 | running PointsPath or...

00:39:45.600 | Or, I'm sorry, running one of the other tools,

00:39:48.440 | AwardTool or Points, yeah.

00:39:53.560 | Or really any of these other tools that you like

00:39:56.480 | that cover a lot of different programs,

00:39:59.000 | because you might've found that there was another program

00:40:01.960 | that would fly you that same flight

00:40:05.360 | instead of 12,500 American miles.

00:40:07.360 | There might've been one that you could book for 8,000 miles,

00:40:12.280 | 8,000 points, you know, with Avios or something.

00:40:15.760 | - Yeah, that happens to me all the time.

00:40:17.740 | Domestic flights, find something cheap on United,

00:40:21.400 | book it on Avionca for half the price.

00:40:24.560 | - Yeah, yeah, no, exactly, exactly.

00:40:27.240 | And so that's, again, why these tools are so darn useful.

00:40:32.240 | - Yeah, and then the only other one was Roam Travel.

00:40:36.640 | I'm curious, it made it into this kind of shortlist,

00:40:41.640 | so what allowed it to make the shortlist,

00:40:46.200 | even though we haven't talked about it yet?

00:40:47.560 | - Yeah, the reason it made the shortlist

00:40:49.840 | is because it was the first tool to compete

00:40:53.540 | with the expensive older tools,

00:40:58.540 | AwardLogic and PointMe,

00:41:01.660 | and it did sort of the similar things as those tools,

00:41:07.040 | but it's free and fast.

00:41:11.000 | And so it was the first tool

00:41:12.800 | that was really competitive with those,

00:41:15.040 | but then when Pointia and AwardTool came out,

00:41:19.320 | Roam.travel has been kind of left in the dust.

00:41:22.760 | And so until they leapfrogged those others,

00:41:27.760 | at this point, I don't see a reason to turn to Roam.travel,

00:41:32.080 | but all these tools are constantly innovating,

00:41:36.160 | and I'd be surprised if we don't see Roam.travel

00:41:39.680 | all of a sudden introduce great new features,

00:41:41.880 | and then Pointia will have to come back

00:41:44.920 | and get better and so on.

00:41:47.120 | So it's good competition for us as consumers of these tools.

00:41:52.120 | - Yep, absolutely.

00:41:54.640 | Okay, let's talk about flight discovery.

00:41:57.120 | - Yeah.

00:41:58.520 | So remember, the idea here is you wanna ask broad questions,

00:42:03.520 | like, "I have a family of four,

00:42:07.600 | and I wanna go to Europe this summer,"

00:42:09.360 | or, "I just wanna fly international first class to somewhere.

00:42:14.360 | Doesn't matter where,

00:42:15.280 | but show me where the good deals are," things like that.

00:42:19.600 | And there are a bunch of tools that do this,

00:42:23.880 | and some of them are the same tools we already talked about,

00:42:27.240 | and they have a different mode that does this.

00:42:29.800 | What's common across all of them

00:42:32.640 | is they use cached search results.

00:42:34.760 | So they do their searches ahead of time,

00:42:37.080 | they store all this information,

00:42:38.760 | and so they can answer these broad queries like this quickly,

00:42:44.240 | but you have to keep in mind two things.

00:42:46.840 | One, they don't have all possible flights in there.

00:42:51.840 | They only have the flights that they've looked at,

00:42:55.640 | and the other thing you need to keep in mind

00:42:58.640 | is whatever the tools think they know

00:43:02.000 | about what's available might not be true anymore,

00:43:04.400 | because these are cached,

00:43:06.480 | and we don't really have visibility usually

00:43:08.600 | into how old the data is.

00:43:10.960 | Sometimes you do, sometimes you don't,

00:43:12.360 | but despite those negatives,

00:43:17.360 | it really is possible to find a lot of things super quickly,

00:43:22.520 | and then to check the results quickly with these tools,

00:43:27.760 | especially, I'll just tell you, I looked at a bunch of them.

00:43:31.640 | I looked at point.me/explore.

00:43:33.680 | I looked at Roam's SkyView tool.

00:43:37.520 | I looked at AwardTool Panorama,

00:43:40.240 | and Seats.Aero, which is sort of the original tool

00:43:45.240 | that does this cached result thing,

00:43:47.520 | and ultimately, Pointia, their discovery tool

00:43:52.520 | is called Daydream Explorer.

00:43:54.620 | It just kind of beat the pants off all the others

00:43:59.360 | in doing the types of things I tested it for,

00:44:03.400 | and so that's, at least for now,

00:44:08.440 | my go-to for finding these things.

00:44:10.720 | I was able to do like a really,

00:44:12.560 | what I thought was a difficult challenge.

00:44:15.740 | Like in my test, I started in an airport

00:44:18.680 | that doesn't have, it's not a big airport, Cleveland.

00:44:23.680 | I had to start there and look for a family of four

00:44:28.000 | to go business class in the summer to Europe,

00:44:32.400 | and I thought, oh, that'll be a really hard thing

00:44:34.120 | for any tool to find.

00:44:37.040 | I found good options immediately through Daydream Explorer

00:44:42.040 | and through several other scenarios, too.

00:44:48.120 | It had the most complete results and the best features.

00:44:53.400 | And when I talk about features,

00:44:58.860 | one feature that I really like

00:45:03.240 | that some of the others don't have

00:45:05.000 | is not just being able to say flexibly

00:45:08.180 | where you're going to,

00:45:09.380 | like to be able to say I want to go to Europe,

00:45:11.800 | but also I want to be able to broadly say

00:45:13.640 | I want to come from not just Cleveland

00:45:17.960 | but the United States or North America

00:45:20.920 | because I'm willing to position to another place,

00:45:24.080 | or maybe for my return travel,

00:45:26.320 | I want to say I'm coming from Europe

00:45:28.640 | and going to Cleveland, for example.

00:45:30.560 | Yeah, I want that kind of flexibility,

00:45:32.680 | and Daydream Explorer gives you that.

00:45:35.980 | Another thing that not all tools do,

00:45:39.320 | and this is kind of unbelievable,

00:45:40.640 | but Pointsia does do,

00:45:43.380 | is let you say how many people would be traveling.

00:45:47.200 | Like, doesn't that seem like

00:45:48.480 | that's gotta be the most basic thing that they would all do,

00:45:51.540 | but it's actually fairly rare in this space so far,

00:45:56.080 | so that's a obviously really good feature.

00:46:00.120 | And we talked before about the ability

00:46:02.600 | to set minimum premium cabin

00:46:05.680 | so that you don't want to end up with finding flights

00:46:09.000 | that are predominantly economy

00:46:11.240 | and a short leg in business class that lets you do that.

00:46:16.240 | Yeah.

00:46:17.180 | Now, you might know this

00:46:19.720 | 'cause I've played with them all logged in,

00:46:22.160 | but are a lot of these exploration tools available free?

00:46:26.720 | Because I do know that Point.me

00:46:29.080 | made the Explore feature free to everyone recently,

00:46:32.760 | and so I don't know if the other tools,

00:46:36.000 | exploration tools are free or not.

00:46:38.400 | Yeah, it depends.

00:46:40.000 | It varies from tool to tool,

00:46:41.040 | but the Pointsia Daydream Explorer,

00:46:43.700 | you get full functionality, as far as I could tell,

00:46:45.840 | from the free version,

00:46:47.800 | and so that's pretty awesome.

00:46:50.940 | Wow, okay.

00:46:52.440 | Yeah, I'm playing with them all.

00:46:54.560 | Some of the features that we haven't talked about

00:46:56.940 | that are interesting, I'm looking right now,

00:46:59.660 | a lot of them let you pick the kind of trip you want.

00:47:02.380 | So you could say ski trip or beach trip

00:47:04.780 | or that kind of stuff.

00:47:05.660 | All they've really done is gone

00:47:07.020 | and just categorized all these airports as to what they are,

00:47:09.620 | but the ability to go in and say,

00:47:12.440 | hey, I want to go to the beach

00:47:14.700 | and I want to go nonstop in business class

00:47:17.400 | from wherever I am and for four people

00:47:20.460 | and come up with something is really cool.

00:47:22.020 | So I think-

00:47:23.180 | It is really cool.

00:47:24.020 | And I have to admit, I did not test them

00:47:26.600 | to see who could do beach or ski vacations

00:47:30.300 | or golf vacations or whatever it is better than the others.

00:47:33.900 | I'm dubious about their ability

00:47:36.580 | to correctly categorize things

00:47:38.460 | 'cause just about anywhere you go,

00:47:42.220 | it may be a way to get to a beach,

00:47:46.380 | but it might not be the primary beach you want to go to.

00:47:52.620 | Well, I'm seeing some great options

00:47:54.100 | for four people from San Francisco

00:47:55.940 | to go to the beach right now in Mexico,

00:47:59.560 | in Hawaii, on nonstop, first in business.

00:48:02.660 | So I am inspired.

00:48:05.160 | One tool that we haven't talked about yet much

00:48:10.140 | is seats.arrow.

00:48:11.300 | Yeah.

00:48:12.820 | So seats.arrow, this is what I think

00:48:17.460 | has started this whole class of discovery tools.

00:48:22.340 | It was the first one I knew of anyway,

00:48:24.700 | where they would upfront run a million award searches,

00:48:29.700 | store all the results,

00:48:32.800 | and then let you just explore quickly

00:48:36.180 | to see what's available.

00:48:37.940 | Now it does it in a very nerdy,

00:48:42.580 | you have to understand what the two letter codes

00:48:46.660 | for airlines and airports are and things like that.

00:48:50.940 | But it's incredibly powerful,

00:48:55.940 | and I still turn to it regularly for specific things.

00:49:01.780 | So it's not as good as Points Yes, Daydream Explorer

00:49:11.460 | for just tell me across all programs,

00:49:19.940 | where can I fly in business class this summer,

00:49:23.020 | that kind of thing.

00:49:23.860 | It's not really good for that.

00:49:25.380 | But if you have an idea of more specific things

00:49:30.380 | that you want, like so for example,

00:49:33.100 | you know you wanna use your Emirates miles

00:49:38.100 | to fly Emirates first class.

00:49:40.620 | It's a great tool for quickly identifying

00:49:44.820 | all of the first class award availability

00:49:48.220 | that it has cached.

00:49:50.140 | Yeah, I will say the reason why it's a little confusing

00:49:55.100 | to use and you know this is,

00:49:56.880 | when you're browsing the website,

00:49:58.220 | it's like they have a section called Explore,

00:50:00.420 | and you pick the program,

00:50:03.580 | and you can do some much broader searching.

00:50:06.800 | So you could say,

00:50:07.640 | just look at everything I can do with Air France,

00:50:10.100 | and now I get all these features.

00:50:12.100 | But when you do your search on that,

00:50:13.660 | you're not gonna get any United flights,

00:50:16.180 | or any Lufthansa flights or anything.

00:50:18.280 | And so the most flexible searching is within a program.

00:50:22.460 | Yeah, yeah, exactly.

00:50:25.500 | Also, what you might not realize is that

00:50:29.060 | if you wanna see Delta flights,

00:50:32.440 | picking Air France or Virgin Atlantic

00:50:35.300 | is what you wanna explore to see Delta flights.

00:50:38.660 | So you have to know those kind of nerdy things,

00:50:41.100 | that that's what this tool does

00:50:42.900 | is because they're partners with Delta.

00:50:45.400 | And so, yeah, it really was designed

00:50:50.400 | for people who know what they're doing.

00:50:52.920 | The author of the tool tells me

00:50:55.960 | he's working on like some sort of mega Explore feature

00:51:00.480 | where it would maybe combine all of those programs together

00:51:04.640 | on one massive Explore,

00:51:06.400 | which I would love that,

00:51:07.320 | because I'd love the Explore,

00:51:09.460 | how powerful the Explore interface is.

00:51:12.580 | And, but it frustrates me that I have to switch

00:51:17.580 | between programs to do a full search.

00:51:21.840 | But what I did, I did notice recently,

00:51:23.820 | so I'm doing a search on my screen.

00:51:25.320 | I went to the search tab, which searches all the programs,

00:51:28.960 | and search US to Europe in, let's just pick July 15th,

00:51:33.960 | plus or minus 60 days.

00:51:39.260 | And I can say for at least two people on direct flights

00:51:44.260 | and run a search.

00:51:46.800 | Now, normally I thought this search would work.

00:51:50.840 | In this case I have, we encountered an unexpected error.

00:51:55.000 | So let's lower it to plus or minus 28 days

00:51:57.640 | just to see if it works.

00:51:59.500 | And so there is the ability to do this.

00:52:02.480 | I noticed that depending on your from and your to,

00:52:05.620 | sometimes the number of days gets ratcheted down

00:52:08.760 | and down and down.

00:52:09.600 | If you search US to anywhere,

00:52:11.160 | you could do a plus or minus three day search.

00:52:13.800 | So it's funny, 'cause we didn't talk about it

00:52:16.840 | in the first set of tools for searching flights.

00:52:19.400 | We didn't really talk about it in the discovery.

00:52:21.960 | I find that it's actually probably maybe one

00:52:25.240 | of the best tools that does both.

00:52:27.920 | You just really need to spend time understanding

00:52:30.480 | how to use it to get the most out of it.

00:52:33.080 | And for a lot of people, this is not gonna be that.

00:52:36.400 | However, I just searched and I said,

00:52:39.160 | "Hey, I want United States to Europe 28 days

00:52:43.640 | "within the middle of July, two people direct flights."

00:52:46.860 | And I got 17,000 flights.

00:52:50.760 | Now, if I wanted to filter that down to business,

00:52:53.940 | and let's say I don't have any American miles,

00:52:55.960 | so I wanna filter out American and Alaska.

00:52:58.740 | I can do that.

00:53:01.560 | I can filter the number of fees.

00:53:03.680 | And so you can kind of work your way to get there,

00:53:06.880 | but I would say highest learning curve,

00:53:09.760 | but maybe the most ROI if you figure it out.

00:53:14.240 | - Maybe, maybe, although I wanna point out something

00:53:17.320 | of the search you just did that you put

00:53:20.680 | that you wanna fly to Europe,

00:53:22.200 | but that three-letter code, Europe,

00:53:25.560 | only is bringing in what seats.euro chose to be

00:53:33.320 | as major airports in Europe.

00:53:35.600 | - Oh yeah, I'm looking right now and the list is about,

00:53:38.800 | I don't know, I'm gonna ballpark it at 30 airports maybe,

00:53:42.360 | but not all of them.

00:53:43.940 | - Not all of them.

00:53:44.880 | And so, when I was doing the Poincia Daydream Explorer thing,

00:53:49.880 | one of the best flights that it found for me to Europe

00:53:55.600 | was to Lyon, France.

00:53:57.380 | And I bet you Lyon is not a major airport in that list,

00:54:02.360 | but often flights to smaller airports

00:54:07.360 | have better award availability, strangely,

00:54:12.860 | or at least at better prices.

00:54:15.940 | So it's weird but true that flying, for example,

00:54:20.940 | from Detroit to Paris on Air France to Lyon

00:54:26.200 | is sometimes a lot cheaper than just Detroit to Paris.

00:54:29.820 | So the exact same first leg,

00:54:32.280 | but adding on a flight to a smaller airport

00:54:36.600 | sometimes can lower the price substantially.

00:54:39.440 | And so that's what I was able to find

00:54:42.400 | with the Poincia tool and what you wouldn't find

00:54:46.140 | with that particular search you just did.

00:54:48.800 | - Yeah, so I will say I like it.

00:54:52.760 | It does a lot of stuff.

00:54:54.880 | You've gotta get used to how to use it.

00:54:57.500 | But once you figure it out,

00:54:59.720 | I'm like, "Oh, this is cool."

00:55:01.140 | If you really wanna nerd out,

00:55:02.220 | I think you can export the results.

00:55:04.380 | I think they have an API you can play with.

00:55:07.100 | So you could really go as deep as you want, but--

00:55:10.700 | - You really can, and I love it too.

00:55:14.220 | I don't wanna talk it down at all.

00:55:17.900 | I just did wanna point out a difference

00:55:19.580 | between the other tools.

00:55:22.020 | I also love that they have a tools menu

00:55:25.380 | with some specialty searches that you can do

00:55:29.620 | to find things that might be hard to find

00:55:34.620 | without having those tools there,

00:55:38.980 | like the Delta One Finder as a way to quickly find

00:55:42.700 | award flights flying Delta One

00:55:45.860 | using Virgin Atlantic miles, for example.

00:55:48.380 | - Yeah, I actually used it.

00:55:50.800 | I had a friend who had some expiring United Plus points

00:55:53.380 | and was like, "I got these points that are expiring."

00:55:55.700 | I was like, "I wonder where you could go with them."

00:55:57.300 | And then I just quickly looked up and it's like,

00:55:58.740 | "Oh, you can go to Japan."

00:56:01.060 | If you wanted to go to Japan in the next two weeks,

00:56:03.780 | you can use your Plus points.

00:56:04.900 | And so they've built a lot of cool stuff.

00:56:07.700 | I think, at least when I've read about how point.me

00:56:11.540 | is doing their Explore tool,

00:56:14.000 | they're kind of basing it off of user searches.

00:56:17.380 | And so I don't know if this is true for all the other tools,

00:56:20.160 | but the one thing that I know seats.arrow does

00:56:23.940 | is they're running a search for a lot of routes every day.

00:56:28.460 | And so if no one has searched for,

00:56:33.460 | for example, I'm looking a lot of the best West Coast

00:56:36.940 | to Europe business class availability this summer

00:56:39.540 | seems to be on a lot flight from LAX to Warsaw, right?

00:56:44.540 | If no one searched for LAX to Warsaw on point.me,

00:56:50.980 | then you're not gonna get that in the Daydream Explorer,

00:56:53.340 | even though if you wanna fly to Europe from the West Coast,

00:56:57.620 | LAX to Warsaw might be a great option in business class.

00:57:01.180 | 70,000 points on arrow plan available on one, two, three,

00:57:04.940 | four, five different days in July and August could be great,

00:57:08.900 | but a lot of the other tools might not show it

00:57:10.860 | because maybe someone hasn't searched for it.

00:57:13.980 | - Right, yeah, that's absolutely true.

00:57:15.340 | I don't know, I was surprised

00:57:17.140 | at how many flights points.ya did find.

00:57:21.180 | And so I do wonder if, do they supplement their cash

00:57:26.860 | with automatically run routes or is there just so many users

00:57:31.860 | because they have a capable product that's free?

00:57:35.900 | Maybe they have so many users

00:57:37.540 | that they are cashing a lot of stuff, I don't know.

00:57:40.260 | But the flip side of what you just said is true also,

00:57:44.460 | which is that if the route, if seats.arrow doesn't look

00:57:49.460 | for the route that you actually want,

00:57:55.540 | you're not gonna find anything.

00:57:57.260 | So again, back to my Lyon example,

00:58:01.100 | even if you put in Lyon as a destination,

00:58:03.500 | you're probably not gonna find anything

00:58:04.700 | because it probably doesn't have Lyon

00:58:06.260 | as a route that it searches automatically.

00:58:08.820 | - Yeah, they have an option to say,

00:58:09.740 | hey, I wanna request-- - Prove me wrong, I'm sure.

00:58:11.380 | - Start adding this route to your search list, but--

00:58:13.780 | - That's right, that's right, you can ask them to add it,

00:58:16.900 | so that's good, but as far as just stumbling

00:58:19.500 | upon things that are available,

00:58:20.780 | you're not gonna be able to do that with something.

00:58:23.400 | So yeah, there's pros and cons there,

00:58:25.180 | but overall, for those who are really,

00:58:28.740 | really into this stuff,

00:58:29.660 | I think Seatside Arrow is an essential tool

00:58:32.500 | for your toolbox, but it's not for the,

00:58:37.500 | it's not a beginner tool by a long stretch.

00:58:40.340 | - And the one other thing that's nice is,

00:58:42.380 | when you look at a flight, I'm looking,

00:58:43.900 | Las Vegas to Gatwick, but it's not probably on BA,

00:58:47.980 | but when you look at it, it'll say,

00:58:49.360 | well, it was last refreshed a day ago,

00:58:51.380 | but if you click the little info box,

00:58:53.180 | it's like refreshing with the results of the airline now.

00:58:56.040 | So I do like how, even though they might not have

00:59:00.700 | availability right now, that's fresh,

00:59:03.880 | they will go and get it for you

00:59:05.340 | without having to jump to another site.

00:59:07.660 | - I like that too, that's a really good thing,

00:59:10.060 | and it'd be nice if it, sometimes it can be really slow,

00:59:15.060 | that refreshing.

00:59:18.020 | - I'm waiting, I'm still waiting right now.

00:59:20.180 | - Yeah, exactly, it'd be nice if they could figure out

00:59:22.100 | how to speed that up, but still,

00:59:25.100 | at least it does do that, so that's good.

00:59:27.180 | - Okay, so it sounds like, if you need one tool

00:59:30.740 | to do it all, Points Yeah is a pretty high runner,

00:59:34.620 | but if you like doing really complicated,

00:59:38.500 | five, six, seven airline, airport, date, searches,

00:59:43.340 | you might be better off with Award Tool,

00:59:45.980 | or Seats.arrow, or some combo of the two.

00:59:50.060 | - Yeah, yeah, I think that's all true.

00:59:53.180 | - Okay, I think the only thing we failed to mention

00:59:55.620 | is that Point.me, which I've found to be

01:00:00.060 | a very comprehensive, yet slow tool,

01:00:03.740 | if you have a Built Rewards account,

01:00:05.940 | which is free, by the way, this is not the Built Credit Card,

01:00:09.260 | this is just the Built Rewards account,

01:00:11.020 | which anyone can sign up for, in their mobile app,

01:00:14.520 | you have the ability to do a search on Point.me for free,

01:00:19.420 | but it's restricted only to the airlines

01:00:22.460 | that Built is partnered with,

01:00:24.300 | which includes many airlines, but not all airlines.

01:00:28.380 | - Yes, absolutely, it's great to know about that,

01:00:33.460 | free access through Built, also, there is a URL,

01:00:37.700 | so you could bring that up on the website

01:00:40.300 | by logging into your Built account on a website,

01:00:43.740 | and we'll get that URL in the show notes.

01:00:47.740 | - Yep, and then also, one other reason we re-recorded this,

01:00:51.140 | since then, Amex has announced the same partnership,

01:00:54.260 | or not the same, a different but very similar partnership,

01:00:57.260 | where if you have a US-based Amex card,

01:00:59.920 | you can also get access to Point.me

01:01:02.300 | with Amex's travel partners.

01:01:03.760 | So if you had an Amex and a free Built Rewards account,

01:01:08.260 | maybe, I haven't done the intersection of,

01:01:10.900 | but that probably gets you pretty far with Point.me access

01:01:15.140 | without having to pay for it.

01:01:17.140 | - Yeah, I mean, I think that's true.

01:01:19.620 | It might be frustrating

01:01:20.620 | when you're trying to decide which to do,

01:01:22.460 | because right now, anyway, Built has American Airlines,

01:01:27.460 | and they've probably added Alaska,

01:01:31.500 | because that's a new transfer partner.

01:01:33.400 | Amex is not gonna have either one of those,

01:01:38.900 | but it will have things like Delta,

01:01:45.380 | and it has a lot of more obscure programs

01:01:50.380 | that may or may not have better pricing.

01:01:55.500 | So you could sometimes get some really good price options

01:01:59.340 | through Amex's transfer partners.

01:02:02.220 | - Yep, okay.

01:02:03.660 | So that's flights.

01:02:05.900 | We covered a lot.

01:02:06.820 | We actually, I had the idea of bringing up

01:02:10.820 | a couple other flight tools in our conversation,

01:02:13.780 | and then I thought, we ended up bringing most of them up.

01:02:16.740 | I'll share the couple other ones we forgot.

01:02:18.380 | So we talked about Seats.arrow.

01:02:20.900 | We talked about PointsPath.

01:02:22.780 | We talked about Flight Connections.

01:02:24.440 | The other few ones I'll have,

01:02:26.300 | there's one different use case,

01:02:27.740 | which we haven't talked about,

01:02:29.220 | which is it's not, I want to take a specific route,

01:02:34.220 | a flight search per se,

01:02:35.460 | and it's not, I wanna go somewhere.

01:02:37.700 | It's, I live in San Francisco.

01:02:40.140 | I wanna fly to London.

01:02:41.580 | I really wanna go on the direct flight,

01:02:43.420 | or I, and that's maybe a poor example

01:02:46.660 | 'cause multiple airlines serve it,

01:02:48.100 | but it's, there is a flight you want,

01:02:50.560 | and you're willing to be flexible with your dates,

01:02:52.780 | but you don't really wanna change the from

01:02:54.580 | or the to and the airline.

01:02:56.480 | And so there are a couple tools,

01:02:58.620 | some part of the tools before,

01:03:00.500 | and then one we haven't mentioned called Seatspy,

01:03:03.380 | which is very good for a very unique search,

01:03:06.540 | which is, I would like to fly from San Francisco

01:03:10.660 | to Narita in Tokyo on the United flight.

01:03:14.500 | Tell me which days over the next 365 days

01:03:18.540 | I can take that flight in business class.

01:03:21.000 | - Yeah, you know, it does that.

01:03:25.160 | That's a great example,

01:03:26.300 | and it does that very, very well.

01:03:28.820 | It doesn't cover a lot of award programs

01:03:33.820 | that you might want,

01:03:37.540 | but for those that it covers,

01:03:40.140 | it does a pretty good job.

01:03:41.860 | - Yep, that is the one search case

01:03:45.780 | that I find myself, now that we have children,

01:03:48.580 | thinking, gosh, if we'd love to go to a place,

01:03:51.320 | we'd really love the direct flight,

01:03:52.780 | and we're super flexible with when we would go,

01:03:55.140 | so let's create a thing, set an alert,

01:03:57.800 | and say, just let me know when you find four seats

01:04:00.140 | on this exact route.

01:04:02.220 | - Yeah.

01:04:03.060 | - Or, I'm probably less doing the alert

01:04:05.200 | and more, when can we go on this exact route,

01:04:07.900 | and let's plan a trip around it.

01:04:10.340 | I could probably achieve that search on another tool,

01:04:13.780 | but it's the only tool that very,

01:04:16.540 | kind of in a beautiful, visual way,

01:04:19.580 | gives me the kind of full year in advance.

01:04:23.700 | - Right, right. - So.

01:04:24.600 | - Totally agree.

01:04:25.440 | You know, seats.arrow kind of does that

01:04:28.780 | with the routes it tracks,

01:04:30.500 | if you know how to use it to do that,

01:04:32.940 | but it's not as clear what's happening

01:04:36.900 | as what you're talking about here.

01:04:38.540 | - Yeah, I'm looking at it on Air France right now.

01:04:40.900 | One trick, sometimes it shows even when it's very expensive,

01:04:44.580 | so I'm dialing back the price of the Air France award

01:04:48.260 | from San Francisco to Paris, and you'll see,

01:04:50.220 | oh, it looked like there was a lot of availability

01:04:53.140 | in business class, now I dropped the price,

01:04:55.860 | and it's like, well, nope, there's not as much,

01:04:58.100 | but there is still, if you wanna plan a trip in January,

01:05:01.400 | some great options.

01:05:03.460 | If you wanna plan in April, some great options.

01:05:05.540 | So, I don't know, I find myself using Seatspy

01:05:08.580 | more than we gave it airtime for,

01:05:11.420 | but it does look like, I think,

01:05:13.500 | Award Tool has a new feature called Routes,

01:05:15.880 | where you can pull up a route and look at a calendar

01:05:18.700 | for that route.

01:05:19.980 | I just think, you know, from a UI standpoint,

01:05:23.220 | I'm looking at the Award Tool one,

01:05:24.900 | and it's like a giant list,

01:05:26.620 | or I can switch to calendar view,

01:05:28.600 | but I'm looking a month at a time for that use case.

01:05:32.820 | If it is your use case,

01:05:34.380 | I think Seatspy is fantastic.

01:05:36.020 | I use it a lot because I have that use case,

01:05:38.940 | but you literally, you can't even search San Francisco

01:05:41.260 | to Paris and see all of those flights.

01:05:43.220 | It is only the ones on Air France,

01:05:44.980 | and then separately, the ones on United.

01:05:47.380 | So, despite that I use the tool a lot,

01:05:50.620 | I wouldn't say I think a lot of people

01:05:53.020 | would often be in the use case to use the tool.

01:05:56.340 | - Right, right.

01:05:57.180 | And let me tell you,

01:05:58.120 | you might wanna look at using Seatspied Aero.

01:06:01.900 | It's nowhere near as user-friendly and beautiful,

01:06:06.420 | the result, but you could use their Explore,

01:06:09.340 | you could go to the United, Explore,

01:06:11.740 | and set your from and to airport,

01:06:14.300 | and you could even set the airline you wanna fly

01:06:17.800 | to limit it to, if for some reason

01:06:19.740 | you only wanna fly United.

01:06:21.420 | And so you could do it that way.

01:06:25.980 | And then results that come up in green are the non-stops.

01:06:30.460 | - Yeah, okay.

01:06:31.660 | Yeah, I have this pulled up now

01:06:32.840 | and I can see how I can search.

01:06:34.600 | And by the way, the filtering on Seatspied Aero,

01:06:38.460 | knowing what you can put in that search field

01:06:41.020 | is kind of interesting.

01:06:42.020 | You can go in and type in like 2024-04

01:06:45.920 | to filter it for April,

01:06:47.420 | which again goes back to how easy is this to use,

01:06:51.980 | but I will give it a little bit more of a go

01:06:54.900 | for that use case and see where we end up.

01:06:57.060 | I will very briefly mention a tool

01:07:01.020 | because we've talked about it.

01:07:02.240 | If you've searched on the internet,

01:07:03.420 | you've probably heard about ExpertFlyer.

01:07:06.140 | I will actually go out on a limb and say,

01:07:09.040 | for 99% of the people listening,

01:07:11.880 | ExpertFlyer is probably not going to be that helpful

01:07:14.820 | of an award tool.

01:07:16.020 | Where I have actually,

01:07:18.620 | I don't think I've used it for award searching

01:07:20.580 | in the last year.

01:07:22.080 | Where I love it, and I believe it's free,

01:07:25.020 | is using it for seat alerts.

01:07:27.740 | Especially as a UnitedSilver member

01:07:30.860 | who does not get access to Economy+ until check-in,

01:07:34.900 | I find that at check-in,

01:07:36.420 | there's never an aisle or a window available.

01:07:38.980 | So I just go in and create an alert and say,

01:07:41.940 | if there's an aisle or a window in Economy+ available,

01:07:44.340 | email me.

01:07:45.420 | And I almost always get an email sometime

01:07:49.040 | in the 24 hours after check-in before takeoff,

01:07:52.100 | and I can log into the app immediately,

01:07:53.900 | change my seat, and get a much better seat.

01:07:56.900 | - I love that, I love that.

01:07:58.060 | And I love that that feature is free on ExpertFlyer,

01:08:02.420 | so you don't even have to subscribe to get that feature.

01:08:05.500 | And to be clear, we're not talking about,

01:08:08.700 | when you say seat alerts,

01:08:09.980 | we're not talking about award seats,

01:08:11.580 | we're just literally talking about,

01:08:14.740 | you already have the booking,

01:08:16.360 | and you want to switch to a particular seat on the airplane,

01:08:19.360 | it lets you set up these alerts, and that's awesome.

01:08:22.100 | - Yeah, I figured it's not worth a whole episode

01:08:24.560 | on flight tools, not for awards, because the only other tool

01:08:29.220 | I would mention is for trip monitoring.

01:08:32.420 | And there's 2 tools I've used.

01:08:34.540 | One is Flighty, and one is TripIt.

01:08:36.780 | And I think Flighty is a beautiful mobile interface

01:08:39.580 | for tracking flights.

01:08:41.060 | And TripIt might have an app.

01:08:43.620 | I'm sure it's not beautiful.

01:08:45.540 | They have a terrible UI.

01:08:47.020 | They're now owned by an expense management platform.

01:08:49.740 | But it's pretty good at scanning your email,

01:08:52.180 | compiling everything into trips,

01:08:53.920 | sending you updates and reminders if flights change,

01:08:56.820 | or if something happens.

01:08:58.980 | And especially helpful, even with Southwest,

01:09:02.260 | at saying, "Hey, your flight dropped in price.

01:09:04.380 | "You might want to go rebook it."

01:09:06.020 | - Yeah, yeah, I rely on both of those tools.

01:09:10.420 | Well, I should say, I rely on TripIt.

01:09:13.100 | I use Flighty, and I like its features a lot.

01:09:17.500 | I haven't learned to rely on it.

01:09:20.780 | But with TripIt, the main thing I do

01:09:23.920 | is use it to organize my trips.

01:09:26.440 | 'Cause I'm often booking multiple separate flights

01:09:31.440 | with different airlines, and then I'm booking hotels

01:09:34.920 | in one place and the other.

01:09:36.120 | And I just send all the receipts to TripIt

01:09:41.120 | and it puts it all.

01:09:42.160 | I don't let TripIt look at my email,

01:09:43.800 | 'cause that's too confusing.

01:09:46.360 | And I'll explain why in a second.

01:09:47.320 | But by emailing TripIt, all of these things,

01:09:51.500 | it just automatically puts them into trips.

01:09:54.180 | And I could then visually see,

01:09:56.980 | and actually it'll tell me if there's a conflict,

01:09:58.900 | but I could visually see, yeah, okay,

01:10:02.500 | I'm gonna arrive in time to catch this next flight.

01:10:05.660 | Or, oh, I forgot to book a hotel

01:10:08.580 | for the first night or whatever,

01:10:10.460 | and then I can go take care of that.

01:10:12.500 | One time I was traveling with my co-host, Nick,

01:10:16.700 | and he was doing the flight planning

01:10:19.600 | and I was putting all the stuff into TripIt,

01:10:22.640 | and then I contacted him to say,

01:10:25.280 | did you know that we're leaving Dubai

01:10:28.120 | before we arrive in Dubai?

01:10:30.460 | And that's the type of thing that TripIt showed me.

01:10:34.360 | It's not something you have to do

01:10:35.500 | like your date math to figure out yourself.

01:10:38.120 | Yeah, I did not do that.

01:10:40.320 | And last week had a flight home from Austin in May

01:10:44.720 | instead of March.

01:10:46.280 | And had I accurately put it all in,

01:10:49.340 | I would have seen that my not three day,

01:10:52.020 | but like 63 day trip to Austin

01:10:54.460 | and would have quickly made a change.

01:10:56.020 | Fortunately, it was the same number of points to get back.

01:11:00.220 | So it was actually, it wasn't a big deal.

01:11:02.380 | I just happened to notice it before it had gotten expensive.

01:11:06.020 | - Yeah, yeah.

01:11:07.420 | So I used to let some tools just look at my email

01:11:11.740 | and create trips, like TripIt and Google used to do that.

01:11:15.820 | I don't know if Google still does that, but I turned it off.

01:11:18.620 | But I sometimes book like award flights

01:11:23.620 | just for various reasons that where I know,

01:11:30.640 | I'm not actually gonna be flying this thing.

01:11:32.340 | Maybe I'm testing out how you cancel

01:11:35.700 | or how you make changes or something.

01:11:37.580 | And so to have all these things like suddenly appearing

01:11:40.460 | in my calendar as things I'm gonna do is just,

01:11:44.060 | I don't like that.

01:11:45.840 | I like to be intentional about what goes in there.

01:11:47.840 | - Let's jump in to the first way

01:11:49.780 | you think about booking hotel tools.

01:11:51.960 | - Yeah, so the first way is basically what I think

01:11:57.780 | everyone would assume a hotel award search tool would do,

01:12:01.740 | which is basically you're planning a trip

01:12:04.660 | and you wanna say, I'm going to London.

01:12:08.820 | I'm going from July 1st to the 6th.

01:12:14.540 | Show me what hotels are available.

01:12:17.060 | How much do they cost in points?

01:12:19.740 | That's what you would kind of expect

01:12:22.220 | any good hotel award search to be able to do.

01:12:26.240 | But surprisingly, there's only one that I'm aware of

01:12:31.240 | that's currently available and does it well enough

01:12:36.980 | for me to talk about.

01:12:39.580 | - Yep.

01:12:40.420 | - I know of one that's sort of in development

01:12:42.620 | and I've looked at some others

01:12:43.900 | that are kind of these half-baked tools,

01:12:45.300 | but they're just not even worth talking about.

01:12:47.340 | So the one that's available is called Aways

01:12:50.500 | with a Z at the end.

01:12:51.780 | And that does all the things I was just saying.

01:12:55.800 | It also, one of the cool things about it,

01:13:01.620 | it searches like a lot of hotel programs.

01:13:04.720 | So it checks the boxes for the major ones

01:13:07.780 | like Marriott, Hilton, Hyatt, and IHG,

01:13:10.740 | but it also includes Accor, Choice, and Wyndham.

01:13:15.740 | And my understanding is they're adding more.

01:13:18.200 | So that's really nice.

01:13:20.780 | - And some of those, I'm doing a search right now for Paris

01:13:23.900 | and Accor has so many hotels in France

01:13:28.700 | that it's almost overwhelming.

01:13:30.980 | But even if I just filter that out, the map is pretty full.

01:13:34.700 | And if you zoom in, there are a lot of options.

01:13:38.200 | And I just think it's funny that there's like

01:13:42.000 | three or four other tools that we could talk about,

01:13:43.940 | but none of them actually do this thing,

01:13:45.740 | which is what most people listening probably want,

01:13:48.320 | which is, yeah, I'm going to Paris

01:13:50.480 | from the 12th to the 16th of April.

01:13:52.900 | Where can I stay and is it a good deal?

01:13:55.920 | - Right, right, right.

01:13:57.520 | Years ago, there was a tool called Award Mapper

01:13:59.960 | that did something similar, but that's no longer available.

01:14:05.760 | And so finally, with Aways, there's a tool that does this,

01:14:10.100 | this thing that should be an obvious thing

01:14:13.940 | that a lot of people do, but no one else currently doing it.

01:14:17.520 | It lets you do things like search by star rating,

01:14:19.980 | so you could find the best hotels, I guess.

01:14:23.920 | You could sort by the cost in points or the cost in cash.

01:14:28.320 | You could sort by a best value, or no,

01:14:31.720 | it'll show you a best value indicator next to each hotel.

01:14:35.600 | - You can now sort by that, actually.

01:14:37.680 | I just noticed that the sort includes point value.

01:14:41.740 | - Yes, you could sort by point value, yes.

01:14:44.840 | So that you'll get the best use of your points

01:14:48.040 | sorting to the top, which is great.

01:14:49.980 | And then if you click into a hotel,

01:14:54.600 | you can view a award availability calendar.

01:14:58.340 | So maybe your dates for your trip aren't totally set,

01:15:05.240 | or maybe the hotel you were interested in

01:15:07.240 | wasn't available for the whole set of dates,

01:15:09.200 | and you wanna see which days is it available,

01:15:12.280 | you could use their award availability calendar,

01:15:14.600 | which is really neat.

01:15:15.660 | - Yeah, I've used Aways for almost every trip

01:15:20.920 | when it comes to searching for cities and award hotels.

01:15:25.160 | We actually just did a session where the founder of Aways

01:15:29.200 | for the AllHacks members kind of did

01:15:31.440 | a full product walkthrough.

01:15:32.740 | We got to ask questions, one of which was like,

01:15:35.280 | they used to roll out city by city.

01:15:36.980 | So we said like, "What kind of coverage do you have now?"

01:15:39.360 | And the answer now is all.

01:15:41.320 | We asked like, "When will you have all the hotels

01:15:44.280 | "for all the programs?"

01:15:45.120 | And they were like, "We do."

01:15:46.620 | And so I think one of the earlier things

01:15:48.880 | was they might have only had 100 cities to start,

01:15:51.160 | but they've loaded in all the cities for all the programs.

01:15:54.060 | And you just get, I think, one of the best views

01:15:58.080 | of "I wanna use points on these days in this place."

01:16:02.520 | The only thing missing might be some flexibility.

01:16:05.800 | If you were like, "I'm going to Paris for a week

01:16:08.780 | "and I wanna, I could kind of be a little flexible."

01:16:13.240 | But you're not necessarily set on a specific hotel.

01:16:16.760 | I think that's one thing you can't do.

01:16:19.360 | But when it comes to doing that kind of search,

01:16:23.320 | it's really great.

01:16:24.960 | - Totally agree.

01:16:29.560 | The guy who started the company had met with me a while back

01:16:34.560 | to talk me through the app and show me what I could do.

01:16:44.200 | And I had every intention of looking at it back then.

01:16:47.320 | And for a few trips that I had planned, I tried to use it.

01:16:50.880 | But each time I tried to use it,

01:16:53.640 | the city I was going to wasn't available in the tool.

01:16:57.000 | And so I gave up until recently.

01:16:58.600 | Then I looked at it recently and I was like,

01:16:59.840 | "Oh, wow, everything is here."

01:17:02.920 | And so suddenly, magically, it's really good.

01:17:06.240 | I will say I've run into a few cases

01:17:09.520 | where it uses cash results that were out of date

01:17:13.600 | or for some other reason it was wrong.

01:17:17.640 | But that's like one where it was just flat out wrong

01:17:22.640 | with the points that it said it costed.

01:17:25.800 | I sent them an example.

01:17:28.840 | And so they're gonna work on that

01:17:30.240 | and try to figure out what's going on.

01:17:31.740 | I'm sure they'll fix that.

01:17:34.080 | I just wanna point out that it's not perfect,

01:17:38.400 | but it is very, very good, I think,

01:17:41.560 | in doing what it's intended to do.

01:17:43.760 | And since it's the only thing out there

01:17:46.540 | that does exactly that, it's an easy answer.

01:17:50.800 | - Yep, I will say I just pulled up rooms.arrow.

01:17:54.280 | And unlike all of the other seats.arrow functionality,

01:17:59.040 | their hotel search works a little bit more visual

01:18:03.500 | than data-organized.

01:18:05.840 | And so I said the same search for Paris.

01:18:09.060 | It's designed for a little bit more flexibility.

01:18:11.640 | It's like what range of check-in dates,

01:18:13.320 | how many nights do you wanna stay?

01:18:15.440 | And it shows me less hotels than a ways

01:18:20.160 | because I think they're only searching Hilton, Hyatt,

01:18:23.880 | and IHG, so there's noticeably Marriott

01:18:27.120 | is missing from that list,

01:18:29.280 | as is Wyndham, or Choice Hotels, or Accor.

01:18:34.080 | But it does have better-than-I-thought ability.

01:18:38.800 | That said, it immediately popped up and said

01:18:41.160 | it's refreshing stale results.

01:18:42.920 | So it knew it had stale results, quite a bit of them,

01:18:46.680 | but it's refreshing them.

01:18:48.040 | But you can't sort by anything.

01:18:49.620 | So the number one result is the Holiday Inn,

01:18:52.740 | and the number two result is the Park Hyatt,

01:18:55.280 | of which I would say those are two very different hotels.

01:18:58.740 | But so it kinda does it, but again,

01:19:04.480 | I think a ways is the only tool you can rely on

01:19:06.760 | for that kind of search.

01:19:08.000 | - Right, also, you mentioned that it supports IHG,

01:19:14.000 | Hyatt, and Hilton, but it's important to note,

01:19:17.080 | and I'm talking about seats, or sorry,

01:19:20.640 | what is the hotel version of Seat Center?

01:19:22.740 | It does not include all IHG hotels,

01:19:30.560 | all Hyatt hotels, all Hilton hotels, not by a long shot.

01:19:35.000 | It has a database of ones that it looks at,

01:19:38.840 | and that's all it does.

01:19:40.680 | - So searching Paris, it probably hit the core

01:19:44.440 | of where a lot of people are looking,

01:19:45.960 | but if I searched to a more obscure place,

01:19:47.760 | it probably wouldn't work.

01:19:49.600 | - Try Lexington, Kentucky.

01:19:52.000 | I bet you'll find like one hotel or something.

01:19:55.040 | - One hotel?

01:19:57.300 | (laughing)

01:19:59.140 | All right.

01:19:59.980 | - All right, so that's the basics of a ways

01:20:09.280 | and hotel trip planning.

01:20:12.900 | One thing that we didn't mention when talking about a ways

01:20:15.640 | is that you can also set alerts.

01:20:17.760 | So if you found a hotel that you wanna stay at,

01:20:20.560 | it's not available, you can set up an alert

01:20:24.480 | to email you when it becomes available.

01:20:27.320 | And the nice thing with hotels, even more than flights,

01:20:33.360 | is availability does change a lot.

01:20:38.360 | Even more than flights do, and partially because,

01:20:44.760 | I think a lot of people book hotels

01:20:47.300 | with free cancellations and do cancel.

01:20:50.880 | And so as you have cancellations,

01:20:53.400 | the word inventory automatically goes in,

01:20:57.000 | and then you can book it.

01:21:00.080 | So that's a really nice feature.

01:21:02.520 | And that's a feature that gets us

01:21:04.600 | to the other category of hotel tools.

01:21:07.240 | So if you're not doing this sort of broad,

01:21:10.240 | if you're not doing planning for a specific trip,

01:21:13.520 | but rather have like a hotel in mind

01:21:16.680 | that I wanna stay at this hotel,

01:21:18.740 | but I'm having trouble finding award availability,

01:21:23.380 | that's where there's a whole host of tools

01:21:25.900 | that try to help you with that.

01:21:27.460 | Some of them started because Hyatt

01:21:32.140 | does not have an award availability calendar.

01:21:36.300 | So unlike Marriott and Hilton and even IHG,

01:21:40.140 | you could bring up one if you know how,

01:21:43.700 | there's no way with Hyatt by itself

01:21:46.680 | to see for a given hotel, which days can I use points?

01:21:51.080 | It'll tell you how much it'll cost in points

01:21:56.040 | if it's available, but not whether or not it's available.

01:21:59.300 | So these tools grew up to answer that,

01:22:03.520 | to be able to answer that question and more.

01:22:05.840 | And the first thing that each of these,

01:22:11.600 | most that most of these tools offer

01:22:14.060 | is a full year calendar of award availability.

01:22:17.860 | And so we saw a Waze has that,

01:22:20.100 | but there's a bunch of other tools that have that as well.

01:22:24.300 | And so I looked at award tool has a hotels feature.

01:22:29.300 | I looked at that, I looked at rooms.arrow,

01:22:33.300 | which we were just looking at as well.

01:22:34.740 | I looked at max my point and stay with points.

01:22:38.520 | So it's interesting 'cause as you're saying this,

01:22:43.520 | I'm playing with these tools

01:22:48.780 | and searching for a few different hotels.

01:22:51.700 | And it's just funny how some of them

01:22:54.780 | have very different ways to express a hotel.

01:22:58.160 | So I'm looking at one of the properties near me,

01:23:01.860 | which is notably hard to stay at,

01:23:04.380 | which is the Alila Ventana Big Sur.

01:23:07.420 | And I'm laughing because award tool says 66% available,

01:23:11.700 | meaning according to them,

01:23:14.020 | 66% of the dates have availability

01:23:16.220 | and stay with point says 0% available.

01:23:20.080 | Yet when I click on it, even though it says 0%,

01:23:25.220 | it has lots of dates that show availability.

01:23:27.880 | So I know that's one example of a place

01:23:31.880 | people are often trying to find a dream stay at.

01:23:35.180 | But I'm curious whether you think some of these tools

01:23:38.260 | have better coverage,

01:23:39.380 | 'cause I don't do a lot of hotel searching,

01:23:42.540 | but I recently, my wife was looking

01:23:45.760 | to book a stay at the Miraval,

01:23:47.780 | which is a pretty good Hyatt redemption

01:23:50.100 | in terms of cents per point.

01:23:52.240 | It is a lot of points, but for those points,

01:23:54.980 | you end up getting an all-inclusive high-end resort.

01:23:58.340 | And they even throw in $175 per person per day

01:24:03.340 | of resort credit when you book with points,

01:24:06.700 | but it wasn't available on every platform.

01:24:08.740 | So it left me wondering,

01:24:11.120 | is one of these tools better for coverage?

01:24:13.660 | - Yeah, yeah.

01:24:14.900 | So I mean, a Waze has by far the best coverage

01:24:18.020 | because it has all hotels,

01:24:20.800 | but it doesn't do some of the key things

01:24:23.460 | that we're gonna talk about in a moment.

01:24:25.940 | Of the tools that do like more advanced stuff

01:24:30.140 | for finding availability, Max, my point,

01:24:33.260 | in my opinion, seems to have the best coverage.

01:24:37.220 | - I will say as I'm looking at these tools,

01:24:39.820 | coverage doesn't, I would just completely skip

01:24:42.340 | over this availability percentage.

01:24:44.740 | I don't know if you got value out of it,

01:24:46.820 | but if you're looking on video now

01:24:49.220 | or if you just wanna hear my voiceover,

01:24:51.860 | they say the percentage of reward nights available to book

01:24:55.340 | in the following 365 days,

01:24:57.580 | and I'm clicking through and in April,

01:25:00.500 | it's almost every day.

01:25:01.900 | In May, it's almost every day.

01:25:04.100 | And in June, it's a handful.

01:25:06.020 | Like it seems like it is available.

01:25:08.340 | Now, what I think it's saying is percentage

01:25:10.940 | of reward nights available to book

01:25:12.460 | with a standard priced award.

01:25:14.500 | It doesn't say that,

01:25:16.040 | but unless that's what it's trying to say,

01:25:19.680 | I don't understand how they're calculating it,

01:25:23.320 | but I'll let you did more research than me.

01:25:27.640 | - No, it's funny you called that out

01:25:30.160 | because that's something I noticed early on

01:25:32.040 | and I just stopped looking at it.

01:25:34.120 | So I haven't tried to figure out

01:25:36.360 | which tool gives a close to accurate answer on that.

01:25:40.320 | I just haven't looked at that.

01:25:42.060 | Let's talk about some of these things the tools can do.

01:25:47.000 | We talked about that they can all be used

01:25:50.280 | to look at a full year of award availability.

01:25:55.280 | They're all using cash data.

01:25:56.680 | So they're all wrong to some extent.

01:25:59.960 | And the best ones show you when it was last updated.

01:26:06.440 | So you could at least know,

01:26:08.680 | is this reasonably good data or not.

01:26:11.660 | They all let you set alerts to find out

01:26:19.880 | when the room becomes available,

01:26:21.920 | but that's where they vary a lot

01:26:24.720 | because some of them like a Waze,

01:26:28.760 | you have to set a specific date range

01:26:31.700 | and either that hotel's available in that date range or not.

01:26:36.380 | But what if you just want to be alerted

01:26:43.600 | anytime across a whole year

01:26:47.320 | that there are new awards available at this hotel?

01:26:51.740 | Max, my point can do that.

01:26:54.440 | What if, or what if you want to know,

01:26:57.280 | alert me anytime there's five days in a row

01:27:00.720 | available in December at this like Maldives resort

01:27:05.720 | or whatever, Stay With Points can do that.

01:27:08.760 | So they have different like advanced alerting features

01:27:12.320 | that can be really important in different situations.

01:27:16.360 | - Okay, so do you have a favorite or?

01:27:18.480 | - Yeah, Max, my point seems to change

01:27:23.480 | and seems to check most of the boxes pretty well

01:27:27.080 | for sort of this kind of advanced searching,

01:27:32.080 | the ability to find these hard to get awards

01:27:37.120 | at places like Alila Ventana.

01:27:39.720 | And so like Max, my point,

01:27:43.960 | it supports all four of the major programs,

01:27:47.160 | Hilton, Hyatt, IHG and Marriott.

01:27:51.560 | And just to give you an example,

01:27:53.720 | like rooms.arrow doesn't support Marriott

01:27:58.520 | and Stay With Points doesn't support IHG.

01:28:03.520 | Max, my point also will let you set alerts

01:28:11.380 | to alert you if the price drops.

01:28:15.480 | So let's say you've booked an IHG awards day.

01:28:19.880 | Excuse me, IHG award prices change like all the time.

01:28:24.880 | And so you'd wanna know if the price goes down

01:28:29.440 | and be able to rebook it then for the lower price.

01:28:32.880 | So you could set up Max, my point to let you know

01:28:37.880 | when that IHG hotel has dropped in price

01:28:41.760 | from whatever you booked, you just have to put in that total.

01:28:48.480 | And it also has a really good filtering features

01:28:52.440 | on its homepage.

01:28:53.700 | So let's say what your goal is to,

01:28:57.180 | let's say you've got some of those Hilton

01:29:00.320 | free night certificates that are good at any Hilton worldwide.

01:29:06.240 | And so what you wanna do is stay at one of these

01:29:10.640 | like really hard to get Hilton properties

01:29:13.640 | like the Waldorf Astoria in the Maldives

01:29:16.280 | or the Waldorf Astoria in Los Cabos.

01:29:20.680 | Those are really hard to find, but you can,

01:29:26.880 | well, you can use the alert features

01:29:32.040 | to let you know when they're available.

01:29:33.240 | But if what you're trying to do is just find

01:29:36.080 | the best hotels that are bookable with Hilton points,

01:29:43.760 | you could use Max, my points homepage and filter to Hilton,

01:29:48.720 | filter to properties costing, let's say,

01:29:51.600 | between 100 and 150,000 points,

01:29:54.580 | which would get you to their top end hotels.

01:29:58.320 | And then you'll see it all and you can sort

01:30:01.560 | by like most popular and you'll quickly see some

01:30:05.480 | that you might wanna target.

01:30:07.040 | - Okay, yeah, I do not have a paid membership

01:30:11.720 | for Max, my point, which I want only

01:30:14.120 | because it is the only one of these sites

01:30:16.160 | that has ads all over it.

01:30:17.800 | And I would love to make them go away.

01:30:19.340 | So that's my next investment is a Max, my point membership.

01:30:23.840 | - You know, what's funny when I first looked

01:30:27.080 | at Max, my point, the free version,

01:30:29.840 | it had way more ads than it does today.

01:30:32.040 | It was almost unusable.

01:30:34.640 | It had so many ads and they were constantly covering

01:30:37.840 | out what I was trying to do.

01:30:39.360 | So today, yeah, it still has a lot of annoying ads,

01:30:42.440 | not nearly as many as before.

01:30:44.360 | So I didn't mention that, but that is true.

01:30:49.360 | And the free version, if you could stand the ads,

01:30:53.120 | it's fairly capable, but the paid version might be worth it

01:30:58.120 | if you do a lot of this kind of thing.

01:31:00.040 | - And we didn't talk much about the hotel tool

01:31:02.160 | from award tool, where does that fit in?

01:31:04.240 | - It's sort of middle of the pack, in my opinion.

01:31:09.080 | It has some decent features, but it didn't beat out Max,

01:31:14.080 | my point on any of the types of things I looked at.

01:31:21.640 | But I guess the way I think about it,

01:31:25.400 | if you're using award tool anyway for flight searches,

01:31:29.840 | you might as well check whether it does,

01:31:31.960 | it can do what you want with hotels as well,

01:31:34.160 | 'cause you're in there anyway.

01:31:35.640 | But if it can't, then go onto another tool

01:31:37.760 | like Max, my point.

01:31:39.160 | - Yeah, and I think you probably have gone deeper down

01:31:42.480 | the hotel search award tool rabbit hole for hotels.

01:31:47.480 | Then I've kind of done a lot in flights,

01:31:50.080 | hotels, I'm kind of like, I'm gonna find my flight,

01:31:54.000 | and then I'm gonna just kind of see what's available

01:31:55.880 | at these hotels and make it work either way.

01:31:58.120 | But especially when you have cool things nearby

01:32:02.680 | that you can drive to,

01:32:03.960 | or if you have a lot of flexibility in your travel,

01:32:06.840 | I feel like I'm underusing the hotel tools.

01:32:09.800 | So personally, I'm excited,

01:32:11.560 | 'cause this episode made me understand

01:32:14.120 | that there's more I can be doing.

01:32:15.880 | - Yeah, I mean, I would totally,

01:32:18.360 | I love Lila Ventana, Big Sur,

01:32:21.200 | and if I was in driving distance like you are,

01:32:24.680 | I would totally be setting up.

01:32:26.440 | The Max, my point has these daily alerts,

01:32:31.880 | which you have to have the paid version to do it,

01:32:35.800 | but it'll basically,

01:32:37.640 | every time a word availability change at all,

01:32:39.400 | it'll send you an email saying,

01:32:40.600 | here's all the dates that's available.

01:32:42.560 | And then I would just scan it each morning and say,

01:32:46.960 | oh, there's a date that I might wanna go,

01:32:49.600 | so let's go ahead and book it.

01:32:51.160 | And of course, you can cancel if you change your mind.

01:32:55.760 | - Yeah, I mean, the idea that we live

01:32:58.600 | less than two hours away,

01:33:00.800 | work from home and could go on a weekday,

01:33:03.440 | and still haven't been to Ventana is a little crazy

01:33:08.440 | for me to think about,

01:33:09.440 | but maybe that'll be on the 2024 before the end of the year.

01:33:13.480 | Let's tick that box.

01:33:14.680 | - Well, of course, you have kids,

01:33:17.840 | and Ventana is adults only,

01:33:20.880 | so maybe that's a getaway for you too.

01:33:25.880 | - I need to set up a Gmail filter

01:33:29.440 | that forwards the Ventana alert availabilities

01:33:32.440 | to my parents and just say,

01:33:34.920 | hey, every time I'm gonna keep sending you this,

01:33:36.880 | if any of the dates align and you wanna come down

01:33:39.280 | and hang out with the kids for a couple of days,

01:33:42.120 | maybe I need to swap it with them.

01:33:43.360 | Maybe I need to, if they're listening,

01:33:45.200 | maybe this is too much of an offer,

01:33:47.080 | but it's like, well, I'll book four nights,

01:33:49.320 | we'll take them for two,

01:33:50.280 | and then you can go down and take the other two nights

01:33:52.680 | as an exchange for watching the kids.

01:33:55.640 | - Yeah, yeah, that sounds great.

01:33:57.240 | So is there a hotel in the Bay Area that you do,

01:34:02.440 | like going, that you've been to,

01:34:04.120 | and you'd recommend that it's worth watching

01:34:07.080 | the word availability for that one?

01:34:09.080 | - I wish, I don't think I've stayed at a Bay Area hotel

01:34:14.000 | in a very, very long time.

01:34:15.860 | - I guess that makes sense.

01:34:18.000 | You have a house. - Yeah, yeah.

01:34:18.840 | We live here.

01:34:19.760 | The one that I've heard a lot about,

01:34:23.120 | which I have not stayed at,

01:34:24.600 | but the Alila that in Napa just opened,

01:34:29.200 | and I've heard great things about the Alila in Napa

01:34:32.320 | for people looking to do a little escape to wine country.

01:34:36.120 | I have stayed at the Westin Verasa in Napa,

01:34:38.800 | and I wouldn't say it's a hotel

01:34:41.600 | I would plan an entire vacation around,

01:34:44.600 | but I would say if you're in Napa

01:34:46.280 | and you don't wanna go for something wild, it's great.

01:34:50.920 | It's a great hotel.

01:34:53.000 | I'm sure the Alila is probably nicer,

01:34:55.160 | but it suited every need we had when we were there

01:34:59.720 | before my parents moved to Napa, and we can stay with them.

01:35:03.000 | - That sounds good.

01:35:07.160 | Let me talk about a special use case

01:35:10.880 | that I mentioned briefly,

01:35:13.400 | but there's a hotel in Michigan

01:35:16.080 | that I really like going to called the Inn at Bay Harbor.

01:35:18.360 | It's a Marriott hotel,

01:35:19.740 | and it's, of course, very popular in the summertime

01:35:24.840 | 'cause it's very cold other times,

01:35:28.520 | and it's right on Lake Michigan.

01:35:29.880 | It's beautiful.

01:35:30.840 | Award availability in the summer is very hard to find,

01:35:35.440 | and they don't show one-night award availability.

01:35:41.440 | So if you're looking just one night at a time,

01:35:44.840 | you're not gonna see anything.

01:35:46.720 | If you use Marriott's flexible dates calendar

01:35:49.560 | and just say, "I wanna look for one night,"

01:35:51.600 | it's not gonna show any availability,

01:35:52.860 | but if you look for two nights,

01:35:54.840 | then things might show up if there's anything there,

01:35:57.360 | but most of the time, there's nothing there.

01:35:59.040 | So there's two ways of handling that.

01:36:04.040 | One is stay with points.

01:36:06.600 | We'll let you create an alert that says,

01:36:09.680 | "Show me any time for the month of June

01:36:12.280 | "or the month of July when there's two nights available

01:36:16.180 | "any time in the whole month."

01:36:17.680 | That's one way.

01:36:20.420 | The other way, and what I did this year,

01:36:23.920 | is I use MaxMyPoints Any Day Alert,

01:36:27.640 | and its Any Day Alert won't tell me

01:36:31.540 | when there's summer availability,

01:36:33.440 | but what it does tell me is when a lot of things

01:36:38.440 | have changed with availability at this Marriott.

01:36:42.380 | So I'll see a flood of nights all of a sudden open up

01:36:46.980 | in the spring, and so then I jump onto Marriott's website

01:36:51.980 | and do a flexible date search in the summer

01:36:55.400 | of two or more days, and then I've been able

01:36:59.560 | to find awards that way.

01:37:01.600 | So it sort of triggers me to look on Marriott's website

01:37:04.800 | when it's time.

01:37:05.740 | - So that would be a great example of a place

01:37:09.640 | that you keep an eye on.

01:37:10.800 | Any other hotels you've stayed at

01:37:13.520 | that you thought were just such amazing properties

01:37:16.140 | and good deals for the points that,

01:37:18.080 | if people were looking to get inspired,

01:37:19.880 | where should they go explore some of these special,

01:37:23.600 | kind of impossible-to-find hotel awards?

01:37:26.600 | - Yeah, a few come to mind, but they're SLH properties,

01:37:32.440 | which are no longer bookable through Hyatt,

01:37:36.480 | but they should become available through Hilton soon,

01:37:41.480 | so maybe it'll still be relevant.

01:37:44.280 | You know that Hilton has taken over a partnership

01:37:47.820 | with SLH that Hyatt used to have.

01:37:49.660 | So most notable that I can think of

01:37:54.580 | are in Queenstown, New Zealand.

01:37:56.940 | There are two amazing properties.

01:38:00.140 | I stayed at one of them, but I've seen videos

01:38:03.100 | of the other one, and the one I stayed at

01:38:08.100 | was just amazing, like the,

01:38:12.700 | I'm trying to think of what it's called.

01:38:14.800 | It's not coming to me off the top of my head,

01:38:17.800 | but it's right on the lake.

01:38:21.800 | The base rooms are huge suites,

01:38:25.280 | and breakfast is included, and it's incredible.

01:38:30.280 | - Icarts.

01:38:31.320 | - Icarts, yeah, private hotel.

01:38:36.720 | Icarts private hotel, that's what it is, yep.

01:38:40.840 | And they have a evening like cocktail hour

01:38:45.840 | where you come in and there's like a host there

01:38:51.920 | who asks you what you want to drink,

01:38:55.520 | prepares your drinks, and then asks you

01:39:00.100 | if you have any dietary restrictions,

01:39:02.520 | and then goes and tells the chef

01:39:04.200 | that we're ready for the chef to prepare our canapes.

01:39:08.440 | And so the chef then custom creates some snacks, basically,

01:39:13.440 | for us while we're enjoying the complimentary drinks.

01:39:21.600 | So very special hotel, and in probably

01:39:25.840 | the most unbelievable location in Queenstown, New Zealand

01:39:29.400 | that you can get, so that would be a great one.

01:39:35.080 | - Yeah, for me it's, we've stayed at the Conrad

01:39:38.640 | and the St. Regis in Bora Bora,

01:39:41.240 | and because San Francisco has direct flights to Tahiti,

01:39:46.240 | it's like just such an easy place to get to,

01:39:49.360 | but if you, the difference between getting a room

01:39:53.200 | for a good deal on points and paying full price

01:39:57.200 | can like triple the cost.

01:39:59.500 | So like if you, I've done an episode I'll link to

01:40:01.800 | in the show notes about going to Bora Bora,

01:40:03.600 | but if you can find a time where United

01:40:06.760 | has saver business availability,

01:40:08.440 | you can book with Aeroplan, and the St. Regis

01:40:11.940 | has kind of pretty affordable deals, or the Conrad does,

01:40:15.960 | all of a sudden you're going on a $30,000 trip

01:40:19.120 | for a fraction of that.

01:40:21.040 | If you pick a different week, you might be going

01:40:23.280 | on a $30,000 trip for $30,000,

01:40:25.480 | which is not a trip I'm excited to go on.

01:40:29.080 | So I think if you can time the flight

01:40:32.160 | and hotel award availability to Bora Bora,

01:40:34.880 | you can go on just an incredible trip

01:40:38.320 | that's less than eight hours plus a short 30-minute flight

01:40:43.040 | from the West Coast that can't be beat.

01:40:46.520 | Yeah, yeah.

01:40:47.640 | No, it's interesting, there are certain hotels like this

01:40:50.580 | where it's probably worth planning your trip

01:40:54.160 | around the hotel availability,

01:40:56.500 | whereas there are many trips,

01:40:59.240 | like if you're going to a big city,

01:41:01.240 | where you might wanna plan the trip

01:41:04.360 | around the flight award availability,

01:41:07.520 | 'cause you know you're gonna be able to stay somewhere nice,

01:41:09.360 | there's so many options.

01:41:10.820 | But when going to Bora Bora, the Maldives, places like that,

01:41:15.100 | you might wanna find the resort first

01:41:19.040 | and then book your flights.

01:41:21.040 | Yeah, the only thing I'll say is,

01:41:22.480 | we've never done the Maldives

01:41:24.000 | only because it's just so far away,

01:41:27.080 | and I don't know how, I'm sure someone will send me an email

01:41:31.160 | and tell me how much better it is than Bora Bora,

01:41:33.960 | but for being three times farther away

01:41:37.040 | and not even close to a direct flight

01:41:40.520 | for the majority of the long haul,

01:41:42.200 | for me, it's like, wow, it's just not even worth it.

01:41:44.800 | But the crazy thing about Tahiti

01:41:48.480 | is that because you can time it,

01:41:50.680 | if you take two different airlines,

01:41:51.960 | you can't take the same airline and make this true,

01:41:54.080 | but you can take day trips for both of them.

01:41:56.740 | So an eight-hour flight during the day in economy

01:42:01.460 | is pretty doable, it's a couple hours longer

01:42:04.700 | than going to the East Coast.

01:42:06.320 | It's not, if you're used to using your miles and points

01:42:10.260 | to splurge on business, I'm not even sure it's necessary.

01:42:14.980 | Now, if you have enough points, why not?

01:42:16.900 | But whereas to go to the Maldives,

01:42:20.780 | I think the experience of flying eight hours to Bora Bora

01:42:24.500 | or to Tahiti in coach is not probably the same

01:42:27.780 | as flying to the Maldives almost 24 hours,

01:42:31.340 | but I don't know, 10 years ago with no kids,

01:42:36.300 | you could have put me in the middle seat

01:42:37.600 | in the back of the plane,

01:42:38.440 | I would have been fine to go either places.

01:42:39.820 | I just think once you played the points game long enough,

01:42:42.740 | you're like, well, there's gotta be a way I can do it

01:42:45.700 | for a better deal.

01:42:46.620 | - Yeah, and I think you're getting at a point here

01:42:50.320 | which is like, for you,

01:42:52.740 | if you're gonna be traveling with four people

01:42:54.940 | and if you're looking at places that are really far away,

01:42:59.900 | then the flight availability almost has to be

01:43:03.740 | more of the driver, right?

01:43:06.020 | Than the resort or hotel award availability.

01:43:09.540 | For me, usually traveling just my wife,

01:43:13.960 | I know I can find something in business class

01:43:18.600 | to just about anywhere, anytime I might have to fly,

01:43:22.480 | I might have to make a positioning flight or two

01:43:28.240 | to make it happen, but I can usually find something.

01:43:31.040 | - Yep, and I think just for anyone listening

01:43:33.200 | who's maybe new to the points and miles world,

01:43:35.960 | I always think it's funny that when I talk about

01:43:38.280 | looking for flights to places, I'm always like,

01:43:40.520 | well, I couldn't find business class,

01:43:42.000 | so we're gonna find another date.

01:43:43.560 | Just to be clear, I don't think I've ever spent

01:43:47.000 | the five to $20,000 those business class flights take.

01:43:52.000 | This is not me speaking out of a desire to spend

01:43:55.320 | on that level of luxury.

01:43:57.720 | It's just that if you figure out how to use these tools,

01:44:01.640 | if you figure out how to time the card bonuses

01:44:04.920 | and your spend and all the other stuff

01:44:07.680 | that you talk about on your show

01:44:09.080 | and I've talked about on my show,

01:44:11.300 | you end up getting to a point that you're somewhat spoiled

01:44:13.840 | to the fact that you can find a way to do it

01:44:16.880 | in a premium cabin at a very reasonable price

01:44:20.200 | almost every time.

01:44:21.840 | - Exactly, and the points and miles, it's amazing.

01:44:26.840 | It lets you do things like this routinely

01:44:31.840 | that you would have never even considered

01:44:34.160 | like forking out the cash to do.

01:44:36.600 | I mean, things like staying at these resorts

01:44:40.080 | that cost like $2,000 a night,

01:44:42.280 | several of the ones we mentioned before,

01:44:44.760 | we didn't talk about the prices,

01:44:46.120 | but would be in that range

01:44:47.600 | or flying business class for, as you said,

01:44:51.320 | anywhere from 5,000 to $20,000.

01:44:54.440 | Those are not things I would consider paying cash for,

01:44:58.540 | but points makes all those things accessible.

01:45:01.440 | And so that's what I love about it.

01:45:03.240 | And we do become spoiled.

01:45:04.700 | I laugh at my wife who, like, well, we were,

01:45:09.700 | what was the last one?

01:45:11.400 | When we flew Air France business class,

01:45:13.440 | it was kind of an older plane.

01:45:15.440 | But it was fully lie flat, direct aisle access.

01:45:20.440 | And she's like complaining about how it wasn't as nice

01:45:24.240 | as the previous flight we were on.

01:45:25.760 | And I just love that we could be that spoiled.

01:45:29.960 | Complain about it even though it's still incredible luxury.

01:45:34.060 | - Yes, and still not have to pay

01:45:36.800 | anywhere near full freight, which is great.

01:45:38.640 | Yeah, this trip to Miraval was just a two night stay.

01:45:44.280 | The rack rate for the same dates

01:45:47.040 | was over $6,000 for two nights,

01:45:49.640 | which is like, it wouldn't even be an option.

01:45:52.200 | Like we would just never do a trip like that.

01:45:54.320 | And unfortunately on this trip, I'm not actually going.

01:45:56.480 | My wife is going with a friend of hers

01:45:58.000 | to celebrate a birthday.

01:45:59.240 | And so I'm gonna have her join on the show

01:46:02.520 | sometime after she stays in April

01:46:04.560 | to give a little rundown of how that trip was.

01:46:07.760 | And she can share with everyone.

01:46:09.960 | But the only other thing I wanted to mention

01:46:11.600 | before we wrap is on hotels,

01:46:14.940 | if you are not finding what you want,

01:46:18.680 | but you are still looking for a little bit of like a perk

01:46:22.920 | or a benefit in the luxury travel world,

01:46:25.840 | there are a lot of different ways that you can book a hotel

01:46:30.200 | and add on a lot of different perks.

01:46:32.440 | And so anyone with an Amex knows that Amex

01:46:35.240 | has the fine hotels and resorts program.

01:46:37.160 | Chase and Capital One have all launched those.

01:46:40.320 | We launched our own at hotels.allthehacks.com

01:46:44.120 | where you can search.

01:46:45.080 | And I think you actually just used it to book something.

01:46:49.120 | Am I right or no?

01:46:51.040 | Someone just texted me and they just used it.

01:46:52.720 | I don't know why I thought it was you.

01:46:54.720 | Anyways, and we set our own at hotels.allthehacks.com

01:46:59.680 | where you can search for kind of the higher end

01:47:02.720 | four or five star hotels and get access to perks

01:47:05.560 | like free breakfast, resort credit,

01:47:10.160 | free upgrades, early check-in, late checkout.

01:47:12.720 | And so I would say, I would encourage everyone

01:47:15.140 | to figure out how to use their points and miles,

01:47:16.700 | use everything we talked about in this episode

01:47:18.840 | to get your stay for free and get all kinds of stuff.

01:47:22.400 | But if you end up spending dollars

01:47:24.320 | and you are staying at a nice higher end hotel

01:47:27.840 | and you have to pay for it,

01:47:29.840 | chances are through one of these platforms,

01:47:32.720 | you can get a pretty awesome set of perks added on

01:47:37.080 | for the same as the rate you typically pay at the website.

01:47:40.840 | Might not be the same as the discounted corporate rate

01:47:43.760 | you have through your employer

01:47:45.200 | or a last minute hotel tonight rate.

01:47:49.000 | But basically we found a partner

01:47:51.620 | that would help us give everyone access to,

01:47:54.680 | I think it's a 4,000 hotels.

01:47:56.520 | I think Chase and Capital One might have like a thousand,

01:47:59.400 | Amex has two or three and we have 4,000.

01:48:01.720 | So I think we have a bigger selection of them.

01:48:04.240 | Nice.

01:48:05.560 | But you can get all those same perks if you want, so.

01:48:09.120 | Sweet.

01:48:09.960 | And is there any fee to use that service?

01:48:13.040 | No, no, no.

01:48:13.880 | It's a free site that we set up with a partner

01:48:16.200 | and the goal was just to get everyone access

01:48:18.060 | to all of these perks and not have to,

01:48:21.760 | there's no booking fee.

01:48:22.600 | I think, I can't remember if Fine Hotels and Resorts

01:48:24.620 | still has a booking fee.

01:48:25.620 | I think maybe with points or something, but-

01:48:28.160 | No, there's no booking fee.

01:48:29.120 | No, there used to be a Amex travel booking fee,

01:48:31.760 | but maybe that was for something else.

01:48:33.440 | Okay.

01:48:34.280 | Yeah, I don't remember.

01:48:35.100 | But anyways, there's no fee.

01:48:37.080 | You can book it.

01:48:37.920 | You can cancel your awards.

01:48:39.940 | I will say to provide this,

01:48:42.200 | we had to make some UI sacrifices.

01:48:45.000 | So the tool that you'd use is not the easiest to use.

01:48:49.100 | But if you go to hotels.allthehacks.com,

01:48:52.040 | you can find a thing.

01:48:52.880 | I'll actually go to, if you go to allthehacks.com/upgrade,

01:48:56.360 | I'll put a video if people want help

01:48:58.260 | walking through the tool.

01:49:00.360 | But yeah, you should get access to all that.

01:49:02.880 | I don't know.

01:49:03.720 | That's all I got for hotels.

01:49:04.540 | It sounds good to me.

01:49:05.380 | That's all I've got too.

01:49:06.720 | (laughing)

01:49:07.560 | Greg, where can everyone go?

01:49:11.000 | 'Cause you dive into this stuff way deeper than we do.

01:49:14.120 | Where can people find what you're reading, writing,

01:49:16.320 | and talking about on your show?

01:49:18.760 | Yeah, so start at frequentmiler.com.

01:49:21.200 | That's where you'll find our blog

01:49:23.320 | and links to our podcast,

01:49:24.960 | which is called "Frequent Miler" on the air.

01:49:27.260 | And you'll just find a wealth of information.

01:49:30.020 | We have resource guides about all these things.

01:49:33.100 | We have the best list of credit card offers on the internet.

01:49:38.100 | Unlike most other websites,

01:49:45.140 | we only post the best offer that we know about

01:49:50.780 | for the reader.

01:49:54.660 | And we don't list offers that are inferior.

01:49:58.680 | So, for example, there might be a 120,000 point

01:50:03.680 | Amex Platinum offer that is available on most websites.

01:50:08.680 | But if you go to our website right now,

01:50:10.980 | as we're recording this anyway,

01:50:12.880 | you'll find 150,000 point offer listed there.

01:50:17.240 | We don't earn anything from you clicking through that offer,

01:50:20.920 | but we think it's the right thing to do

01:50:24.100 | to show the offer that gets people the most points.

01:50:28.760 | Rather than what would pay us.

01:50:30.960 | So that's a big deal.

01:50:34.300 | And yeah, as I mentioned,

01:50:37.500 | just tons of different resources about how to earn points,

01:50:40.500 | how to use them, how to shortcuts to elite status,

01:50:43.780 | things like that.

01:50:44.620 | Things that Chris talks about all the time,

01:50:46.340 | but you might get more in-depth on the blog there.

01:50:50.360 | - Greg's underselling it.

01:50:51.920 | There is so much good stuff.

01:50:54.280 | Your podcast is one of the few that I listen to

01:50:56.380 | every time an episode comes out

01:50:57.980 | because I love going deep on this stuff.

01:51:01.800 | It gives me so much inspiration for ideas to talk about

01:51:04.820 | and podcasts to do with you and Nick,

01:51:06.760 | and we'll see where it goes from there.

01:51:08.220 | So definitely check out the podcast, the website,

01:51:11.080 | and reach out to either one of us if you have questions.

01:51:15.220 | - Absolutely.

01:51:16.460 | - All right.

01:51:17.300 | Thanks so much.

Best Tools for Booking Flights + Hotels with Points & Miles with Greg the Frequent Miler

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