Frequent Miler on the Air - How to find the best flight awards | Ep140 | 3-5-22

Episode Date: March 5, 2022

Booking award flights can be difficult, frustrating and time-consuming -- but it doesn't have to be. This week, we talk about the challenges of booking the best flight awards and how to overcome them. 00:56 Giant Mailbag 2:29 What crazy thing....did American Airlines do this week? https://frequentmiler.com/gregs-american-airlines-loyalty-point-progress/ 10:50 Mattress running the numbers / Mileage running the numbers https://frequentmiler.com/2200-aadvantage-miles-and-6-meals-for-34-with-green-chef-and-chase-offer/ 14:43 Main Event: How to find the best flight awards 20:29 Individual airline miles 22:15 The Kayak-like tools for award flights https://frequentmiler.com/point-me-a-kayak-like-tool-for-flight-awards-has-launched-try-it-out-for-free/ https://frequentmiler.com/taking-award-logic-for-a-test-drive/ 32:22 Expert Flyer 40:27 SeatSpy https://frequentmiler.com/seatspy-an-awesome-tool-for-finding-ba-and-virgin-award-flights/ 47:10 How do you know an award flight is a good deal? 50:44 What about booking through bank travel portals? 59:15 Question of the Week: Can you get the Venture X card if you already have two Capital One personal cards? Join our email list: https://frequentmiler.com/subscribe/ Music credit: Annie Yoder

Let's get into the giant mailbag. What crazy thing did City do this week? It's time for Mattress Running the Numbers. Ready for the main event? The main event. Frequent Miler on the air starts now. Today's main event, how to find the best flight awards. So finding award flights is not that easy. Not always. I mean, I guess it's easier if you've got like one person, right? But if you're booking for more than one person and or you don't have a lot of free time on your hands, it can be a pain.

Well, it can be hard even with one if you don't know what you're doing. I mean, there's so many possibilities out there. There's so many. Even if you find awards, how do you know which miles to use to book them? Because not all miles are baked the same, so to speak. So we're going to talk about how to find and book the best flight awards. But of course, first, giant mailbag time. So John writes in, in response to our discussions about American Airlines loyalty points and the loyalty game, as we've called it. So little background, that American Airlines has changed how they award elite status. It used to be almost exclusively from flying lots of miles,

but now most ways that you can earn American Airlines miles, including through shopping portals and through other like partner things, buying flowers, whatever, those things also give you loyalty points, which can propel you to high levels of American Airlines elite status. So we've called that the elite. I see what you did there. Nicely done. Propel you to the top of the airline elite status game. Wasn't even intentional. So, okay. So with that background in place, let's hear from John. John says, during an upcoming episode,

would you be willing to give an update on your loyalty points progress? I've earned just over 16,000 points through various means, flights, city AA executive card spend, Simply Miles, eShopping portal, Shell gas rewards, and Advantage Dining. Although I'm happy with my progress, the deals that don't work out are frustrating. You were right when you said this game isn't for the faint of heart. We'll certainly celebrate when I hit my goal of executive platinum. Thank you for the great work, guys. So, I mean, that's a great question this week

because this week, of course, the month began here, the year, the elite year officially began on March 1st. So we should definitely discuss this as we talk about what crazy thing did American Airlines do this week? Yeah. So American Airlines, we know we've been waiting for these miles that we earned in January and February to turn into loyalty points. And we were promised that would happen in early March. And now it's started to happen. As we record this, probably by the time anyone listens to this, it's fully appeared your loyalty, if they haven't already in your account. And so here's the crazy thing, is that while we've been doing crazy things like signing up for

free trials of various things or buying SIM cards that we don't even want in order to earn American Airlines miles and loyalty points, during that time, a lot of those miles got clawed back, meaning they were initially appeared to post to our account. And then they were reversed out when the powers that be decided for whatever reason that we weren't actually eligible for those miles. And so the crazy thing that happened is at least initially, American Airlines has posted the loyalty points for all of those miles, even the ones that have been clawed back. Crazy, crazy, my craziness. Yeah. I couldn't believe it when, you know, when I started hearing reports that loyalty points are posting, I went to my account just to be sad and depressed about how I could have had elite status. But much to my surprise, I had American Airlines gold status and way more loyalty points than I expected.

And I went back and pulled out the calculator and realized that they had added all of those things that had gotten clawed back, which in my case was most of what I had earned. I mean, I only expected to have a very little bit of loyalty points after almost everything had been clawed back. So in the end, I didn't get any redeemable miles for a bunch of those like Verizon SIM card purchases. But so far as we record this, I have loyalty points. Now, I don't know, Greg, I don't expect those to hang around, right? Yeah, I mean, we'll see. So going forward, I fully expect that if you go through a portal like tomorrow and buy something and it initially posts and then gets clawed back, I fully expect the loyalty points to get clawed back then.

The reason I have some hope here that your points will stick around is that they didn't do it on a transaction by a transaction basis. They awarded them all in one big lump sum of loyalty points. And I don't know, I have a hard time imagining American prioritizing, going through and figuring out where they gave too many and, and, and clawing those back. I'm not saying it won't. Oh, I don't know. Did you read some of those court cases over the miles that got taken away when they shut down everybody's accounts? I don't know. They might go through things with a fine tooth. You know, again, it's absolutely possible. And, and I don't think anyone should be, you know, yelling or crying about it. If that happens,

you still might have a legitimate reason to yell or cry about the fact that it got clawed back in the first place. That's a whole nother story. Right. Yes. Yes, for sure. Yeah. And I mean, in my case, for example, I had a bunch of those Verizon prepaid lines because

at the time they were offering 6,200 miles or something for a Verizon prepaid line and they took them all back and there's no good reason for it. And one of these days I'll get around to filing a claim for that because I should have gotten the miles as far as I can tell. Prepaid was one of the qualifying things. But I'm at least moderately happy that I got elite status out of it for now. So that much is a good thing. And then, of course, people who followed along with the blog saw that there was an

opportunity that came up to port those lines out to Visible Mobile for what at the time was a $200 bonus per line. And so I ported almost all of those Verizon lines over to Visible. And so I'm hoping that I will get those rebates as well. I think I will. So I feel like I'm going to come out well ahead of this, even if I don't get the redeemable miles. So, I mean, part of me is like, I don't know, maybe I should just leave it alone. I got the loyalty points. Let's not, you know, break what doesn't need to be fixed or whatever, you know, maybe I should just leave it alone, but, but we'll see. So, yeah, I mean, so far so good. I'm excited that they've posted. And so for me, I'm over gold status. I'm halfway-ish to platinum status. You?

So roughly how many miles? I think 38,000, just over 38,000. Around 38,000 so far. I was on vacation when you started posting about the Verizon deal. And so I actually let it go. I sort of intended to do it, but each day I was just like, I've got other stuff. And I didn't do it at all. And then when people started reporting clawbacks, it's like, oh, good. So anyway, that's sort of my excuse for not having that many. So I only had, of all the things I've done, I did a bunch of free trials and other things.

Only one thing has clawed back so far. Bespoke Post, I think is the one. I can't remember if that was a thousand or 1200 points. Yeah, something like that, yeah. But so I'm sitting on just over 15,000 and I should have about 14,000 if that clawed back one hadn't really created loyalty points for me. So yeah, so I'm way behind.

Way behind. You got to get your game up there, Craig. Yeah, yeah. I definitely need to work harder and faster. Although that said, percentage-wise, if you look at the fact that we have 14 months to get there this time, this is an exception because we have January and February in addition to all the months up through next February to get to elite status. The rate I'm going will just get me to my goal of 125,000. If I, if I do the same, if I average this pace, that's a bit of a marathon, Greg, I don't know if you're a marathoner or not, but you're going to keep that pace up for 14. I don't, I don't know, Greg, that's a tough pace to keep up. You got to get out of here. I would much prefer getting some buffer, get some,

get some big wins under the belt, but that's where I'm at. That's where you are. There you go, John. There you go. There's our status. There's the update. And hopefully in the end, I'm going to end up with those Verizon things, making some, you know, a few bucks because I turned out to need the extra lines for something. So I was able to grab some phones and so I've activated them. I get the SIM cards in the phones, everything's going on. So that's looking like it could end up being profitable. So again, I should probably just accept the loss on the model. Yes, you should. Oh, one more thing. I do need to mention the biggest flop of a deal or what we thought was the biggest flop of a deal was this bite thing where you order an impression kit for about a hundred bucks. And if you had a Citi

card that with merchant offers that you could sync to, you got your a hundred dollars back through Citi. I mean, if everything worked, you'd get a hundred dollars back through Citi. You get a bunch of points through Simply Miles by linking that card there. And you'd get a $45 back from TopCash back. That's the deal I tried. Initially, the only thing that registered was a $45 from top cash back. And it was looking pretty dismal because I spent a hundred bucks, but just in the last few days,

both the a hundred dollars from city and the simply miles miles showed up. So it ended up being both a moneymaker and a point slash loyalty point maker. So yeah, it turned out to be a good deal. Nice, nice. Too bad I missed out on that one. I don't have the city merchant offers at all. So I kind of ignored that one.

But in hindsight, between the portal and the miles payout, maybe it would have been worth going after. I don't know. We'll see. Yeah, hard to say without that $100 back. Yeah, that was, it was, it was questionable. Yep. All right. So then let's talk about mattress running the numbers. So this week for mattress running the numbers, we have something, well, a mileage run of sorts, the modern mileage run. So we've got an American Airlines deal. Tell me about it, Greg. What's the deal?

Right. As we've talked about in the past, mileage runs are different with AA these days because mileage running is not about flying. It's about shopping. Break out your wallets, folks. What we try to do, as we were just talking about, is find these deals where you earn a bunch of miles for very little money through shopping, usually. And so the deal this week is the ability to get 2,200 American Airlines miles through the American Airlines eShopping portal when you shop at Green Chef. And the deal

that Tim wrote up is the ability to get six meals for $34 from Green Chef. $34. I mean, that's like value meals right there. Right, right. And it comes down to $34 because it relies on having either a Chase or Bank of America offer on your account to get 15% back on Green Chef purchases, and also an automatic half-price startup coupon that gets applied when you click through from the portal. Those things amount to only $34 for six meals. So what do you think?

Is this mileage run worthy? I mean, if you don't want the meals, if you're just going to donate the food or something, then no, probably not. I probably wouldn't value the 2,200 miles at more than $34. But if you value the food at all, and I mean, if you eat, then you should probably value the food some, you know, some amount to some extent, then yeah, I mean, I think it's a great deal. I haven't actually done it and there's no good reason why, because we just got a meal box in the mail this, you know, UPS or whatever this week from, I think every plate we

buy these things now and then, I mean, not every single week, but quite a bit in my household once or twice a month, just to try something different. And I eat the same stuff all the time. So they're not always the most delicious things ever. I haven't actually tried green chef yet, but that intrigues me because I haven't actually tried them yet. So I don't know whether I'll like them or not, but for 34 bucks, I'll take a chance

on that. My question here, and I don't know if you can answer this, is can you only do this once per account or could two people do it from my account? Yeah, no, great question. I don't know. So that's worth looking into. Yeah. It's because we have a Chase offer and Bank of America offer on a couple of cards here. So if we can make that happen and send a meal to somebody else, that'd be great. Right. Right. I mean, my assumption is that the half price thing is based on it being your first purchase, but that doesn't mean your wife couldn't sign up for it or, you know, a family member couldn't sign up for it as well. And you use the same, the question is whether you could use the same American Airlines account. You don't want your relative earning those miles.

Preston Pyshko, CFO Alphabet and Google, Right. No, of course not. I want the miles. Preston Pyshko, CFO Alphabet and Google, Anyway, I agree with you. I think this is mileage run worthy. Even without the 2,200 miles, it is a darn cheap price to get six meals. So to get those miles on top of it, that's a win. So hopefully it'll all track. The Sun Basket deal, which was very similar, worked out well for me. I don't know if you did that one. Yeah, I did that one. And I also did the Blue Apron one. Now I had done the Blue Apron, though. I want to say I had done that through Simply Miles is what it was before. So this was before the loyalty point conversion. This is the

end of December. And I had done that through the Wyndham portal and got a bunch of Wyndham points. And so that one worked out the way I expected. So I'm sure that it would probably work out well through American Airlines also. So there's a number of these meal kit delivery things you can do for miles. Right. Right. All right. I think it's time for the main event. That's right. The main events. Tell us about the main event. All right. How to find the best flight awards. So let's talk about why it's hard to find the best flight awards. I think there's two big pieces to it that that when you want to fly somewhere, finding award availability can be really tough. So, you know, not every airline makes all their seats available for award purchases. In fact, the old way of doing it with vast majority of airlines was that they would only have a few seats available on each flight that were, you know,

slated for awards. And, and if you, you know, if no one else had booked them up, then you can book them, but, but they were like very hard to find. More and more airlines that were moving to sort of dynamic pricing where every seat or almost every seat is available to book, but at very high prices, which brings to the next part, which is how to figure out which points to use to get the best price for your award is also really complicated. So for example, let's say you find an American Airlines flight that's available, not just through American Airlines, but also through its partners. Do you book with American Airlines miles? Do you book with Alaska miles? Do you book with British Airways avios? Do you book with Iberia avios? Do you book with British airways? Obvious. Do you book with Iberia obvious?

Do you book with Cathay Pacific? How the heck would you know? Yeah, there's, there's so many different things. And, and, you know, even if you know some of them, you probably don't have all the award charts memorized. And then even if you have all the awards memorized, you're probably going to forget something. Right. I mean, and then even if you don't forget anything and you got all the award charts memorized, it's just time consuming. Right. I mean, it takes, you got to go to each of the sites like Qantas requires you to log in and British Airways requires you to log in. And like some sites don't require you to log in. Others do. Sometimes you can find the airport codes you're looking for easily. Sometimes you need to work

around in order to find the right airport codes. We're into that with Virgin Atlantic this morning, such a pain. Sometimes the codes would come up fine. Sometimes I have to search by country and blah, blah, blah. What a pain. So sometimes it can be very time consuming. That's the thing I think that in addition to finding the availability and knowing which points is also the time consuming end of it. Right. And the good news here is things have gotten better. So about 10 years ago, the answer to how to find the best awards was probably read these types of blogs for about two years

and then you might be able to do it yourself or pay someone to do it for you who knows what they're doing. I mean, those are, you know, really, if you really want to make sure you got the best awards, but things have gotten significantly better. So, so for one example, major programs now show most of their partners online. So for example, if you, if you now, if you search delta.com, just to use one example, for award flights, you will see Air France and Virgin Atlantic and Aeromexico and on and on, all their partners, almost all their partners, just by doing award search through delta.com. That didn't used to be true. Same thing with

American Airlines. They used to have very few of their partners available in the award searches. And so you had to know, you had to like somehow magically know, oh, I want to book, you know, Etihad. So I have to go over to somewhere else to see if Etihad award space is available and then, you know, and then call American to book it. And now, even though not all of it is available to American, that's an example of how things used to be with most programs. And now, more and more, you can find what you want online with these individual programs. So that's great news. The other big change that's made things easier is more and more banks have gotten into transferable point currencies. So when I

started this hobby 10, 11 years ago, the like Citibank didn't have any transfer partners. Certainly Capital One didn't have any transfer partners. And Chase was pretty new on the scene at the time with it. And so Amex was, you know, at the time and diners club, I guess was an old one, which, which is hard to get into these days. But, um, you, so you have many more opportunities now to earn points that are transferable to lots of different programs. So if you find a great award, that's bookable with Avianca life miles, for example, getting those miles needed is actually pretty easy these days. Whereas, again, 10 years ago, you would have been like, well, what am I going to do? Go fly Avianca just so I can earn these miles and book this flight?

And you mentioned the major ones, right? Amex, Chase, Capital One, and Citi. But then, of course, you have other ones appearing too these days. You got Brex, Built Rewards. So there's more things popping up where you may be able to earn transferable points too. Great point. Great point. And then the third thing is better tools have appeared on the scene. So especially online tools. Back when I started, there were some things where you could download a program that ran only on Microsoft Windows 3.1 or whatever. And I never wanted to do that. But these days you can get on the web and there's some really solid tools for what you need. So things have gotten much

better. That doesn't mean it's easy though. There's still a lot to know. For sure. For sure. So where does somebody start? If you're kind of new to this game and you're looking to get into booking your own awards because you want to fly and you want to travel, you're kind of getting back into the swing of things, what do you do? If you got American Airlines miles or you got United miles or Delta miles or something,

what do you do? Yeah. Let's start with that. If you only have one or two types of miles, like, like American or United, those websites do a pretty good job of finding what you need. I would just start there. Say, these are the only miles I have. I'm going to, I'm going to, you know, click on these two, log in, do my award searches for what I want and when. And if I don't find something that looks good enough, then look instead at other alternatives like paying for flights. But if you have a transferable points currency, all the ones we just talked about, you have your Chase Sapphire preferred card, you've got your city premier card and so on and so on, then that's where you need, I think you need help.

I agree. I agree. You do need help at that point. You know, if you have the single airline currency, then like you said, the website is a good tool. There may be a couple of additional partners that you have to book over the phone or something, but most of the partners you're going to find on the website. And the thing to keep in mind is if you have American Airlines miles, you can use them to book American Airlines partners, but you can't transfer the miles to an American Airlines partner. You can't move them. I don't know, American partners with, let's say, British Airways. You can't transfer them from American to British Airways. They're American Airlines miles. You're going to pay the American Airlines price. However,

if you have the transferable currencies that we talked about, well, now all of a sudden your Amex membership rewards points can become British Airways Avios or your Chase Ultimate rewards points can become British Airways Avios, et cetera, et cetera. So yeah, so you need some help. And where do you go for help? Well, there are a few tools now. There are, right. And so if you just want a very simple tool, like kayak-like tool, where you just say,

here's where I'm starting from, here's where I want to go and when, then there are two tools on the market right now that do that for you. One is called PointMe, so point.me, and the other one's called AwardLogic. And they both work in a very similar way, which is, like I said, you just put in your start and end location, how many passengers and the dates that you want to fly. Press go. You've got to wait several minutes and you'll get a list of potential flights and how many miles it should cost in different programs. So sometimes you'll see the same exact flight in, you know, sort of listed in different ways because you could book it as we were talking about earlier, you might be able to book that same flight with American

Airlines miles or British Airways Avios or whatnot. And so you'd be able to then see which one you want to book. And it will even tell you, for example, you can use this many Chase Ultimate Rewards points or this many Amex Membership Rewards points. So that's a real help in figuring out whether your transferable points program can get you where you want to go. Yeah. And it's really nice because these tools show you the different programs that can transfer. And so you can also figure, okay, well, I also have this kind of card or that kind of card and figure out, okay, well, I could transfer some from this pile of points and some from that pile of points, perhaps if you're in

that situation, that point me tool links up with award wallet, which is a popular tool for monitoring your various balances. So you can see results and see right away, okay, well, this is what I have enough American Express membership rewards points for, or I can use my Capital One miles for this or that. So that's really nice. And what I like about these tools and the PointMe tool in particular is how many different programs they search. And the advantage there is that it's going to find prices in many different programs. And the same flight can often cost different numbers of points in different programs. For example, I had an American Airlines flight in an example post this morning where I wrote about, I say this morning, this week,

I should say when I wrote about award logic. And I think the American Airlines flight was something like, let's say 6,000 miles one way. But on that search result in either tool, AwardLogic or PointMe, it would say, view more options. And I think there were something like 24 different ways to book that same flight with different programs. And so you could see how many points it would be different amounts. And it can be wildly different amounts. You know, to give an example that I didn't find through one of those tools today, I just today, as we record this, booked four tickets in Delta One business class from New York to Amsterdam.

And I paid about 39,000 Amex membership rewards points per passenger. Had I booked through Delta, it would have been 225,000 points per passenger, literally like nine times or eight times or whatever as many points if I booked through Delta. So these tools help you find a variety of prices and that way you can find the best deal. So it makes it much more user-friendly in terms of being able to search multiple different programs at once and see something you might've forgotten. Maybe you didn't know that Flying Blue Air France's loyalty program is partners with Copa Airlines and you want to go somewhere

in Latin America and you're like, oh, well, I have lots of miles I could transfer to Air France, KLM, Flying Blue, and I could book this Copa flight with them. And I never would have known I could do that or that it was cheaper than using United or some other partners. So those tools can be really useful, I think, in helping you discover things. Even me, I mean, there are things I forget all the time or didn't know in terms of partnerships or pricing where I'll discover something and say, wow, I can save miles. And when you save miles per passenger on a per passenger basis for multiple passengers, you can really add up. Sure. Absolutely. Yeah. And some things are just

sort of almost impossible to do on your own. I guess maybe that's an extreme statement, but there are some airlines where finding that they have award space can be very, very difficult because maybe they're not available through like a.com or delta.com or whatever to search. But somehow these tools get at some of those as well, which is super, super helpful because I know in my case, unless I was specifically looking for that airline and so I'm going out of my way to look for that award space, I'm not going to find that. You know, Of those two, do you have a recommendation? Which one should people look at?

You know, so I've been using PointMe for a while because we had access before it was public. So I've been using PointMe for a while. And the experience I had with PointMe before the public launch was significantly different than the experience that people had in the first days after the public launch, because there was so much demand on the servers and whatever doing the searches that things just slowed to a crawl and a lot of results weren't populating. So I mean, based on that type of experience, it would be hands down award logic after, you know, the way that that worked out the first couple of days. However, because I have the benefit of more time than that using the PointMe tool, I know how capable it is when it's not overwhelmed with this sudden surge of

traffic. So I think I like for a beginner, I like the PointMe tool better for a few reasons. Number one is I haven't yet found a phantom flight through PointMe. I haven't found something that wasn't bookable through PointMe. Anything I've seen through PointMe has been bookable through an airline. And that's important if you're a beginner, because those of us who are more advanced might recognize things where we say, oh, that looks available, but I know from past experience that it isn't really there. It just shows up on one site or another. And the PointMe tool seems very good at eliminating those things that are not definitely available. So that's, I think, a big piece of it. The second big piece of it is that it's super easy for beginners because they

have these really simple video tutorials that show you how to create a loyalty account with that partner airline program, how to transfer your miles over and how to book the flight. So you could literally watch a step-by-step for each piece of it. And it kind of holds your hand and walks you through it. So I think that's super simple for beginners. I also think price-wise it's a better deal. Either PointMe or AwardLogic charges $5 for a one-day pass, but the monthly cost, if you want to maintain a membership to it, is significantly cheaper for PointMe. And they search a lot more programs. So those are the advantages that I like with PointMe. Though on the flip side, I have to say AwardLogic is returning

results much more quickly than PointMe is. So search at PointMe will take a couple of minutes. They aim for under two minutes, I think. And I know that at launch, it was way more. But in my experiences before launch, two minutes was certainly more than reasonable. But award logic was like less than a minute. I had the results. So it was definitely significantly faster when I searched and it found some things that I didn't see through PointMe. Now, I don't know if some of those things were phantom things that weren't actually available, but I know some of them were available and didn't show up through PointMe. So there are going to be advantages and pluses to either. And really truthfully, if you're doing this just to book a single trip and you're just going to spend Saturday searching for flights and book something, it might be worth spending five bucks for each tool. I mean, you're going

to get a lot of overlap between the two, but $10 for the amount of time savings you're going to have. Maybe it's worth it, or at least it's worth it to you to play with them both one time and decide which one works better for you. Because at that price, at the $5 price, it's cheap enough to get in and check them both. Right. And when first trying it out, at least currently, we have a code on our site that'll give you a one-day free trial of PointMe. And on the WordLogic side, you can sign up for their monthly price and get the first month free and then set a reminder to yourself to cancel it before you get charged for the next month. So there are some ways to do free trials, at least to see which one you like better.

So that's, I think, a good way to get started. It is. And if you have existing miles and existing programs, then I would also give the nod at least slightly to point me because they search many more programs. And so if you're someone who travels internationally for business and you've got some Malaysia and rich miles that nobody else in their right mind has been collecting, but you happen to have them, then that tool is going to search that program too. Whereas most tools like this are not going to be searching a niche program like that that doesn't tend to have many good values. So that's another thing to think about.

What programs do I have existing miles in and does this tool search those programs? Right, right. I think one, actually two Achilles heels to both of these is that you can't search multiple dates. So that's a big problem because, you know, as I talked about, finding awards is difficult. And so often you need to be flexible and look across a range of dates to find, you know, a good flight for where you want to go to. And the ability to do a range of dates then, you know, I think is important. So work around as you could, you know, open these and, and you could do a search for one date in one browser window and then duplicate the,

you know, into another tab and do a different date search in the next tab. And that way you can sort of go back and forth to see the different date results, but it's not very user-friendly to have to do that. The, the other thing that's missing from both of these tools is any way to set up an alert because that would really be ideal. Like you want to fly to Australia and you just, you know, you don't find any good results when you first search. You would love to be able to say, alert me when these awards become available and instead of me sitting here and searching every day. And neither tool has that yet,

which is why we're going to talk about two other tools that are on the market and who should use those and when and why. The first one I want to talk about is ExpertFlyer. This has been around forever and ever. It used to be the go-to tool for most award searchers because it was pretty much the only web-based tool that wasn't outrageously expensive that was on the market. But it's very, very different from what we were just talking about, right? It doesn't let you just say, I want to go from here to there, show me what's available. Instead, you have to say

what airline you want to fly, what class of service, and gosh, what type of award search are you doing? Or even if you're doing like a search for paid flights, you have to pick the kind of like fair code that you're interested in. And, um, and then it'll do a good job of finding up to, um, what is it? Two weeks of availability. I think it was, or no, a week available, but I think you do like plus and minus three days, something along those lines. Yeah. I think that's what it is. Yep. So, um, but, but, you know, the results are very nice. It, it. It shows you day by day and tab results for that airline. When do they have awards available that are bookable, not just with that airlines miles, but with partner miles as well.

I mean, those are the only ones that will show up. Let me back up a second when I said that. So Delta, for example, you can book any flight anytime with Delta miles, but there's only certain flights, certain times and flights where those seats are available to partner miles. And that's what you're interested in when you're using expert flyer. So that's the type of thing it'll show. And it'll show not just that there is something available, it'll show all the different flights for that day for each tab that are available.

And often, it depends on the airline, it'll show how many seats are available in the class of service you're looking at. So really, really helpful in that way. Yeah, you know, ExpertFlyer has lots of information. And if you're someone who's into that and you know a fair amount about award booking and airline operations and fare codes and stuff like that, it's a super powerful tool. And what you didn't mention, I don't think there is the ability to set alerts. And so that is something that sets it apart in the sense that you can set an alert for seats

to be able to find out when those seats open up. Right. Right. Now, if I remember right, when you set an alert, you're setting it for a specific flight or set of flights. And so, uh, if another, tell me if I'm wrong, but I believe you're right. If another flight opens up on that same day and you didn't set up an alert for that other flight, you're not going to get alerted that, that I don't think so. I don't think so. So you do have to, you know, set it for what it is you want and know what you want. And I feel like Expert Flyer is a very powerful tool. It's not particularly user-friendly or it is designed in such a way that it doesn't have a very modern feel to it. So you have to be comfortable with limited graphics and a lot of information input.

So, and if you are, then it's a really valuable tool. The ability to set the alerts is really nice. And if you're competent at then booking what it is you want, then it's a good tool too. Because the other piece to keep in mind is, once you've found that Delta flight that's available via partners, ExpertFlyer is going to help you know which programs

you can use to book it or how many miles it's going to cost or which one is the best deal. You still need to know all of that information. So you still either need a PointMe tool or an AwardLogic tool, or you need to have the knowledge of what's the best way to book that particular flight. Now, that's obviously something you can Google and learn and read blogs to find out that maybe you already have. And if you have, great, then that tool will work really well for you. Something I should have mentioned about PointMe and AwardLogic before, when I talked about beginners, is I know some people, especially for their first or second or third trips, feel uncomfortable with the booking process, particularly if it involves dealing with a foreign airline. And one of the things that I think is probably helpful for a lot of beginners with, for example, PointMe,

is that they do offer an award booking service. So they show you how to do it yourself and you can do it yourself. Or if you don't want to have to do that, you can pay somebody else to do it for you. And the prices are, I don't know, I don't know what award booking services go for in general. Seems reasonable enough to me. It's probably not the cheapest way to get somebody to book an award for you, but neither is it outrageously expensive. So if you need some more handholding, you need somebody to do it for you, you can. Whereas with ExpertFlyer, you're on your own.

You got to be able to do it. And if you are independent and you can do it, great. If not, it's not going to probably work for you. I think people often pair ExpertFlyer with a tool that will tell you the best award prices if awards are available. So there are plenty of free tools that will show you what it thinks are the prices for certain routes and airline combinations. But those tools don't know if those awards are actually available for the dates you're looking at. And so, oh, shoot. Award hacker. Award hacker. Thank you. That's one that comes to my mind. That seems pretty good at that. It is pretty good. There are some spots though that are outdated

where the award charts have changed and nothing's been updated in that regard. I don't know whether there are plans to or not, but if you're aware of that, then that may not be a big deal to you if you're aware of which things have changed. But yeah, I think that's a great point that you're going to want to pair expert flyer with something like that, that enables you to look up, the best ways to get to, if you just type in your Google search box, frequent miler, best ways to get to, you could see our post about the best ways to get to Europe or Asia or this or that, and it would probably give you the ideas to which program to use to book any particular award. And so then it's a matter of just finding the space with a tool like expert flyer, if you're comfortable using that type of resource. Right, right. A couple other small points about ExpertFlyer. If you're searching for upgrade space, so you have some sort of upgrade certificate

or you want to use miles to upgrade, it lets you actually search for upgrade space on a lot of airlines. Seat selection, you can actually set alerts for when a particular seat on the airplane becomes available. So maybe you want to, there's a particular place you want to sit on the plane and it's not available when you go to pick your seat, you can actually set seat alerts as well. So there's a lot of stuff there. As Nick

said, it's for the sort of more advanced users. But again, if you know which airline you want to fly, it does let you search a week at a time, which is really, really valuable. And faster than searching via the airline's individual website, typically, and the results are pretty quick with expert flyers. So that's a nice benefit. That's, that's a really good point. Yes. And then, um, then we have seat spy, which is a, it's sort of a niche tool in that it'll only look for awards for the six or seven airlines that it currently supports. But what it does is really unique. When you, when you pick an airline, let's say you pick United Airlines, then you have to pick a specific nonstop route. So you pick Chicago to Honolulu, let's say. and optionally in both directions to show which days have saver awards on United. And that means you could then use not just United to book these, but any of United's

Star Alliance partners. And sometimes you can get incredible deals by doing that. So Seatspy, if you know which airline you want to fly and which specific routes. Which specific non-stop routes. Non-stop routes. That's a really important point. You can't really beat this because it also lets you set up alerts to let you know when there's new availability.

I don't think it lets you set up an alert for a particular day, but it'll say, oh, there's new availability. I don't think it lets you set an alert for a particular day, but it'll say, oh, there's new awards available between Chicago and Honolulu. So then you go look at it and say, okay, yeah, I could use that or not. So really, really useful in very specific, very, very specific circumstances. Right, and it's worth two verys there because you need it. Obviously, there's a limited number

of airlines, but then beyond that, airlines have this married segment logic where sometimes things are available when they're connected to other things, but they're not necessarily available separately. So if you don't live in one of those markets with a nonstop and you're willing to position or you're hoping to link two flights together, then it becomes less certain that you're going to actually find the availability through there. France and, uh, or actually it was on KLM and I looked up New York to Prague and New York to Amsterdam on a seven 87 connected to something from Amsterdam to Prague. And that was available via Virgin Atlantic for 55,000 miles one way, but JFK to Amsterdam was not available. So it had to be paired together with that other piece. So if I had been using the seat spy tool, I assume I actually wasn't in that case. But I assume that the JFK to Amsterdam would have come up empty, even though there are seats available on that flight, as long as you're connecting to something else. So that's why I say it's pretty unique circumstances, though I say unique.

And I'm based in the New York area, and are plenty of non-stops where I'd be happy to find United availability, particularly on the flights to Hawaii. And I don't mind positioning in Chicago if I need to. And then there are non-stops from Chicago. So I have actually been using Seats by more because I've been dreaming of a Hawaii trip now that things are starting to get closer to normal. So I've been using it more and more lately, but it's worth mentioning eight times that it is a very specific thing. It's not something you're going to get for general, all of your award searching needs. Right, right. I also find it very difficult to use with the programs that have dynamic pricing. With the exception of United, they seem to have figured

out how to only look at United Saver Awards, which again are bookable with United's partners. That's not true with American Airlines or Air France. And so I've seen lots of positive results show up on both of those where you have to use those miles to book those flights. And that's not what I'm usually using the tool for. Right. Right. And, you know, I'm glad you mentioned that because that's something that I didn't include in today's post when I was talking about award logic, but eventually when I can pair point me and award logic against each other, this will be something that will be a

relevant point in that designing these tools has to be tough and figuring out which results and what they mean and why you display one or another is important. And to give one small example, there was a situation that I was looking at with a nonstop American Airlines business class flight and Point Me was showing that flight available for 25,000 miles one way and Award Logic was showing it available for 20,000 miles one way. and AwardLogic was showing it available for 20,000 miles one way. They were both right. AwardLogic was showing the web saver price, and PointMe was showing the non-saver price. And that flight could be booked at either regular business class 25K level or at web special level. And I presume that PointMe was showing the 25 K level because that's the

one that's also available to partners. Web specials are not available to partners by default. So, so, and, and I, I get the sense that point me is not showing flights that aren't available for partner bookings. So, so there are lots of those types of oddities that make differences. Yeah, except that's not true. I found Delta Ords on PointMe that are not available on a partner. So, it's not a fixed rule. Oh, there you go. Interesting. But maybe it's prioritizing the partner ones.

Was it American you said? Yeah, it was American, yeah. Yeah, I don't know. That you said? Yeah, it was American. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. Yeah. So that gets complex. So the same thing, you get to run into that issue with Seats Buy, you run into it with other tools. That's where a tool like Expert Flyer comes in handy in that it will find seats that are just available to partners. And rather than trying to return prices for those seats, it'll show you what's available and then it's on you to go find the prices. Right, right, right.

Okay. So, again, the first two tools we talked about just sort of summarize things a little bit. The point me and award logic are great for the beginner, you know, and if you know specific set of dates where you want to travel, it'll tell you every possible thing that you could do almost and help you find the best flight. Expert Flyer and Seat Spy, great for searching across ranges of dates, but you need to know which airline you want to fly and you need to know a lot more to use them effectively in general. Okay. Next, I just want to touch on this really briefly. Let's say you find an award flight. How do you know it's a good deal? So let's say you can book a flight for 20,000 airline miles or $200? Would you book it with cash or would you book it with miles? How do you know? Right. That's a good question. How do you know? I mean, my easy answer there is to compare it

against our reasonable redemption values. Take a look at the reasonable redemption values that Frequent Miler has and say, okay, well, how does that compare to what we say you should reasonably be able to get without a lot of effort at maximization? And if it's close, then okay, that's probably fine to book with miles. If it's far off in the sense that if you're not getting nearly as much value as what our reasonable redemption value is, then you know that maybe it's worth saving those miles for a time when you can get a more valuable use. But I think it's still pretty individual here. There's that joy of free and the ability to book your vacation without using any of your cash and keep cash in the bank and flexible for other stuff. There are reasons why you might accept suboptimal value. So I don't think that there's a one size fits all answer there. There probably isn't, but I'm going to give a tip. Here's what I do in my head when I'm doing

these things is I look at the mileage price and I convert that into dollars as if the miles were pennies. So a 20,000 mile award flight, I just say, okay, 20,000 pennies, that's $200 plus tack on any award fees. Let's say there's $50 in awards fees. So, okay, $250 in miles. Now that's, I'm not saying I value miles at a penny each. I'm just saying sort of how I do this mentally. Then I compare it to the cash price. Let's say the cash price is $200. Well, I want whichever is cheaper. So I'm going to go with the cash price in that example. What if the cash price is $260? Well, then the mileage price is $260. Well, then the mileage price is cheaper. But what you're saying then is you're

getting just a tiny bit better than one cent per mile value. I want the cash price to be a lot more expensive than the mileage price. And I'm not going to try to define to you what a lot is. I just don't want it to be close. I want it to be more, I want to be getting more than one cent per point value for my miles. And that's sort of, that's sort of what I do in my head when I'm looking at these before I try to like figure out more detailed, is this a good deal or not? I think that's a good enough first blush. There you go. I think that's a great tool. I typically think about it in terms of one and a half cents per mile, but one cent per mile is probably easier, faster math. So that's probably a good way to look at it and say, okay, well, which is the better deal? Which am I laying out less value? Because obviously your miles aren't cash, but they're value. They represent value, a store of value of some sort. And so you don't

want to pour out more value in miles than it would cost you in cash. Unless cash is tight, then I would think that you want to make sure you're getting better. Yeah, of course. Right, right. Or if you're trying to, maybe you have miles that are going to expire and you just want to use them up. There's all kinds of reasons why you might accept bad value. So what about booking through bank travel portals? If you have a Chase Sapphire preferred card, you probably know, or maybe you don't know, I don't know, that if you go through the United, I mean, through the Chase Ultimate Awards portal to book flights, you'll get 1.25 cents per point value in booking the flight. With the

Sapphire Reserve, you get 1.5. Similarly, with the U.S. Bank Altitude Reserve, if you go through their portal, you'll get 1.5 cents per point value booking that way. Should people be doing that? Probably not. And I think that if you asked us this question two and a half years ago, we probably would have said, yeah, if you can get decent value, sure, because one and a half cents is reasonable enough for value. And it's easy. You don't have to find award availability. You can pick the flight you want, et cetera, et cetera. So there are reasons why we would have argued in favor of it. However, thanks to the pandemic shed light on what happens when things don't go the way you planned for them to go. And it's not pretty when you book through a credit card portal.

It really isn't. When things go wrong, when flights get canceled, when you have to get rerouted, things are so much simpler when you've booked directly with the airlines involved as opposed to through a portal of any type. When you're dealing with points and stuff, it just even gets more complicated because if there's a refund, where does that refund go? Do they know to somehow give you your points back or are they going to keep the refund as like a credit that you could apply to a new flight? And then if they do, is that credit hard tied to a particular passenger or can be used for anything? These are all things that are going to vary from one travel portal to another. And I just don't want to deal with that. No, no, nobody does. And it's too bad because there are times when it will cost you fewer points to book at one and a half cents a piece through a credit card portal than an award might

cost you. And I guess those are times when you now have to ask yourself, well, am I getting enough value to make the award ticket worthwhile? But when you consider the fact that you could use points at a value of one and a half cents each and earn miles on the flight, that sometimes made the possibility of booking through ultimate rewards or MX membership rewards pretty attractive to me in the past. And maybe eventually when things become more normal again and more predictable, maybe that will be appealing to me again. Because in a more normal world, I just didn't have that many situations where a flight got canceled by the airline or things went sideways. But these last couple of years, who knows? I don't know what's going to change and when entry restrictions are going to change

and requirements and when somebody might test positive for COVID in the family and this and that. So there's just way too many variables in the here and now, in the current times in which we live for me to bother with booking through any kind of, like Greg was saying, portal. And what he means by that is any online travel agency, whether it's Expedia, Priceline, Chase, Ultimate Rewards, Amex Membership Rewards, whatever else. There's too much potential headache. And I think back actually, and my in-laws had a flight booked for a wedding this past fall that just popped into my mind now, never would have remembered if not for this conversation, that they have a credit with American Airlines that they have to use by calling American Express

at some point between now and whenever it expires. And it's not something that they can easily track because it's not just in their American Airlines account or something like that. And so if I hadn't thought of it, probably everybody would have forgotten about it and that money would have gone away. So there's just way too many headaches. So I would avoid that generally. It's so unfortunate. Now, the US Bank Altitude Reserve Card has a workaround, which is if you're booking a flight with a domestic airline, then if you have your real-time mobile rewards set up, basically just go directly to the airline, pay with your altitude reserve card, and you should get a text message that says, do you want to use your points to pay for this?

And you get 1.5 cents per point value with that card when you say, yes, redeem. You type in redeem it. If Chase ever enables their, their, their, their pay yourself back feature for travel or for airfare, then we'd be able to do something similar there. But at least for now, that's not, that's not an option as, as we, as we talk about this. Right. Right. All right. So we talked about why we don't like to shop through online booking services. What about Capital One, though? They're saying now that they're going to add very soon the ability to cancel any flight

that you book through them for a small upfront fee. So like, I guess, I guess that means at a time of booking, you add this ability, you pay a little bit extra in order to make your flight freely cancelable. Will that change your opinion about where to book? I mean, it depends. Maybe, you know, there's part of me that says you already can do that, right? You just have to book a refundable fare class. So it's a little bit more. It depends on that little bit can vary as to how much it is. Or you could have different insurances, whether you're talking about travel insurance you buy or you buy through the airline or through your credit card. I mean, there are various different ways. But my assumption here is that Capital One is buying

one of those types of insurance policies and passing along just a small portion of the cost to the cardholder is my bet about what's happening behind the scenes. And so you're basically buying insurance. Now, how much is that worth to me? I don't know. I mean, I probably would pay a few extra dollars and then maybe I would use it, I think. I think the additional flexibility, especially if it's really easy to cancel, if it's just like click a couple of buttons and cancel, I would probably consider that. Yeah. You? Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, I think so. Now, I don't have any capital one cards right now, but if I did, I mean, I think I would consider that. I still would not book through their portal and pay with points because it's Capital One, especially you can always pay with your credit card and then erase the points afterwards. And that way you still earn rewards on that purchase and then still use your points to pay for it. Right. So better way to go. Right.

I wouldn't be, wouldn't be in a hurry to redeem them through the capital one portal. And that's a point I've made when people have asked about the capital one portal and redeeming miles before. There's just no reason to do it that way. Eliminate the headache, book direct and use your points to erase. So the advantage of looking through the portal is when you're not using your

points, when you're earning miles because you're spending money on the flight and you can earn more miles by using your Capital One card through the portal. And then if, again, if it's a reasonable fee, if it's a very small fee to be able to cancel for any reason, then I think that will make it a really interesting tool. And I think that that was innovative. That to me is an interesting idea because that's something that not everybody else is offering and that everybody wants, right? I mean, the ability to cancel your flight easily. Even though most domestic airlines now let you make free changes or you cancel and you get a credit, that credit is only available for a year. And it might be tied to the original passenger's name.

Right. And it can't be a basic economy ticket. And so this may offer a much better option where you actually get your money back and maybe even for basic economy, which would make, I think that would potentially eliminate. economy, which would make, um, I think that, that would, you know, potentially eliminate, actually, that would be very interesting. Cause if, if a basic economy ticket was still cheaper after paying the small fee and they let you cancel it, that could be a winning combination. Yeah. I mean, I agree with you. I think that that would potentially make it the place to book those types of flights.

So I'll be curious to see what happens. Yes, me too. All right. I think that wraps up the main event. I think so. And so I think that brings us to the question of the week. And so this week's question of the week came in via messenger message. I got a message from somebody who I know follows the blog

quite regularly. And I thought that this question was timely and one that is worth mentioning for people interested in the VentureX card. And so this transitions nicely from talking about Capital One. So question this week was, I wanted to double check your data point from the VentureX post. We have a post on FrequentMiler. It's like everything you want to know about the Capital One VentureX card. He said that my wife had applied for it and she got approved for it despite having both the Venture card and the Venture One card open. Is that right? Most blogs continue to say Capital One has a two personal card limit. Have they just relaxed it for the VentureX? I have two old Capital One cash back cards.

I keep them for the card history, and I'm trying to decide if I need to close one before I apply for the VentureX. What do you think? So, I mean, yeah, I'm not caught up with the latest in Capital One's application rules and approval rules, but what's the situation? Well, you know, as I wrote about in that post, my wife had a Venture card and a Venture One card, both quite old. And she was instantly approved for the VentureX.

So we had thought that the limit was two personal cards from Capital One, and also that you could only get one card per six months. But since the VentureX launched, I have seen plenty of data points, both on our blog and on other blogs, because I do read the comments on other blogs too, just to find information like this. I've seen plenty of data points from people who already had two Capital One cards and still got approved for the VentureX, and also plenty of data points from people who had recently opened a different Capital One card and were able to get the VentureX also, or people who had recently opened a different Capital One card and were able to get the VentureX also, or people who had opened the VentureX and were then able to get the Spark Cash Plus card that's

got a big welcome offer, increased welcome offer on it right now. So I don't know whether those rules have gone away altogether or whether they have just been relaxed for these cards that are featuring increased bonuses. But I know that it's at least possible. And our rule of thumb is always, if it's possible for something to happen, then you know it's not a hard and fast rule. So that two personal card limit is clearly not a hard and fast rule anymore. And the one card per six months, also clearly not a hard and fast rule. There are situations where you might be able to get around that. So if you're interested, that VentureX offer ends, I think, March 14th. So you got to get on it while you can. But if you have a couple of old Capital One cards, I would not close them. I don't think you need to. I would certainly go for it if I could.

But having Capital One shut down my venture card, I don't think it makes sense for me to sign up for the venture. No, you would be a glutton for punishment to sign up and make the spend and get the bonus and get the miles redeemed at half a cent each yet again. Yeah. No, thank you're listening to this or watching this show, please give us a like, leave us a comment, subscribe and enable notifications. We appreciate all those things. They help the channel out. And if you have questions, what can you do, Greg? If you have questions or feedback, email us at mailbag at frequent mylar.com. We'll see you next week. Bye everybody.