I’m a huge fan of booking flights with points and miles. Trips that can cost thousands in cash suddenly cost next to nothing. The points game, however, can be incredibly confusing. Earning the points is the easy part; understanding how to book with them is an entirely different beast. While I’m no expert on the ins and outs of airline alliances and transfer partners, I’ve found a few good tools to help me use my points.
Why Use Points and Miles to Book Flights
Making savvy use of credit card points, which rack up quickly through your every day spending along with the occasional major purchase, can get you on more flights more often for nearly free. Or, if you’re planning a particularly long flight and want a more comfortable trip, credit card points can get you to a business class seat, literally saving you thousands of dollars for a single flight leg.
Tip: Some airpoints charge much higher taxes and fees that are still passed on to you when you book with points. Heathrow is a common example of this; I try to avoid flying through Heathrow whenever trying to use points, because I’d still usually end up paying several hundreds of dollars.
How to Earn Credit Card Points Quickly
Earning points is straightforward. Simply get a travel rewards credit card (ideally with a nice initial bonus once you meet a spending goal) then use it for your everyday purchases. By being smart with your purchases – for instance, using a card that gives you 5x for travel on travel, while using the card that gives you 4x for restaurants on dining – you can quickly rack up a ton of points. Additionally, you can get more credit card points or airline miles by using shopping portals. This is especially nice for major purchases. But after I started earning points, I didn’t realize it takes a bit of leg work to actually use those points.
Tip: What you don’t want to do is book your flight directly through your credit card’s travel portal. Those flights (booked through the Amex or Chase travel portal, for instance) always cost an exorbitant number of points and give you a terrible value for those points. You’ll get much better value by transferring those points from the card to a partner airline (or hotel, but for the purposes of this post I’ll focus on flights).
Why the Points and Miles System Feels Confusing
That’s where the system to book flights with your heard-earned points can get incredibly complicated. Certain cards are partnered with only certain airlines. So if you want to transfer your Amex points to American Airlines, you’re out of luck. But, thanks to the airline alliances (Star, Oneworld, Sky Team), you can book a flight one one member of the alliance via another member. Once you understand that, you will then run into the problem that airlines only release a certain number of award tickets, so it can be hard to find the route you’re looking for.
On top of all that to keep track of, some flights will be easily bookable online, whereas other airlines will require you to call to book on an allied airline. It’s a lot to manage, but if you can get the basics down then use helpful booking tools, it’s completely worth the hassle for the money saved. I suggest learning the basics without stressing too much about the details of each airline, then use a booking tool that walks you through step by step.
My Personal Strategy for Booking Award Flights
There are a swath of bloggers out there who can explain the most efficient ways to use points and tips for “point hacking” much better than I can. There are Facebook communities about only this topic, courses, and even personal consultants. Some of those can be great resources if you want to get really deep into it. But if there’s a spectrum of points aspiration from “I have no interest in getting a rewards credit card” to “I earn millions of points through potentially-illicit point manufacturing and I know exactly how far in advance each airline releases their award seats,” I fall somewhere in the middle, as I think a lot of people do.
My general overall style is to 1) take advantage of a few credit card welcome bonuses per year while keeping a diverse portfolio of programs (Chase Ultimate Rewards, Amex Membership Rewards); 2) use a reward shopping portal (Rakuten, Aadvantage, etc) when I think of it but always when there’s a big purchase; then 3) use the tools below when it comes time to plan my trip. Usually I’m booking at least 6 months in advance, but you can also get great last minute flights. I’m sure I could be more efficient if I planned my trips a year ahead of time and set alerts for the day the award seats opened up on my chosen airline, but it’s just not realistic for me.
The Best Tools for Managing and Booking Award Flights
Rakuten – this is an online shopping portal to boost my Amex Membership Rewards. When you sign up, the app will default to cashback, but you can set your settings to get “paid” in credit card points rather than cash. As far as I know, Amex is the only travel card that works with Rakuten to earn points. You don’t actually have to use Amex to pay for the item you’re buying; as long as you have your Amex card linked and set to points rather than cash, you can use whatever card you want to pay for your purchase. I don’t use Rakuten all the time (usually because I don’t remember to), but if I know I have a large purchase to make, I do my best to find a store through Rakuten that carries it.
Notes app. To track my points among various credit cards, hotels, and airlines, I just update a pinned note in my phone’s notes app periodically. Not the most advanced, to be sure, but I’ve tried sites that sync with each of my accounts and keep things automatically updated in the past, and I find them far too buggy. So I just occasionally update the note to keep a general idea of how many points I have.
Travel Freely app. I use this to research new credit cards and to track all the cards I have. The app details the perks of each card and reminds me when I have to reach the minimum spend to satisfy the welcome bonus, as well as when the annual fee is coming up. It’s free to use and well designed. If you’re so inclined, you can also include a “player 2” (usually this is your partner/spouse), but I’m not at the level of being able to track credit card spends for two of us. Of course, you should not be trying to play the multiple credit card game unless you can afford to pay off each card every month.
Tip: A word on credit card annual fees. You’ll note in the screenshot I used that some of these cards have a very high annual fee. This is important to consider when getting these cards. For most of my cards, I usually get my money’s worth out of the annual fee; but thanks to some recent changes in benefits of the Amex Business Platinum, it’s tough for me to use the $700 in benefits every year. This means I need to downgrade. Usually when you get a new card, you’ll have to pay the annual fee once, but if you go about downgrading the right way, you generally don’t have to pay the annual fee the second year.
Pointsyeah.com This is my personal go-to website as an award flight search tool that is free to use but powerful. It’s less popular than some of the other sites out there, but I find it to be incredibly helpful and easy to use. I enter my destination, select a span of a few days if there’s flexibility in my trip, and filter by all the programs I currently have points with. Each open award seat lists exactly how to book; for instance, this is a flight from Dallas to Rome on Finnair. The site tells me to transfer my Citi Thank You points to Aadvantage then links me to the American Airline website to book the Finnair flight. If you’re unsure how to transfer points, there’s a link just below the result explaining.
I currently have the paid subscription ($99/year or $12/month), which makes things a bit more efficient by allowing you to search two departure and arrival cities and search across more travel days at a time. Pointsyeah also allows you to set up flight alerts – 4 for the free version and 32 for the paid. A cool newer feature is their “Daydream Explorer” – a global map where you can enter your departure city and visualize all the possible destination by number of points. Or, you can enter you’re destination city and see where it’s cheapest to fly from. This makes it easy to visualize if you need to take a positioning flight to get a great deal on a long haul flight.
Other tools
Point.me– This seems to be a fairly popular tool, but in my opinion it does not measure up to Pointsyeah. The free basic plan is limited to the degree that it’s not not all that useful. The standard plan runs around $11/month and offers more features (like searching up to 365 days in advance, allowing for a few flight alerts), but even that tier offers less than the Pointsyeah free version. Point.me’s website does appear cleaner and simpler. They also offer concierge planning services. While I haven’t personally used that service, it seems like it could be handy for the traveler who doesn’t know where to start or doesn’t have time to search award seats.
Seats.areo – This is a great tool that I’m starting to use more. It includes some airlines that Pointsyeah doesn’t list, and an extensive list of results sorted in table format pops up in under a second. I suspect this can be a bit more overwhelming to process if you’re not familiar with the ins and outs of points transfers and airline alliances. Similar to Pointsyeah, it also has a tool to explore destination options by continent and filtering by award programs, if you’re flexible on where you’re traveling. There is less hand-holding in terms of how to book the award ticket, but if you’re already family with points game, this is a powerful tool that also has a user-friendly mobile app. The price is around $10/month; there is a free tier that’s much more limited.
Conclusion
At the end of the day, points and miles aren’t about chasing every program or gaming the system, but about giving yourself wider travel options by saving money. The key is to keep it simple: get a few rewards credit cards, optimize the right card for the right purchase where you can, and stay organized with the right tools. Over time, these points will add up and open the door to bigger, more meaningful travel experiences.