- We broke the entire landscape of tools that you can use to get maximum value out of your points. How did you decide to break it up? - So first we have flight search tools. So press go and tell me what flights are available, how much they cost with points.

Another category is flight discovery, and that's where the tools are broader. Then the next two categories are around hotel searches. So you have hotel points and you wanna use them. The other category... - What's been the impact for the ability for you to get maximum value out of your points by having access to all these tools?

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

- We do. This time we have a nice outline, but also we just had so much fun recording before, figured why not do it again, right? - I know, usually it's audio problems, video problems, and you're like, oh, we lost it, we gotta record here. It's like, nope, it all worked.

We just wanted to do a better job for everyone listening and hopefully you will all appreciate it. So what we did was we broke the entire landscape of tools that you can use to search for flights and hotels into a couple categories. And I added one, but you kind of started this list.

So how did you decide to break it up? - Yeah, so first we have flight search tools. So you have all these points, you wanna book a flight to somewhere. How do you find a good award flights? There are two broad categories of tools that I think are important to think of differently.

One is just flight search, which means you know you wanna go from this airport to that airport, you know your dates of travel, press go and tell me what flights are available, how much they cost with points, which points I should use to book it. That's a basic flight search tool.

Another category is flight discovery. And that's where the tools are broader. They're not designed to tell you which exact flights to get from here to there, but rather to say, you know, I wanna fly to Europe sometime this summer, or, you know, you have a broad idea of what you wanna do.

These discovery tools help you find what are all the best opportunities for that sort of broad idea. 'Cause maybe you wanna go to Europe, but you don't really care about where, you just want the best flights to get there and at the best times where the best flights are available.

So that's what flight discovery tools can help you do. - It could also be, I just wanna fly on a business class or first-class cabin for a great deal. And like, if my vacation takes me to Asia or Europe or South America, so be it. I'll go anywhere, but give me one of those once-in-a-lifetime redemption for a low value.

- Absolutely, yep. Then the next two categories are around hotel searches. So you have hotel points and you wanna use them. The most obvious use I'm calling hotel trip planning. And that's where basically, you know you're gonna be going to Paris during July 6th to the 20th, and show me what hotels are available in Paris at that time and how much do they cost with points?

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

And so that's why it's impossible to find hotels awards searches. - The only one I added was I added a category that we'll get to in flights, which is just some other flight tools. There's a handful of things that don't necessarily fit into search and discovery, but I think are worth kind of just quickly running through so people know they exist.

And so I'll add a few of my favorites there. I know you've used a couple of them also. - Yep, yep. That'll be good. So that'll be the last category is the miscellaneous other flight search tools. But I think you had some things that weren't really even flight searches, right?

So it's just miscellaneous other tools, let's say. - For anyone who has miles, we're gonna do an episode actually with your co-host on the Frequent Miler in the Air podcast, Nick, talking about just general how to search for awards, not the tactical, but how to just think about redeeming your points and how to get the most value out of your points and ways to structure that and think about it and how far out to plan.

That episode, we're actually gonna record at the end of this week. It'll be out a few weeks after, but I wanted this one to come out first because the last thing I wanna tell everyone is, hey, here's how to start thinking about it, but not actually give you the tools to use.

So we're gonna talk about the tools. And then for anyone who wants to zoom out a little and think, how do I even just start thinking about the best ways to redeem my points, when to look, where to look, how to structure the trip, that'll be coming in a few weeks with Nick.

And that one will certainly make reference back to this episode. - Yeah, great point. Before we dive into flight search tools, I just wanna give some broad background because I think a lot of people think, well, I've got my American Airlines miles. So obviously the way to search for awards is to just get on aa.com and type in where I wanna go and see what comes up.

And there's a couple of problems with that. One is that you might miss some great opportunities to use your American Airlines miles because you didn't look at other dates or you didn't look at other cities. So for example, you might be wanting to fly somewhere far away to South Africa, let's say, and maybe you started your search in San Francisco, but the best flight awards might be available from LA.

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

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

So you could transfer your Chase points over to Virgin Atlantic, let's say, in order to book an Air France flight. And so that kind of complexity is something that a lot of people I think are afraid of, but these tools make it pretty easy to grasp, I think. - And I don't know if this is still as much the case as it used to be, but in the past, at least, I remember there are some airlines that you might be able to use your United, Delta, Amac, or Air France, whatever points on, with their partners that don't show up on their website.

And so I don't know how much that's still true, but there were some partners that you could use points in one program to book, but you had to know that the availability was there from another tool to be able to book it. - Yeah, yeah. It's still there. It's not as bad as it used to be.

It used to be very, very common. But I think a lot of tools have gotten better about that. And the search tools we're gonna talk about won't necessarily help you with that specific situation. So for example, let's say your United Miles could be used for a particular United partner that's not available through United's website.

You might, one of these tools might show that that award flight is available with some other points, but it's not gonna show that it's available with United. You have to be smart enough to know, oh, United's a partner with that airline, so I could use my United Miles. And so that's a problem that is not solved by the tools we're gonna talk about.

- Okay. All right. All right, so let's dive in. Flight search tools. These are the tools that look like Google Flights or Kayak Flights or Expedia when you're searching for flights. They ask you for where you're going from, where you're going to, number of passengers, what are your dates that you're traveling, and what class of service do you want, economy, business class, first class.

So there's a whole slew of tools like this. And in my opinion, the ones that are best do a number of things. First of all, they search a number of different airline programs. If you just search Delta United American, you're gonna miss out on a lot of opportunities for really good priced award flights.

The best tools run quickly, run their searches quickly, and they can search a range of dates at once. Now, this is something that you don't normally see on a Kayak-like tool, the ability to say, I wanna leave any day this week, or that kind of thing. But it's more important with award flights, because sometimes if you just look at one day, you might see that the best award flight would cost, I'll make up a number, like 400,000 points for one person.

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

This is something not a lot of tools can do, but there's a few that can. And the idea there is a couple of things. Maybe you're near multiple airports, and so you wanna specify, I'm willing to leave from any of these two or three airports. But also, where you're flying to, you can often find better deals by flying to different airports.

And you might have to then book another short-distance flight , let's say, to get to where you really wanna end up ultimately. But the more you do searches, the more you're gonna want that capability to put in multiple airports. - And just on that note, my wife and I were going to Japan.

We really wanted to do it in business. From Portland, the flights were in business were like one quarter of the cost on the kind of range of dates we wanted as they were from San Francisco. It was like 100,000-something round trip from Portland and like 400,000 round trip in San Francisco.

And the flight to Portland was like $100 each way. - Yeah. - So like $200 plus 100,000 points is infinitely better than spending 100,000 points. And at the time we had no kids, so the extra stop was not nearly as much work as it would be with kids. So I just wanna really highlight how valuable it can be to be able to search a range of airports that are not necessarily a short drive, but might be a short flight.

- Yeah, great point. Terminology wise, we call those positioning flights when you fly to somewhere like Portland in order to get the flight you ultimately want. And that can happen at both ends of your trip, right? Like so maybe you wanted to go to Kyoto, but the best deals were to fly to Tokyo.

So you fly to Tokyo and then you take either a positioning flight from Tokyo to Kyoto, or you take a train. You know, you have other, you have different options for positioning, but that's the idea here. One of the biggest features, or most important features I think, is the ability to set alerts.

So what some people might not realize is if you sit down and do an award search to see what's available, that's not the end of the story. Like you may find some good flights, you may not, but what's available changes all the time. So if you don't find what you like, I find it's like critical to be able to set up an alert so that the tool will keep checking the route you're interested in, and will email you when something within your parameters becomes available.

And then you get the email and then you can jump online and hopefully book that trip. So that's setting alerts. And finally, some good tools provide detailed instructions. So for beginners who don't know that you can transfer chase points, Virgin Atlantic, like I was talking about before, some tools will actually kind of step you through, here's how to do it, and here's exactly what to do.

Not just to transfer the points, but then to actually book it once you have the points in the right place. So those are the criteria I looked at. And I looked at a number of tools and I'll just list them really quick. AwardLogic, AwardTool, PointMe, PointsPath, PointsYeah, and Roam.travel.

Those are the tools I looked at. - Those might've been the ones you gave a full comparison to, but I know we also even talked about looking at PointHound. We talked about playing around with Oasis new flight search. So I would say maybe this is the short list, but I know you've probably played with half a dozen more tools that we're not even putting on the short list that we will then take down to like a final set.

So I'll just flag that every week, it seems like there's a new tool or a new feature from a tool. And so there's a handful of other tools that I know you've played with in the past or recently that maybe didn't even make it to this short list, but I wanna make sure everyone listening knows that we've probably looked at most of them.

Reward Flight Finder, I think was another one. So there's so many of them. - There are, there are so many, and you're absolutely right. Some of the ones that made the list made them because they're very popular tools. And so I felt like I needed to cover them. And then some of them made the list because they have a lot of the capabilities that I'm looking for that I just described.

And some of the ones that didn't make the list are ones that are new or new to me. And I looked at them briefly, saw, oh, they don't let me do a range of dates. They don't let me set alerts, you know? So there wasn't anything that I could see right at a glance that they weren't gonna make the top of my list.

So there's no reason to do an in-depth comparison with those. - That makes sense. - Cutting it down right to the end point here, so which tools are best for given all those things I talked about? And the truth is, as things stand right now, there are two tools that check most of the boxes, Pointia and AwardTool.

They are very similar to each other. They both have almost all of those things I mentioned. They have alerts, they allow you to do a range of dates, they let you do multiple airports, and they're fast. So those are cool things about both of those tools. And they both have capable free versions.

So as long as you sign up, even for the free version, you can do meaningful searches, you can do a range of dates, not as many dates as you would be able to do if you got the pro version, but still, and you can set some alerts. So there's a lot there, whether you pay for these tools or not.

And they're similar priced, as things stand now, they're around $90 a year. And AwardTool has a $12 per month option if you wanna pay for the tools. - So I'm pulling up Pointia, just for anyone that's on video with us. And just to kind of walk people through high level, you can go in and you can say, I'm departing from San Francisco or Los Angeles.

It looks like on Pointia, you can pick two airports. - That's right. - Right now, and you can say I'm going to, let's say Paris or London. So they've got two, but only two. So that might be a little bit of a change. And then for dates, I can say, let's go from April 1st to April 8th.

I can choose a week window for this one-way flight. And I can say economy and premium economy, or business at first, which is nice. You don't have to search business separately from first. And you could actually filter the programs, but I hope that people listening have, you know, tried to build up a points balance in enough places that don't start your search by filtering by the airline.

Do that later, once you get somewhere. And obviously choose the number of passengers you're looking for. And so you'll get a list of all of those flights and the airlines they come from. - Yeah, yeah. - The main difference, if I remember right, I'm looking, now I'm pulling up a word tool to do a similar thing.

I can search 16 airports. Lot more than two. - You can, but then, so award flights, award tool, sorry, award tool, which you're looking at now. It, yeah, it'll let you do up to 16 airports, but if you do 16 airports, then you can only do a single day.

- Yeah, they're basically letting you search 16 vectors, I guess. It's like two airports for eight days, four airports for four days. - Exactly, exactly. And then they have this mega version of their search, which I have no idea why it's separate, but that gives you 24 degrees of freedom.

So you could do 24 airports, or you could do one airport in a 24-day date range, or you could do two, from airports to two airports in a 12-day date range. - Now I do know some of these, just to be clear. I think to dial it up to 16 or use mega, you need to be a premium member.

- Yes. - Here's how I'll stack rank it. I'll put a link to all the deals I've gotten for everyone. If I don't have one, I'll put all the links that you guys have gotten to everyone, and if I don't have one of those, I'll just link to the website.

But I know that between you and I, we probably have some type of promo or referral or something for all these tools. And it's really nice to be able to search a handful of different airlines or airports. - Yeah. - For me, it's like having three or four is sometimes a little better because we just have three in the Bay Area.

So if I can only get two, I can't even add LAX or something that's really close. - Yeah, yeah. - So I like that. - Yeah, I like that too. For me from Detroit, if I'm flying, let's say to Europe, I look at all the major airports that I can easily get to in one short hop.

And so that includes New York City Airport, Chicago, Toronto, Washington, DC. That's my short list of, and sometimes I'll throw in Boston, but my short list of airports, in addition to Detroit itself, that I'll put in my from list using a word tool. And yeah, with points here, I can only put in two at a time, which is still better than once I only allow one.

- I was gonna put this in the grab bag list of tools, but for this particular use case, the tool I use the most is called Flight Connections. I've heard, I can't remember, there's another tool that has a name that I can't remember, but the thing I love about Flight Connections is I can go in and put, oh, I live in San Francisco, and it'll just show me all the direct flights.

And so, if I'm starting off thinking I'd love to go to Europe, my usual choice, this is how I think about it. I'm like, if I wanna go to Paris, obviously the perfect flight is SFO to Paris direct. But the game with points and miles is give yourself flexibility on dates, on departure airports.

So what I'll typically try to do is say, well, I wanna start an SFO and I wanna go to, I wanna look at all the airports in Europe, and then I'll reverse that search and say, or I'll look at Paris and look at all the places you can get to Paris from the United States.

Now, just looking at this map right now, I'm like, well, now I'm well over the 60, I might not even be able to do a mega search here. I might have to do two searches, one from all of the US to Paris and one from all of Europe to San Francisco.

And we'll get to that when we talk about discovery, 'cause I feel like we're kind of slowly crossing the line into discovery tools. But I think Flight Connections is the best tool I've found for finding which airlines fly direct from an airport. Yeah, no, I use it all the time for that purpose.

So for example, when I had a flight from Queenstown, New Zealand, I wanted to return home. And Queenstown is a pretty small airport, and so I used Flight Connections to see, okay, there are nonstop flights from Queenstown to, and don't check my memory here, but to within New Zealand, Christchurch and Auckland, but also to some places in Australia like Sydney.

And ultimately, I ended up getting a flight back from Sydney and so I separately positioned, booked a positioning flight from Queenstown to Sydney for that. - Yep. - I see it right now. - Okay. - Yeah, so. - There you go. - Hopefully that's helpful. You know, you could be playing along.

I should mention, all these websites, we're gonna put links to the show notes, you could play along at home and kind of play with these tools as we're talking about them. For many of them, for award tool endpoints, yeah, which were your kind of top two, the free tool gives you some access.

Is there a general thought about what paying gives you? - So in both cases, you get a lot more flexibility with how many airports or dates you can search. So for points, yeah, for example, you can only do one airport if you have the free version. And I think you could do four day date range on the free version there.

And award tool gives you like four degrees of freedom that you could spend any way you want with four airports or four dates kind of thing. - Okay. - So that just goes way up when you pay for it. Now award tool, that mega search thing, even a free version will give you a few, I can't remember the number, but it'll give you a few times you can use that mega search, the full power of it from, I can't remember a few a day or a few a month or whatever, but yeah, I think it's a few a day.

So that's pretty good right there. - What would any of these other tools, when would they come into play? - Two things that these tools don't do is they don't search, they're not the best at searching all possible award programs. And they don't provide detailed instructions for a beginner to show you how to move the points from Chase or Amex or Citi or Capital One to an airline program and then how to book it.

That kind of detail is something that you'll find in a tool called Point Me. And Point Me also probably searches the most different programs of any of the tools here. So Point Me-- - Are there any major holes? Are there any like big obvious gotchas that Points Yeah or Award Tool aren't doing?

- Probably the biggest is Singapore. So if, and this is very specific, but if your heart's set on flying Singapore suites, which is amazing, first class, fully enclosed type of experience, the only way to book that is with Singapore's own miles. And you can transfer to Singapore miles from pretty much any transferable points program.

So it's easy to get the miles, but among the popular tools, only Point Me, if I'm remembering right, actually searches Singapore. So if you're using these other tools and you wanna fly Singapore, you either need to use Point Me or log into Singapore's website itself and do your searches there, which is how I do it.

- Yeah. And I'm just, I just remembered one thing. So I'm sharing my screen a little bit here and I was looking at Points Yeah, and I think the same thing is true on Award Tool. One important thing, they all have the same kind of filtering tools. So you can sort them, you can search by airports, arrival airports, how many stops are you taking?

What's the max number of points or taxes? One thing that I think is important that a lot of people might forget is this premium cabin thing. I got this flight and I said, "Wow, I wanna go from LAX to Paris. It's only 32,000 points in business class. That's incredible." And then I look and I said, "No, it's 21% in business class.

It's LAX to London in economy and then Heathrow to Frankfurt in business and then Frankfurt to Paris in business." - Yeah, yeah. - So like, first off, if you're trying to get from London to Paris, taking a one-stop flight through Frankfurt is probably one of the least efficient ways that you could get there.

But two, I would advise you to set that marker to be somewhere at least over 80% or close. Otherwise, you'll be stuck in a place where you're gonna end up finding awards that aren't really what you want. And then the other bummer one is that taxes. So I'm looking on this search and it's like, "Well, now I found San Francisco to London for 38,000 points in business.

That's great." But it's on Virgin Atlantic and you can see the fees are $1,000, $998. And so not to say that 38,000 points and $1,000 isn't a better deal than paying for that ticket outright. It probably actually is, but I wouldn't say it's a screaming deal. - Yeah, yeah, absolutely right.

And another parameter that I like to set often is the time of day, like departure time, arrival time, depending on what's going on. If I don't wanna get up at three in the morning to catch a flight, I might set the minimum time to a later time. And especially if I'm doing something where I have to catch another flight or get to somewhere in time, I use that a lot.

So those can be really helpful as well. - Yeah, and then as just a little example here, I'm looking at points here and it says, "Oh, you can use these points on life miles." And I'm like, "That sounds great. Let's do it." Nice, a lot of these tools all show you, here's how many points it's gonna take to get your 61,200 life miles.

And most of them are looking at the current transfer bonuses. Right now, Citi has a 25% transfer bonus. So they say, "If you have Citi points, that's the deal." It looks like they do have a transfer guide here, but it's certainly not for everything. And so they have a Citi transfer guide that's a little bit generic.

Otherwise, if they don't have one for an airline, it just takes you to the website. When I go to point.me and I say, "Show me how to do this." I guess here's the downside. I have to wait for point.me to finish loading. - That's the thing. We didn't talk about the downsides to point.me.

It is painfully slow. It takes about two minutes, which may not sound bad if you just hear the word two minutes, but when you're running searches, and especially if you wanna do a bunch of different ones, I find it excruciating. And it's made worse by the fact that point.me doesn't do date ranges.

So if you wanna check multiple days, you gotta run separate searches. It only does individual airports. Again, you wanna check multiple airports, that's more searches, and it won't do alerts. So a lot of downsides to point.me, but the fact that it gives such detailed instructions for how to transfer the points, how to book the flight once you have the points is really important for beginners.

And it totally could be worth someone buying a day pass to just use point.me to step them through that process. - Totally. - Even after they've, if they found an award through some other tool, you might wanna jump over to point.me to hold your hand through actually booking it.

- Yeah, I'm looking right now. It's like, how do I book this flight on Virgin Atlantic? And this is a multi-step process of here's how to create the account. Here's how to create the account on Virgin. Here's how to create the account. Here's how to search. Here's how to walk you through one by one by one for each individual transferable currency, how to transfer it.

So I would definitely say, the way I use point.me is, if I'm trying to walk someone through it, I say, I found you a flight on these dates, go get a day pass to point.me so you can see how it works and then it'll walk you through it. Sometimes I use it as a validator.

Not to say I don't trust the other tools, but we didn't talk much about accuracy, but I think that's important. And I feel like point.me, I've had the least number of issues where it shows me something that's not there. And then sometimes it's that like, I'm about to book this flight in cash.

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

I think it's good. Any other things? - Yeah, I mean, I think that's a really good point about it. Although I had found a Life Miles flight a couple of weeks ago through a word tool and I didn't see it on points yet. So I checked point.me and it wasn't there either.

So I thought, oh, it's Phantom Space, but then I was able to bring it up and book it on Life Miles. So there's no tool that's perfect. And I don't know why even with these tools, sometimes you could run the same exact search multiple times and you'll see a flight like the Life Miles one show up, but then not show up the next time you run it or vice versa.

So I don't know why they're unreliable in that way, but there is some mystery to the results that come back, unfortunately. - Yep, and you briefly mentioned awards or alerts are important. Point.me does not have alerts, but if I'm using a word tool and I say, well, I do wanna go to Paris and I'd like to do it in business class on a specific date range.

And let's say there's nothing there. You can say, hey, just let me know. - Yeah, exactly. - And you can say track prices almost in the same way you would do on a Google flights, but you can also say, set an alert for a specific route. - Right, so you would say, I wanna go to Paris.

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

That's how I use that tool. - And you can set the number of people, which I think if you're traveling with three or four people. - Oh, that's critical. - This whole game is very hard, but you could set, it looks like you set 25 alerts, but similar to the way the search works, I'm looking now at setting an alert from San Francisco to Paris for a date range of four days.

That's gonna use four of my 25 alerts. - It will. - So it's all a currency of how many you have access to, whether it's searching or alerts, but at least you have them. And I don't think it's hard. I think it's easy to forget. You already said this, and I'll just say it again.

It's easy to forget that this stuff changes all the time. - It really does. - And so I would tell someone that said, "Hey, I wanna go to Paris on this three date window, like six months from now." And the answer is like, between the day you wanna take off and now, it will probably become available and become unavailable multiple times.

- That's true. And on some routes, some airlines, the chance of it becoming available actually increases dramatically as you get within a few weeks or a few days of the flight, which lends a whole nother fun to people who really wanna live on the edge and wait till the last minute to book their flights.

But I expect that you and Nick will talk about strategies around that, around that idea of booking good enough flights and then setting alerts for things like this. And if something comes available a few days before your flight, canceling the original and booking the, not in that order, and booking the better one.

So let me re-say that. You wanna book the better one first, make sure that booking works, you don't have any problems booking it, then cancel your original one. - If you had the ballpark, these tools didn't always exist, right? It used to be a long process to figure out how to make all of this work out, calling, asking, what about this date?

What about this date? What about this date? You know, what's been the impact for the ability for you to get maximum value out of your points by having access to all these tools? - Oh, I mean, it's huge because, I mean, it just makes it so much easier to find what you want.

You don't have to be an expert geek at this stuff to find good things. I think that's the biggest change. - And finding good things is saving thousands or maybe tens of thousands of dollars by getting the right deal. - Right, it's either saving huge amount of money or probably often it means flying business or first class instead of economy, which you might've done had you not had access to these awards and these tools to help you find those flights.

So yeah, it's huge. Flip side is, as these tools make it so easy to find these awards, they probably get snapped up faster than they would without the tools. And so people who knew before how to find these awards might be frustrated by having fewer available because other people are snapping them up.

- Yeah. Now, two quick tools we didn't talk about much. One is PointsPath, which in the last couple of weeks, I've actually gotten a lot of use out of. And it's a Chrome extension. So it doesn't actually have a website. I mean, it has a website, but you're not using the website.

And it pops up when you're doing searches on Google Flights. And at first glance, I was like, "Hmm, when am I gonna use this?" And the example I just searched for did not bear fruit like I had expected. But I recently went to South by Southwest in Austin, and I was looking at flights, and I had waited too long to book them.

And I was like, "Oh my gosh, flights are really expensive." Like $500 one-way flights from San Francisco. And on Google Flights, it popped up and said, "Hey, just so you know, it's only 12,500 AA miles." And I was like, "What?" Like, I blew my mind that I could get such a good deal using points on just a basic domestic flight, direct, exact dates I wanted.

And I almost assumed that I wouldn't get a good deal and never looked anywhere else. So I think it's a no-brainer to turn the PointsPath Chrome extension on because I'm already doing my cash searching on Google Flights. If it happens to find something, granted, I think it's only searching American United Delta.

- They just added JetBlue as well. - And JetBlue? - Yep. - So it's not searching everything, but it is searching enough that I've actually saved a few hundred dollars just in the past few weeks having that extension on. - That's a good commercial for that tool. Yeah, no, I feel the same way.

I love having it, not because I would... I would never, ever seek it out. If they had a website, search here for these four programs. I would never seek out this tool, but having it installed in my browser so that any time I use Google Flights, it just automatically shows me the point prices of flights I'm looking for anyway, I find really, really valuable.

Although I have to say that it's still worth, in the example you gave, running PointsPath or... Or, I'm sorry, running one of the other tools, AwardTool or Points, yeah. Or really any of these other tools that you like that cover a lot of different programs, because you might've found that there was another program that would fly you that same flight instead of 12,500 American miles.

There might've been one that you could book for 8,000 miles, 8,000 points, you know, with Avios or something. - Yeah, that happens to me all the time. Domestic flights, find something cheap on United, book it on Avionca for half the price. - Yeah, yeah, no, exactly, exactly. And so that's, again, why these tools are so darn useful.

- Yeah, and then the only other one was Roam Travel. I'm curious, it made it into this kind of shortlist, so what allowed it to make the shortlist, even though we haven't talked about it yet? - Yeah, the reason it made the shortlist is because it was the first tool to compete with the expensive older tools, AwardLogic and PointMe, and it did sort of the similar things as those tools, but it's free and fast.

And so it was the first tool that was really competitive with those, but then when Pointia and AwardTool came out, Roam.travel has been kind of left in the dust. And so until they leapfrogged those others, at this point, I don't see a reason to turn to Roam.travel, but all these tools are constantly innovating, and I'd be surprised if we don't see Roam.travel all of a sudden introduce great new features, and then Pointia will have to come back and get better and so on.

So it's good competition for us as consumers of these tools. - Yep, absolutely. Okay, let's talk about flight discovery. - Yeah. So remember, the idea here is you wanna ask broad questions, like, "I have a family of four, and I wanna go to Europe this summer," or, "I just wanna fly international first class to somewhere.

Doesn't matter where, but show me where the good deals are," things like that. And there are a bunch of tools that do this, and some of them are the same tools we already talked about, and they have a different mode that does this. What's common across all of them is they use cached search results.

So they do their searches ahead of time, they store all this information, and so they can answer these broad queries like this quickly, but you have to keep in mind two things. One, they don't have all possible flights in there. They only have the flights that they've looked at, and the other thing you need to keep in mind is whatever the tools think they know about what's available might not be true anymore, because these are cached, and we don't really have visibility usually into how old the data is.

Sometimes you do, sometimes you don't, but despite those negatives, it really is possible to find a lot of things super quickly, and then to check the results quickly with these tools, especially, I'll just tell you, I looked at a bunch of them. I looked at point.me/explore. I looked at Roam's SkyView tool.

I looked at AwardTool Panorama, and Seats.Aero, which is sort of the original tool that does this cached result thing, and ultimately, Pointia, their discovery tool is called Daydream Explorer. It just kind of beat the pants off all the others in doing the types of things I tested it for, and so that's, at least for now, my go-to for finding these things.

I was able to do like a really, what I thought was a difficult challenge. Like in my test, I started in an airport that doesn't have, it's not a big airport, Cleveland. I had to start there and look for a family of four to go business class in the summer to Europe, and I thought, oh, that'll be a really hard thing for any tool to find.

I found good options immediately through Daydream Explorer and through several other scenarios, too. It had the most complete results and the best features. And when I talk about features, one feature that I really like that some of the others don't have is not just being able to say flexibly where you're going to, like to be able to say I want to go to Europe, but also I want to be able to broadly say I want to come from not just Cleveland but the United States or North America because I'm willing to position to another place, or maybe for my return travel, I want to say I'm coming from Europe and going to Cleveland, for example.

Yeah, I want that kind of flexibility, and Daydream Explorer gives you that. Another thing that not all tools do, and this is kind of unbelievable, but Pointsia does do, is let you say how many people would be traveling. Like, doesn't that seem like that's gotta be the most basic thing that they would all do, but it's actually fairly rare in this space so far, so that's a obviously really good feature.

And we talked before about the ability to set minimum premium cabin so that you don't want to end up with finding flights that are predominantly economy and a short leg in business class that lets you do that. Yeah. Now, you might know this 'cause I've played with them all logged in, but are a lot of these exploration tools available free?

Because I do know that Point.me made the Explore feature free to everyone recently, and so I don't know if the other tools, exploration tools are free or not. Yeah, it depends. It varies from tool to tool, but the Pointsia Daydream Explorer, you get full functionality, as far as I could tell, from the free version, and so that's pretty awesome.

Wow, okay. Yeah, I'm playing with them all. Some of the features that we haven't talked about that are interesting, I'm looking right now, a lot of them let you pick the kind of trip you want. So you could say ski trip or beach trip or that kind of stuff.

All they've really done is gone and just categorized all these airports as to what they are, but the ability to go in and say, hey, I want to go to the beach and I want to go nonstop in business class from wherever I am and for four people and come up with something is really cool.

So I think- It is really cool. And I have to admit, I did not test them to see who could do beach or ski vacations or golf vacations or whatever it is better than the others. I'm dubious about their ability to correctly categorize things 'cause just about anywhere you go, it may be a way to get to a beach, but it might not be the primary beach you want to go to.

Well, I'm seeing some great options for four people from San Francisco to go to the beach right now in Mexico, in Hawaii, on nonstop, first in business. So I am inspired. One tool that we haven't talked about yet much is seats.arrow. Yeah. So seats.arrow, this is what I think has started this whole class of discovery tools.

It was the first one I knew of anyway, where they would upfront run a million award searches, store all the results, and then let you just explore quickly to see what's available. Now it does it in a very nerdy, you have to understand what the two letter codes for airlines and airports are and things like that.

But it's incredibly powerful, and I still turn to it regularly for specific things. So it's not as good as Points Yes, Daydream Explorer for just tell me across all programs, where can I fly in business class this summer, that kind of thing. It's not really good for that. But if you have an idea of more specific things that you want, like so for example, you know you wanna use your Emirates miles to fly Emirates first class.

It's a great tool for quickly identifying all of the first class award availability that it has cached. Yeah, I will say the reason why it's a little confusing to use and you know this is, when you're browsing the website, it's like they have a section called Explore, and you pick the program, and you can do some much broader searching.

So you could say, just look at everything I can do with Air France, and now I get all these features. But when you do your search on that, you're not gonna get any United flights, or any Lufthansa flights or anything. And so the most flexible searching is within a program.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Also, what you might not realize is that if you wanna see Delta flights, picking Air France or Virgin Atlantic is what you wanna explore to see Delta flights. So you have to know those kind of nerdy things, that that's what this tool does is because they're partners with Delta.

And so, yeah, it really was designed for people who know what they're doing. The author of the tool tells me he's working on like some sort of mega Explore feature where it would maybe combine all of those programs together on one massive Explore, which I would love that, because I'd love the Explore, how powerful the Explore interface is.

And, but it frustrates me that I have to switch between programs to do a full search. But what I did, I did notice recently, so I'm doing a search on my screen. I went to the search tab, which searches all the programs, and search US to Europe in, let's just pick July 15th, plus or minus 60 days.

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

I noticed that depending on your from and your to, sometimes the number of days gets ratcheted down and down and down. If you search US to anywhere, you could do a plus or minus three day search. So it's funny, 'cause we didn't talk about it in the first set of tools for searching flights.

We didn't really talk about it in the discovery. I find that it's actually probably maybe one of the best tools that does both. You just really need to spend time understanding how to use it to get the most out of it. And for a lot of people, this is not gonna be that.

However, I just searched and I said, "Hey, I want United States to Europe 28 days "within the middle of July, two people direct flights." And I got 17,000 flights. Now, if I wanted to filter that down to business, and let's say I don't have any American miles, so I wanna filter out American and Alaska.

I can do that. I can filter the number of fees. And so you can kind of work your way to get there, but I would say highest learning curve, but maybe the most ROI if you figure it out. - Maybe, maybe, although I wanna point out something of the search you just did that you put that you wanna fly to Europe, but that three-letter code, Europe, only is bringing in what seats.euro chose to be as major airports in Europe.

- Oh yeah, I'm looking right now and the list is about, I don't know, I'm gonna ballpark it at 30 airports maybe, but not all of them. - Not all of them. And so, when I was doing the Poincia Daydream Explorer thing, one of the best flights that it found for me to Europe was to Lyon, France.

And I bet you Lyon is not a major airport in that list, but often flights to smaller airports have better award availability, strangely, or at least at better prices. So it's weird but true that flying, for example, from Detroit to Paris on Air France to Lyon is sometimes a lot cheaper than just Detroit to Paris.

So the exact same first leg, but adding on a flight to a smaller airport sometimes can lower the price substantially. And so that's what I was able to find with the Poincia tool and what you wouldn't find with that particular search you just did. - Yeah, so I will say I like it.

It does a lot of stuff. You've gotta get used to how to use it. But once you figure it out, I'm like, "Oh, this is cool." If you really wanna nerd out, I think you can export the results. I think they have an API you can play with. So you could really go as deep as you want, but-- - You really can, and I love it too.

I don't wanna talk it down at all. I just did wanna point out a difference between the other tools. I also love that they have a tools menu with some specialty searches that you can do to find things that might be hard to find without having those tools there, like the Delta One Finder as a way to quickly find award flights flying Delta One using Virgin Atlantic miles, for example.

- Yeah, I actually used it. I had a friend who had some expiring United Plus points and was like, "I got these points that are expiring." I was like, "I wonder where you could go with them." And then I just quickly looked up and it's like, "Oh, you can go to Japan." If you wanted to go to Japan in the next two weeks, you can use your Plus points.

And so they've built a lot of cool stuff. I think, at least when I've read about how point.me is doing their Explore tool, they're kind of basing it off of user searches. And so I don't know if this is true for all the other tools, but the one thing that I know seats.arrow does is they're running a search for a lot of routes every day.

And so if no one has searched for, for example, I'm looking a lot of the best West Coast to Europe business class availability this summer seems to be on a lot flight from LAX to Warsaw, right? If no one searched for LAX to Warsaw on point.me, then you're not gonna get that in the Daydream Explorer, even though if you wanna fly to Europe from the West Coast, LAX to Warsaw might be a great option in business class.

70,000 points on arrow plan available on one, two, three, four, five different days in July and August could be great, but a lot of the other tools might not show it because maybe someone hasn't searched for it. - Right, yeah, that's absolutely true. I don't know, I was surprised at how many flights points.ya did find.

And so I do wonder if, do they supplement their cash with automatically run routes or is there just so many users because they have a capable product that's free? Maybe they have so many users that they are cashing a lot of stuff, I don't know. But the flip side of what you just said is true also, which is that if the route, if seats.arrow doesn't look for the route that you actually want, you're not gonna find anything.

So again, back to my Lyon example, even if you put in Lyon as a destination, you're probably not gonna find anything because it probably doesn't have Lyon as a route that it searches automatically. - Yeah, they have an option to say, hey, I wanna request-- - Prove me wrong, I'm sure.

- Start adding this route to your search list, but-- - That's right, that's right, you can ask them to add it, so that's good, but as far as just stumbling upon things that are available, you're not gonna be able to do that with something. So yeah, there's pros and cons there, but overall, for those who are really, really into this stuff, I think Seatside Arrow is an essential tool for your toolbox, but it's not for the, it's not a beginner tool by a long stretch.

- And the one other thing that's nice is, when you look at a flight, I'm looking, Las Vegas to Gatwick, but it's not probably on BA, but when you look at it, it'll say, well, it was last refreshed a day ago, but if you click the little info box, it's like refreshing with the results of the airline now.

So I do like how, even though they might not have availability right now, that's fresh, they will go and get it for you without having to jump to another site. - I like that too, that's a really good thing, and it'd be nice if it, sometimes it can be really slow, that refreshing.

- I'm waiting, I'm still waiting right now. - Yeah, exactly, it'd be nice if they could figure out how to speed that up, but still, at least it does do that, so that's good. - Okay, so it sounds like, if you need one tool to do it all, Points Yeah is a pretty high runner, but if you like doing really complicated, five, six, seven airline, airport, date, searches, you might be better off with Award Tool, or Seats.arrow, or some combo of the two.

- Yeah, yeah, I think that's all true. - Okay, I think the only thing we failed to mention is that Point.me, which I've found to be a very comprehensive, yet slow tool, if you have a Built Rewards account, which is free, by the way, this is not the Built Credit Card, this is just the Built Rewards account, which anyone can sign up for, in their mobile app, you have the ability to do a search on Point.me for free, but it's restricted only to the airlines that Built is partnered with, which includes many airlines, but not all airlines.

- Yes, absolutely, it's great to know about that, free access through Built, also, there is a URL, so you could bring that up on the website by logging into your Built account on a website, and we'll get that URL in the show notes. - Yep, and then also, one other reason we re-recorded this, since then, Amex has announced the same partnership, or not the same, a different but very similar partnership, where if you have a US-based Amex card, you can also get access to Point.me with Amex's travel partners.

So if you had an Amex and a free Built Rewards account, maybe, I haven't done the intersection of, but that probably gets you pretty far with Point.me access without having to pay for it. - Yeah, I mean, I think that's true. It might be frustrating when you're trying to decide which to do, because right now, anyway, Built has American Airlines, and they've probably added Alaska, because that's a new transfer partner.

Amex is not gonna have either one of those, but it will have things like Delta, and it has a lot of more obscure programs that may or may not have better pricing. So you could sometimes get some really good price options through Amex's transfer partners. - Yep, okay. So that's flights.

We covered a lot. We actually, I had the idea of bringing up a couple other flight tools in our conversation, and then I thought, we ended up bringing most of them up. I'll share the couple other ones we forgot. So we talked about Seats.arrow. We talked about PointsPath. We talked about Flight Connections.

The other few ones I'll have, there's one different use case, which we haven't talked about, which is it's not, I want to take a specific route, a flight search per se, and it's not, I wanna go somewhere. It's, I live in San Francisco. I wanna fly to London. I really wanna go on the direct flight, or I, and that's maybe a poor example 'cause multiple airlines serve it, but it's, there is a flight you want, and you're willing to be flexible with your dates, but you don't really wanna change the from or the to and the airline.

And so there are a couple tools, some part of the tools before, and then one we haven't mentioned called Seatspy, which is very good for a very unique search, which is, I would like to fly from San Francisco to Narita in Tokyo on the United flight. Tell me which days over the next 365 days I can take that flight in business class.

- Yeah, you know, it does that. That's a great example, and it does that very, very well. It doesn't cover a lot of award programs that you might want, but for those that it covers, it does a pretty good job. - Yep, that is the one search case that I find myself, now that we have children, thinking, gosh, if we'd love to go to a place, we'd really love the direct flight, and we're super flexible with when we would go, so let's create a thing, set an alert, and say, just let me know when you find four seats on this exact route.

- Yeah. - Or, I'm probably less doing the alert and more, when can we go on this exact route, and let's plan a trip around it. I could probably achieve that search on another tool, but it's the only tool that very, kind of in a beautiful, visual way, gives me the kind of full year in advance.

- Right, right. - So. - Totally agree. You know, seats.arrow kind of does that with the routes it tracks, if you know how to use it to do that, but it's not as clear what's happening as what you're talking about here. - Yeah, I'm looking at it on Air France right now.

One trick, sometimes it shows even when it's very expensive, so I'm dialing back the price of the Air France award from San Francisco to Paris, and you'll see, oh, it looked like there was a lot of availability in business class, now I dropped the price, and it's like, well, nope, there's not as much, but there is still, if you wanna plan a trip in January, some great options.

If you wanna plan in April, some great options. So, I don't know, I find myself using Seatspy more than we gave it airtime for, but it does look like, I think, Award Tool has a new feature called Routes, where you can pull up a route and look at a calendar for that route.

I just think, you know, from a UI standpoint, I'm looking at the Award Tool one, and it's like a giant list, or I can switch to calendar view, but I'm looking a month at a time for that use case. If it is your use case, I think Seatspy is fantastic.

I use it a lot because I have that use case, but you literally, you can't even search San Francisco to Paris and see all of those flights. It is only the ones on Air France, and then separately, the ones on United. So, despite that I use the tool a lot, I wouldn't say I think a lot of people would often be in the use case to use the tool.

- Right, right. And let me tell you, you might wanna look at using Seatspied Aero. It's nowhere near as user-friendly and beautiful, the result, but you could use their Explore, you could go to the United, Explore, and set your from and to airport, and you could even set the airline you wanna fly to limit it to, if for some reason you only wanna fly United.

And so you could do it that way. And then results that come up in green are the non-stops. - Yeah, okay. Yeah, I have this pulled up now and I can see how I can search. And by the way, the filtering on Seatspied Aero, knowing what you can put in that search field is kind of interesting.

You can go in and type in like 2024-04 to filter it for April, which again goes back to how easy is this to use, but I will give it a little bit more of a go for that use case and see where we end up. I will very briefly mention a tool because we've talked about it.

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

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

And I almost always get an email sometime in the 24 hours after check-in before takeoff, and I can log into the app immediately, change my seat, and get a much better seat. - I love that, I love that. And I love that that feature is free on ExpertFlyer, so you don't even have to subscribe to get that feature.

And to be clear, we're not talking about, when you say seat alerts, we're not talking about award seats, we're just literally talking about, you already have the booking, and you want to switch to a particular seat on the airplane, it lets you set up these alerts, and that's awesome.

- Yeah, I figured it's not worth a whole episode on flight tools, not for awards, because the only other tool I would mention is for trip monitoring. And there's 2 tools I've used. One is Flighty, and one is TripIt. And I think Flighty is a beautiful mobile interface for tracking flights.

And TripIt might have an app. I'm sure it's not beautiful. They have a terrible UI. They're now owned by an expense management platform. But it's pretty good at scanning your email, compiling everything into trips, sending you updates and reminders if flights change, or if something happens. And especially helpful, even with Southwest, at saying, "Hey, your flight dropped in price.

"You might want to go rebook it." - Yeah, yeah, I rely on both of those tools. Well, I should say, I rely on TripIt. I use Flighty, and I like its features a lot. I haven't learned to rely on it. But with TripIt, the main thing I do is use it to organize my trips.

'Cause I'm often booking multiple separate flights with different airlines, and then I'm booking hotels in one place and the other. And I just send all the receipts to TripIt and it puts it all. I don't let TripIt look at my email, 'cause that's too confusing. And I'll explain why in a second.

But by emailing TripIt, all of these things, it just automatically puts them into trips. And I could then visually see, and actually it'll tell me if there's a conflict, but I could visually see, yeah, okay, I'm gonna arrive in time to catch this next flight. Or, oh, I forgot to book a hotel for the first night or whatever, and then I can go take care of that.

One time I was traveling with my co-host, Nick, and he was doing the flight planning and I was putting all the stuff into TripIt, and then I contacted him to say, did you know that we're leaving Dubai before we arrive in Dubai? And that's the type of thing that TripIt showed me.

It's not something you have to do like your date math to figure out yourself. Yeah, I did not do that. And last week had a flight home from Austin in May instead of March. And had I accurately put it all in, I would have seen that my not three day, but like 63 day trip to Austin and would have quickly made a change.

Fortunately, it was the same number of points to get back. So it was actually, it wasn't a big deal. I just happened to notice it before it had gotten expensive. - Yeah, yeah. So I used to let some tools just look at my email and create trips, like TripIt and Google used to do that.

I don't know if Google still does that, but I turned it off. But I sometimes book like award flights just for various reasons that where I know, I'm not actually gonna be flying this thing. Maybe I'm testing out how you cancel or how you make changes or something. And so to have all these things like suddenly appearing in my calendar as things I'm gonna do is just, I don't like that.

I like to be intentional about what goes in there. - Let's jump in to the first way you think about booking hotel tools. - Yeah, so the first way is basically what I think everyone would assume a hotel award search tool would do, which is basically you're planning a trip and you wanna say, I'm going to London.

I'm going from July 1st to the 6th. Show me what hotels are available. How much do they cost in points? That's what you would kind of expect any good hotel award search to be able to do. But surprisingly, there's only one that I'm aware of that's currently available and does it well enough for me to talk about.

- Yep. - I know of one that's sort of in development and I've looked at some others that are kind of these half-baked tools, but they're just not even worth talking about. So the one that's available is called Aways with a Z at the end. And that does all the things I was just saying.

It also, one of the cool things about it, it searches like a lot of hotel programs. So it checks the boxes for the major ones like Marriott, Hilton, Hyatt, and IHG, but it also includes Accor, Choice, and Wyndham. And my understanding is they're adding more. So that's really nice.

- And some of those, I'm doing a search right now for Paris and Accor has so many hotels in France that it's almost overwhelming. But even if I just filter that out, the map is pretty full. And if you zoom in, there are a lot of options. And I just think it's funny that there's like three or four other tools that we could talk about, but none of them actually do this thing, which is what most people listening probably want, which is, yeah, I'm going to Paris from the 12th to the 16th of April.

Where can I stay and is it a good deal? - Right, right, right. Years ago, there was a tool called Award Mapper that did something similar, but that's no longer available. And so finally, with Aways, there's a tool that does this, this thing that should be an obvious thing that a lot of people do, but no one else currently doing it.

It lets you do things like search by star rating, so you could find the best hotels, I guess. You could sort by the cost in points or the cost in cash. You could sort by a best value, or no, it'll show you a best value indicator next to each hotel.

- You can now sort by that, actually. I just noticed that the sort includes point value. - Yes, you could sort by point value, yes. So that you'll get the best use of your points sorting to the top, which is great. And then if you click into a hotel, you can view a award availability calendar.

So maybe your dates for your trip aren't totally set, or maybe the hotel you were interested in wasn't available for the whole set of dates, and you wanna see which days is it available, you could use their award availability calendar, which is really neat. - Yeah, I've used Aways for almost every trip when it comes to searching for cities and award hotels.

We actually just did a session where the founder of Aways for the AllHacks members kind of did a full product walkthrough. We got to ask questions, one of which was like, they used to roll out city by city. So we said like, "What kind of coverage do you have now?" And the answer now is all.

We asked like, "When will you have all the hotels "for all the programs?" And they were like, "We do." And so I think one of the earlier things was they might have only had 100 cities to start, but they've loaded in all the cities for all the programs. And you just get, I think, one of the best views of "I wanna use points on these days in this place." The only thing missing might be some flexibility.

If you were like, "I'm going to Paris for a week "and I wanna, I could kind of be a little flexible." But you're not necessarily set on a specific hotel. I think that's one thing you can't do. But when it comes to doing that kind of search, it's really great.

- Totally agree. The guy who started the company had met with me a while back to talk me through the app and show me what I could do. And I had every intention of looking at it back then. And for a few trips that I had planned, I tried to use it.

But each time I tried to use it, the city I was going to wasn't available in the tool. And so I gave up until recently. Then I looked at it recently and I was like, "Oh, wow, everything is here." And so suddenly, magically, it's really good. I will say I've run into a few cases where it uses cash results that were out of date or for some other reason it was wrong.

But that's like one where it was just flat out wrong with the points that it said it costed. I sent them an example. And so they're gonna work on that and try to figure out what's going on. I'm sure they'll fix that. I just wanna point out that it's not perfect, but it is very, very good, I think, in doing what it's intended to do.

And since it's the only thing out there that does exactly that, it's an easy answer. - Yep, I will say I just pulled up rooms.arrow. And unlike all of the other seats.arrow functionality, their hotel search works a little bit more visual than data-organized. And so I said the same search for Paris.

It's designed for a little bit more flexibility. It's like what range of check-in dates, how many nights do you wanna stay? And it shows me less hotels than a ways because I think they're only searching Hilton, Hyatt, and IHG, so there's noticeably Marriott is missing from that list, as is Wyndham, or Choice Hotels, or Accor.

But it does have better-than-I-thought ability. That said, it immediately popped up and said it's refreshing stale results. So it knew it had stale results, quite a bit of them, but it's refreshing them. But you can't sort by anything. So the number one result is the Holiday Inn, and the number two result is the Park Hyatt, of which I would say those are two very different hotels.

But so it kinda does it, but again, I think a ways is the only tool you can rely on for that kind of search. - Right, also, you mentioned that it supports IHG, Hyatt, and Hilton, but it's important to note, and I'm talking about seats, or sorry, what is the hotel version of Seat Center?

It does not include all IHG hotels, all Hyatt hotels, all Hilton hotels, not by a long shot. It has a database of ones that it looks at, and that's all it does. - So searching Paris, it probably hit the core of where a lot of people are looking, but if I searched to a more obscure place, it probably wouldn't work.

- Try Lexington, Kentucky. I bet you'll find like one hotel or something. - One hotel? (laughing) All right. - All right, so that's the basics of a ways and hotel trip planning. One thing that we didn't mention when talking about a ways is that you can also set alerts.

So if you found a hotel that you wanna stay at, it's not available, you can set up an alert to email you when it becomes available. And the nice thing with hotels, even more than flights, is availability does change a lot. Even more than flights do, and partially because, I think a lot of people book hotels with free cancellations and do cancel.

And so as you have cancellations, the word inventory automatically goes in, and then you can book it. So that's a really nice feature. And that's a feature that gets us to the other category of hotel tools. So if you're not doing this sort of broad, if you're not doing planning for a specific trip, but rather have like a hotel in mind that I wanna stay at this hotel, but I'm having trouble finding award availability, that's where there's a whole host of tools that try to help you with that.

Some of them started because Hyatt does not have an award availability calendar. So unlike Marriott and Hilton and even IHG, you could bring up one if you know how, there's no way with Hyatt by itself to see for a given hotel, which days can I use points? It'll tell you how much it'll cost in points if it's available, but not whether or not it's available.

So these tools grew up to answer that, to be able to answer that question and more. And the first thing that each of these, most that most of these tools offer is a full year calendar of award availability. And so we saw a Waze has that, but there's a bunch of other tools that have that as well.

And so I looked at award tool has a hotels feature. I looked at that, I looked at rooms.arrow, which we were just looking at as well. I looked at max my point and stay with points. So it's interesting 'cause as you're saying this, I'm playing with these tools and searching for a few different hotels.

And it's just funny how some of them have very different ways to express a hotel. So I'm looking at one of the properties near me, which is notably hard to stay at, which is the Alila Ventana Big Sur. And I'm laughing because award tool says 66% available, meaning according to them, 66% of the dates have availability and stay with point says 0% available.

Yet when I click on it, even though it says 0%, it has lots of dates that show availability. So I know that's one example of a place people are often trying to find a dream stay at. But I'm curious whether you think some of these tools have better coverage, 'cause I don't do a lot of hotel searching, but I recently, my wife was looking to book a stay at the Miraval, which is a pretty good Hyatt redemption in terms of cents per point.

It is a lot of points, but for those points, you end up getting an all-inclusive high-end resort. And they even throw in $175 per person per day of resort credit when you book with points, but it wasn't available on every platform. So it left me wondering, is one of these tools better for coverage?

- Yeah, yeah. So I mean, a Waze has by far the best coverage because it has all hotels, but it doesn't do some of the key things that we're gonna talk about in a moment. Of the tools that do like more advanced stuff for finding availability, Max, my point, in my opinion, seems to have the best coverage.

- I will say as I'm looking at these tools, coverage doesn't, I would just completely skip over this availability percentage. I don't know if you got value out of it, but if you're looking on video now or if you just wanna hear my voiceover, they say the percentage of reward nights available to book in the following 365 days, and I'm clicking through and in April, it's almost every day.

In May, it's almost every day. And in June, it's a handful. Like it seems like it is available. Now, what I think it's saying is percentage of reward nights available to book with a standard priced award. It doesn't say that, but unless that's what it's trying to say, I don't understand how they're calculating it, but I'll let you did more research than me.

- No, it's funny you called that out because that's something I noticed early on and I just stopped looking at it. So I haven't tried to figure out which tool gives a close to accurate answer on that. I just haven't looked at that. Let's talk about some of these things the tools can do.

We talked about that they can all be used to look at a full year of award availability. They're all using cash data. So they're all wrong to some extent. And the best ones show you when it was last updated. So you could at least know, is this reasonably good data or not.

They all let you set alerts to find out when the room becomes available, but that's where they vary a lot because some of them like a Waze, you have to set a specific date range and either that hotel's available in that date range or not. But what if you just want to be alerted anytime across a whole year that there are new awards available at this hotel?

Max, my point can do that. What if, or what if you want to know, alert me anytime there's five days in a row available in December at this like Maldives resort or whatever, Stay With Points can do that. So they have different like advanced alerting features that can be really important in different situations.

- Okay, so do you have a favorite or? - Yeah, Max, my point seems to change and seems to check most of the boxes pretty well for sort of this kind of advanced searching, the ability to find these hard to get awards at places like Alila Ventana. And so like Max, my point, it supports all four of the major programs, Hilton, Hyatt, IHG and Marriott.

And just to give you an example, like rooms.arrow doesn't support Marriott and Stay With Points doesn't support IHG. Max, my point also will let you set alerts to alert you if the price drops. So let's say you've booked an IHG awards day. Excuse me, IHG award prices change like all the time.

And so you'd wanna know if the price goes down and be able to rebook it then for the lower price. So you could set up Max, my point to let you know when that IHG hotel has dropped in price from whatever you booked, you just have to put in that total.

And it also has a really good filtering features on its homepage. So let's say what your goal is to, let's say you've got some of those Hilton free night certificates that are good at any Hilton worldwide. And so what you wanna do is stay at one of these like really hard to get Hilton properties like the Waldorf Astoria in the Maldives or the Waldorf Astoria in Los Cabos.

Those are really hard to find, but you can, well, you can use the alert features to let you know when they're available. But if what you're trying to do is just find the best hotels that are bookable with Hilton points, you could use Max, my points homepage and filter to Hilton, filter to properties costing, let's say, between 100 and 150,000 points, which would get you to their top end hotels.

And then you'll see it all and you can sort by like most popular and you'll quickly see some that you might wanna target. - Okay, yeah, I do not have a paid membership for Max, my point, which I want only because it is the only one of these sites that has ads all over it.

And I would love to make them go away. So that's my next investment is a Max, my point membership. - You know, what's funny when I first looked at Max, my point, the free version, it had way more ads than it does today. It was almost unusable. It had so many ads and they were constantly covering out what I was trying to do.

So today, yeah, it still has a lot of annoying ads, not nearly as many as before. So I didn't mention that, but that is true. And the free version, if you could stand the ads, it's fairly capable, but the paid version might be worth it if you do a lot of this kind of thing.

- And we didn't talk much about the hotel tool from award tool, where does that fit in? - It's sort of middle of the pack, in my opinion. It has some decent features, but it didn't beat out Max, my point on any of the types of things I looked at.

But I guess the way I think about it, if you're using award tool anyway for flight searches, you might as well check whether it does, it can do what you want with hotels as well, 'cause you're in there anyway. But if it can't, then go onto another tool like Max, my point.

- Yeah, and I think you probably have gone deeper down the hotel search award tool rabbit hole for hotels. Then I've kind of done a lot in flights, hotels, I'm kind of like, I'm gonna find my flight, and then I'm gonna just kind of see what's available at these hotels and make it work either way.

But especially when you have cool things nearby that you can drive to, or if you have a lot of flexibility in your travel, I feel like I'm underusing the hotel tools. So personally, I'm excited, 'cause this episode made me understand that there's more I can be doing. - Yeah, I mean, I would totally, I love Lila Ventana, Big Sur, and if I was in driving distance like you are, I would totally be setting up.

The Max, my point has these daily alerts, which you have to have the paid version to do it, but it'll basically, every time a word availability change at all, it'll send you an email saying, here's all the dates that's available. And then I would just scan it each morning and say, oh, there's a date that I might wanna go, so let's go ahead and book it.

And of course, you can cancel if you change your mind. - Yeah, I mean, the idea that we live less than two hours away, work from home and could go on a weekday, and still haven't been to Ventana is a little crazy for me to think about, but maybe that'll be on the 2024 before the end of the year.

Let's tick that box. - Well, of course, you have kids, and Ventana is adults only, so maybe that's a getaway for you too. - I need to set up a Gmail filter that forwards the Ventana alert availabilities to my parents and just say, hey, every time I'm gonna keep sending you this, if any of the dates align and you wanna come down and hang out with the kids for a couple of days, maybe I need to swap it with them.

Maybe I need to, if they're listening, maybe this is too much of an offer, but it's like, well, I'll book four nights, we'll take them for two, and then you can go down and take the other two nights as an exchange for watching the kids. - Yeah, yeah, that sounds great.

So is there a hotel in the Bay Area that you do, like going, that you've been to, and you'd recommend that it's worth watching the word availability for that one? - I wish, I don't think I've stayed at a Bay Area hotel in a very, very long time. - I guess that makes sense.

You have a house. - Yeah, yeah. We live here. The one that I've heard a lot about, which I have not stayed at, but the Alila that in Napa just opened, and I've heard great things about the Alila in Napa for people looking to do a little escape to wine country.

I have stayed at the Westin Verasa in Napa, and I wouldn't say it's a hotel I would plan an entire vacation around, but I would say if you're in Napa and you don't wanna go for something wild, it's great. It's a great hotel. I'm sure the Alila is probably nicer, but it suited every need we had when we were there before my parents moved to Napa, and we can stay with them.

- That sounds good. Let me talk about a special use case that I mentioned briefly, but there's a hotel in Michigan that I really like going to called the Inn at Bay Harbor. It's a Marriott hotel, and it's, of course, very popular in the summertime 'cause it's very cold other times, and it's right on Lake Michigan.

It's beautiful. Award availability in the summer is very hard to find, and they don't show one-night award availability. So if you're looking just one night at a time, you're not gonna see anything. If you use Marriott's flexible dates calendar and just say, "I wanna look for one night," it's not gonna show any availability, but if you look for two nights, then things might show up if there's anything there, but most of the time, there's nothing there.

So there's two ways of handling that. One is stay with points. We'll let you create an alert that says, "Show me any time for the month of June "or the month of July when there's two nights available "any time in the whole month." That's one way. The other way, and what I did this year, is I use MaxMyPoints Any Day Alert, and its Any Day Alert won't tell me when there's summer availability, but what it does tell me is when a lot of things have changed with availability at this Marriott.

So I'll see a flood of nights all of a sudden open up in the spring, and so then I jump onto Marriott's website and do a flexible date search in the summer of two or more days, and then I've been able to find awards that way. So it sort of triggers me to look on Marriott's website when it's time.

- So that would be a great example of a place that you keep an eye on. Any other hotels you've stayed at that you thought were just such amazing properties and good deals for the points that, if people were looking to get inspired, where should they go explore some of these special, kind of impossible-to-find hotel awards?

- Yeah, a few come to mind, but they're SLH properties, which are no longer bookable through Hyatt, but they should become available through Hilton soon, so maybe it'll still be relevant. You know that Hilton has taken over a partnership with SLH that Hyatt used to have. So most notable that I can think of are in Queenstown, New Zealand.

There are two amazing properties. I stayed at one of them, but I've seen videos of the other one, and the one I stayed at was just amazing, like the, I'm trying to think of what it's called. It's not coming to me off the top of my head, but it's right on the lake.

The base rooms are huge suites, and breakfast is included, and it's incredible. - Icarts. - Icarts, yeah, private hotel. Icarts private hotel, that's what it is, yep. And they have a evening like cocktail hour where you come in and there's like a host there who asks you what you want to drink, prepares your drinks, and then asks you if you have any dietary restrictions, and then goes and tells the chef that we're ready for the chef to prepare our canapes.

And so the chef then custom creates some snacks, basically, for us while we're enjoying the complimentary drinks. So very special hotel, and in probably the most unbelievable location in Queenstown, New Zealand that you can get, so that would be a great one. - Yeah, for me it's, we've stayed at the Conrad and the St.

Regis in Bora Bora, and because San Francisco has direct flights to Tahiti, it's like just such an easy place to get to, but if you, the difference between getting a room for a good deal on points and paying full price can like triple the cost. So like if you, I've done an episode I'll link to in the show notes about going to Bora Bora, but if you can find a time where United has saver business availability, you can book with Aeroplan, and the St.

Regis has kind of pretty affordable deals, or the Conrad does, all of a sudden you're going on a $30,000 trip for a fraction of that. If you pick a different week, you might be going on a $30,000 trip for $30,000, which is not a trip I'm excited to go on.

So I think if you can time the flight and hotel award availability to Bora Bora, you can go on just an incredible trip that's less than eight hours plus a short 30-minute flight from the West Coast that can't be beat. Yeah, yeah. No, it's interesting, there are certain hotels like this where it's probably worth planning your trip around the hotel availability, whereas there are many trips, like if you're going to a big city, where you might wanna plan the trip around the flight award availability, 'cause you know you're gonna be able to stay somewhere nice, there's so many options.

But when going to Bora Bora, the Maldives, places like that, you might wanna find the resort first and then book your flights. Yeah, the only thing I'll say is, we've never done the Maldives only because it's just so far away, and I don't know how, I'm sure someone will send me an email and tell me how much better it is than Bora Bora, but for being three times farther away and not even close to a direct flight for the majority of the long haul, for me, it's like, wow, it's just not even worth it.

But the crazy thing about Tahiti is that because you can time it, if you take two different airlines, you can't take the same airline and make this true, but you can take day trips for both of them. So an eight-hour flight during the day in economy is pretty doable, it's a couple hours longer than going to the East Coast.

It's not, if you're used to using your miles and points to splurge on business, I'm not even sure it's necessary. Now, if you have enough points, why not? But whereas to go to the Maldives, I think the experience of flying eight hours to Bora Bora or to Tahiti in coach is not probably the same as flying to the Maldives almost 24 hours, but I don't know, 10 years ago with no kids, you could have put me in the middle seat in the back of the plane, I would have been fine to go either places.

I just think once you played the points game long enough, you're like, well, there's gotta be a way I can do it for a better deal. - Yeah, and I think you're getting at a point here which is like, for you, if you're gonna be traveling with four people and if you're looking at places that are really far away, then the flight availability almost has to be more of the driver, right?

Than the resort or hotel award availability. For me, usually traveling just my wife, I know I can find something in business class to just about anywhere, anytime I might have to fly, I might have to make a positioning flight or two to make it happen, but I can usually find something.

- Yep, and I think just for anyone listening who's maybe new to the points and miles world, I always think it's funny that when I talk about looking for flights to places, I'm always like, well, I couldn't find business class, so we're gonna find another date. Just to be clear, I don't think I've ever spent the five to $20,000 those business class flights take.

This is not me speaking out of a desire to spend on that level of luxury. It's just that if you figure out how to use these tools, if you figure out how to time the card bonuses and your spend and all the other stuff that you talk about on your show and I've talked about on my show, you end up getting to a point that you're somewhat spoiled to the fact that you can find a way to do it in a premium cabin at a very reasonable price almost every time.

- Exactly, and the points and miles, it's amazing. It lets you do things like this routinely that you would have never even considered like forking out the cash to do. I mean, things like staying at these resorts that cost like $2,000 a night, several of the ones we mentioned before, we didn't talk about the prices, but would be in that range or flying business class for, as you said, anywhere from 5,000 to $20,000.

Those are not things I would consider paying cash for, but points makes all those things accessible. And so that's what I love about it. And we do become spoiled. I laugh at my wife who, like, well, we were, what was the last one? When we flew Air France business class, it was kind of an older plane.

But it was fully lie flat, direct aisle access. And she's like complaining about how it wasn't as nice as the previous flight we were on. And I just love that we could be that spoiled. Complain about it even though it's still incredible luxury. - Yes, and still not have to pay anywhere near full freight, which is great.

Yeah, this trip to Miraval was just a two night stay. The rack rate for the same dates was over $6,000 for two nights, which is like, it wouldn't even be an option. Like we would just never do a trip like that. And unfortunately on this trip, I'm not actually going.

My wife is going with a friend of hers to celebrate a birthday. And so I'm gonna have her join on the show sometime after she stays in April to give a little rundown of how that trip was. And she can share with everyone. But the only other thing I wanted to mention before we wrap is on hotels, if you are not finding what you want, but you are still looking for a little bit of like a perk or a benefit in the luxury travel world, there are a lot of different ways that you can book a hotel and add on a lot of different perks.

And so anyone with an Amex knows that Amex has the fine hotels and resorts program. Chase and Capital One have all launched those. We launched our own at hotels.allthehacks.com where you can search. And I think you actually just used it to book something. Am I right or no? Someone just texted me and they just used it.

I don't know why I thought it was you. Anyways, and we set our own at hotels.allthehacks.com where you can search for kind of the higher end four or five star hotels and get access to perks like free breakfast, resort credit, free upgrades, early check-in, late checkout. And so I would say, I would encourage everyone to figure out how to use their points and miles, use everything we talked about in this episode to get your stay for free and get all kinds of stuff.

But if you end up spending dollars and you are staying at a nice higher end hotel and you have to pay for it, chances are through one of these platforms, you can get a pretty awesome set of perks added on for the same as the rate you typically pay at the website.

Might not be the same as the discounted corporate rate you have through your employer or a last minute hotel tonight rate. But basically we found a partner that would help us give everyone access to, I think it's a 4,000 hotels. I think Chase and Capital One might have like a thousand, Amex has two or three and we have 4,000.

So I think we have a bigger selection of them. Nice. But you can get all those same perks if you want, so. Sweet. And is there any fee to use that service? No, no, no. It's a free site that we set up with a partner and the goal was just to get everyone access to all of these perks and not have to, there's no booking fee.

I think, I can't remember if Fine Hotels and Resorts still has a booking fee. I think maybe with points or something, but- No, there's no booking fee. No, there used to be a Amex travel booking fee, but maybe that was for something else. Okay. Yeah, I don't remember. But anyways, there's no fee.

You can book it. You can cancel your awards. I will say to provide this, we had to make some UI sacrifices. So the tool that you'd use is not the easiest to use. But if you go to hotels.allthehacks.com, you can find a thing. I'll actually go to, if you go to allthehacks.com/upgrade, I'll put a video if people want help walking through the tool.

But yeah, you should get access to all that. I don't know. That's all I got for hotels. It sounds good to me. That's all I've got too. (laughing) Greg, where can everyone go? 'Cause you dive into this stuff way deeper than we do. Where can people find what you're reading, writing, and talking about on your show?

Yeah, so start at frequentmiler.com. That's where you'll find our blog and links to our podcast, which is called "Frequent Miler" on the air. And you'll just find a wealth of information. We have resource guides about all these things. We have the best list of credit card offers on the internet.

Unlike most other websites, we only post the best offer that we know about for the reader. And we don't list offers that are inferior. So, for example, there might be a 120,000 point Amex Platinum offer that is available on most websites. But if you go to our website right now, as we're recording this anyway, you'll find 150,000 point offer listed there.

We don't earn anything from you clicking through that offer, but we think it's the right thing to do to show the offer that gets people the most points. Rather than what would pay us. So that's a big deal. And yeah, as I mentioned, just tons of different resources about how to earn points, how to use them, how to shortcuts to elite status, things like that.

Things that Chris talks about all the time, but you might get more in-depth on the blog there. - Greg's underselling it. There is so much good stuff. Your podcast is one of the few that I listen to every time an episode comes out because I love going deep on this stuff.

It gives me so much inspiration for ideas to talk about and podcasts to do with you and Nick, and we'll see where it goes from there. So definitely check out the podcast, the website, and reach out to either one of us if you have questions. - Absolutely. - All right.

Thanks so much.