Frequent Miler on the Air - The 5 Best Award Search Tools | Frequent Miler on the Air Ep296 | 3-7-25

Episode Date: March 7, 2025

In today's episode we'll talk about how American Airlines out-crazies Citi, Southwest out-bonvoys Marriott, and we'll talk about what we think are the 5 best award search tools that make it much easier to find those coveted awards. (01:25) - One reader shares their concerns about tax payments made by an American Express card not counting towards sign up bonus spending. (05:28) - Read more about paying taxes with a credit card here and check out our podcast Episode239 about paying taxes to earn rewards. (05:45) - Capital One Venture X Business cards have a Rideshare Protection benefit (which you can read more about here.) (08:00) - Hilton cards offer free night thru 4/29 (which you can read more about here.) (10:29) - Wyndham Earner cards big bonuses Read more about these Wyndham Earner bonuses here. (13:39) - Citi: accidentally credited a client’s account with $81 trillion when it meant to send only $280 (Read more about this here.) (15:22) - American Airlines made a huge blunder which you can read about here. (19:25) - Marriott StudioRes (26:00) - Southwest for the win Read more about Southwest slashing points earning on Wanna Get Away fares here. (29:52) - Alaska starting to roll out mixed partner awards Read more about this here. (32:23) - Aeroplan Family Points Sharing Returns Read more here. (35:20) - Hilton adds more and more SLH properties (38:06) - Find current transfer bonuses here. (41:14) - Read our post about award search tools here. (42:47) - Live Searches vs. Cached Discovery (47:23) - Alerts are KEY (50:25) - Flexible Live Search is very important (51:59) - Which is Best? (54:57) - Runner up (59:07) - Best for Beginners (1:02:28) - Best for advanced people (1:05:10) - Best add on (to use in addition to these other tools) (1:08:15) - Worth mentioning (1:12:17) - Discounts available in our post about which award search tool is best here. (1:12:28) - What should you do with your Capital One miles?

On today's show, American Airlines out crazy city, Southwest out Bonvoy's Marriott, and we go over the five best award search tools. Frequent Mylar on the Air starts now. Today's main event, the five best award search tools. Finding awards using your points and miles can be really difficult, especially if you want to find those really good ones where your points get way outside value. But there are some great tools on the market that actually can make it pretty easy to find the awards that you're looking for.

So we're going to get into that and give awards to the best award search tools. Awards for the best award search tools. Yes, that sounds pretty good. So yeah, I'm looking forward to this because I've said before that I kind of resisted search tools in the beginning because I thought I could do everything they do for free on my own. I just need to search multiple sites and my goodness, they've just cut down on the amount of time I spend searching for awards or increase the efficiency anyway with which I find them

by such an order of magnitude. So I look forward to talking about those today. But remember, if you want to jump ahead to something or you want to come back to something later on, you can always find the timestamps in the show notes. So just expand the show description, find those timestamps wherever you're watching or listening to this. Don't forget to like it, give us a thumbs up, leave us a review. We appreciate your comments, your feedback, your thoughts about everything we're talking about. Speaking of what we're talking about, let's talk next about this week's Giant Mail bag. This week's Giant Mail comes from Thankful. Thankful wrote in as a comment to our post on how to pay taxes with a credit card.

And Thankful wrote, has been addressed in the comments, but there's a non-zero risk that tax payments made by an Amex card will not count towards sign-up bonus spending, though they still will earn regular spend-based points. I just ran into this for the first time recently after many successful sign-up bonus earning tax payments in the past on Amex cards with my latest federal estimated tax payment. It should have qualified me for my signup bonus but after a longer than typical delay and not seeing the bonus post I checked with an Amex rep via the online chat tool. He confirmed that I was short of my needed spend by basically the exact amount of my tax payment and he further noted explicitly that tax payments, both income

and property taxes, are treated as cash equivalents and thus are excluded from counting towards sign up bonuses, though they can still earn regular points. Okay. Oh, thankful. We've heard this one before, but thankfully, thankful wrote in again nine days later. Thankfully wrote, update. Well, after all that, the signup bonus on the card I was referencing came through anyway, without any further purchases on that card. Just took longer than usual to post. So what the chat rep was saying,

whether or not true, didn't end up applying. Could you hear the sense of surprise in Greg's voice as he read that? Or lack thereof? Yeah, yeah, my goodness, we get these reports all the time. And I feel like we've addressed it on the show a number of times, but it doesn't matter how many times we address it, because all the time we get new comments coming in from people saying that these aren't going to count because a chat rep told me so. And, and I especially kind of laughed to myself when he said there's a non zero chance that they, you know, won't count towards the welcome so. And I especially kind of laughed to myself when he said there's a non-zero chance that they won't count towards the welcome bonus. And I was thinking, no,

there's a zero chance, thankful, a zero chance. They're going to count. There's a zero chance that they will not count. That's what there is. So they will. And people oftentimes panic too soon. Like if I had a dime for every time someone has said that something doesn't work anymore because they just didn't wait long enough, I would certainly have a lot of dimes. Let me put it that way. So yeah, yeah, you just have to be patient. I know a lot of times points with Amex post quickly, but sometimes they don't and sometimes they just take weeks for no clear reason. I don't know why. Sometimes things just get slowed down and so you just have to wait.

But I'm like 110% confident. And of course, you know, something could change at any time, but like, there'd be a lot of data points before I'd have to, you know, there would have to be a lot of data points for I'd be convinced that this has stopped working because it has worked. And there have been so many incorrect, uh, negative data points over the years that I would be much quicker to just wait than I would be to call anything dead like this Yeah, and in fact the IRS website that Links to the payment processors that let you pay with a credit card explicitly says this should count as a purchase

I mean, it's it's pretty darn clear So if if you really don't get your bonus like you should have an avenue You should be able to go up the chain in Amex, but as Nick said, the real answer is just wait until you get the bonus because you most likely will. And you know, the thing here that would have totally convinced me and made me not even remotely concerned,

forget about, sent me to a chat rep to talk about it, is it sounds like Thankful got one X on the spend already. So clearly it counted. It's just a lag in awarding the welcome bonus. I mean if you saw that you got points for the purchase as though it was a purchase, then you know it was a purchase and it's being counted as a purchase. So it's gonna post. It's gonna post. Just give it to me. There you go. And if you wanna hear more about paying taxes with credit cards, check out our episode 239 called Pay Taxes Earn Big Rewards

that came out last year, January 27th of 2024. And if you wanna know more about how something works, never ask a chat representative. Okay, often wrong. All right, let's talk about card news. What's up in this week's card news? All right, first up, Capital One Venturex business cards have a ride share protection benefit.

It's like car rental insurance, but for taking ride shares, like an Uber or Lyft. And I had never even heard of this like type of protection before let alone knew it was available on a card. So a reader pointed out that it's sort of a hidden benefit on the Venturex business cards. Yeah, that is interesting, actually. So I have heard of it before because debit card that we wrote about, I think the point debit card, which is long defunct now covered ride share, like there was some ride share protection where if you left something

in a ride share vehicle, you get reimbursed for leaving something, which is one of the pieces of this anyway. So yeah, I mean, I think it's, it's interesting. This seems to have more stuff because of the accidental medical and death and dismemberment. So I think there's much more to this. So that makes it interesting. I haven't heard those pieces of it before for sure. So, interesting little note. A question that I have and I should have known the answer but I don't know, so I'm just crossing my fingers

that maybe you do. Do you know for sure that this applies to both the Visa and MasterCard versions of this card? It does, but it applies a little bit differently. Like the actual rules of what's covered are a little bit different. But yes, as of what's covered are a little bit different. But yes, as long as you have a Venturex business card, you should have some level of protection.

Check out our post, which will be in the show notes for details. I will point out that in that post, Steven pointed out that if you'd prefer to pay your rideshare with a different card because it has some kind of perks that you wanna take advantage of besides rideshare protection, has some kind of perks that you want to take advantage of besides ride share protection.

You can kind of do both because right after a ride, so you could set up the Venturex business card as your default card, and then right after the ride, Lyft will let you change your payment as long as you do it right away. Uber will let you change it, I think, up to 30 days after your ride, something like that. So, you know, both of them, there's a way to change it

to the card you really wanted to, or the credits you really wanted to use, but this way you would be protected in case anything goes wrong. There you go. All right, next up, we've got Hilton cards offering free night certificates, the new welcome bonuses that came out this week on the Hilton consumer cards anyway now

include a free night certificate on top of the points. So the no annual fee card now I think comes with a 70,000 point welcome bonus after $2,000 spent in the first six months and a free night certificate. The surpass card which has a $150 annual fee comes with 130,000 points after $3,000 spend in six months and of course that free night certificate. And the free night certificates with Hilton are uncapped and valid at almost any property worldwide. That includes the SLH properties. So there's incredible value to be had with Hilton free night certificates. Those offers are valid through April 29th, 2025.

So if you're listening to this after that, you're just gonna have to go check and see what the current offer is. But, but anyway, what do you think? Are these worth going after? Absolutely. I took advantage, my wife and I took advantage of a similar deal a year ago and are looking forward to the trip we're going to take on those free nights or certificates. The surpass deal I find particularly compelling because even though the card has a $150 annual fee, it gives you like $50 in Hilton credits every quarter so you could get up to $200 back and getting both 130,000 points plus a free night certificate after a very reasonable amount of spend in six months, $3,000 in six months.

You know, that's what $500 a month of spend. Very easy to hit that. But if you're a bigger spender, you could keep going and meet the $15,000 spend in 12 months. That'll give you another free night certificate, which is just a feature of the card that you have to do each calendar year. And since we're near the beginning of the calendar year, I guess you don't have all 12 months to do it. 12 months, right, yeah. But you have- Yeah, so I was gonna jump in and say,

but yeah. Yeah. You have what, nine months or so, depending on when you sign up. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So that, and I agree, that's, I think that the surpass card is more compelling here because of all of the things that Greg said. So I agree with that and I'm tempted because I haven't had a surpass in a long time. So I'm thinking that I'll probably

be eligible for this passcard bonus. My wife's never had this surpass card. So I'm tempted by this. We're both kind of also trying to consider 524 right now. So I don't know, but I'm pretty tempted because those free night certificates for SLH properties can be huge. So so good offers to be had there. All right, but they're not the only hotel cards out with new offers this week. The Wyndham earner cards now have new offers to right? Yeah, yeah. So you know, periodically, we see these and they're at their their high point right now. Or a high point, I guess. So the no annual fee card, 60,000 points after 2K spend in 90 days.

And all three of these cards give you a 10% discount on all award redemptions, including if you wanna use your Wyndham points for like a Vakasa vacation rental, you still get that 10% off. It's not a rebate, it's like actually a discount on the initial price. So that's pretty good. The business card, this is the one that's not really atate, it's like actually a discount on the initial price. So that's pretty good.

The business card, this is the one that's not really at an all time high, it's 75,000 points, but it comes in two parts, it's 50,000 points after 4K spend in 90 days, and then another 25,000 points after $12,000 spend in a year basically. And this card, we love this card because it's under $100 and they give you 15,000 points every anniversary.

It gives you eight hex on gas at gas stations and other perks, a diamond status with Windham. But so it's a great card. This is not the biggest welcome bonus we've seen for that card. The plus card though, this is a consumer card, the Windham earner plus card is out with a 90,000 point bonus. I think this is the high water mark for this card as far as I can remember anyway. And it only costs $2,000 spend in 90 days to get

those 90,000 points. This is a good card too. It's like not as good as the business one, but if it wasn't for the business one, I'd look at this and say, this is a totally solid card for anyone who can make use of Wyndham Points. Yeah, yeah, I agree. Yeah, and I think that Wyndham Points have,

you know, one of the sort of underrated currencies because some of the properties in the Wyndham chain, many of the sort of underrated currencies, because some of the properties in the Wyndham chain, many of them are more budget friendly brands. So that may not be where you're looking, you're not going to get the same outsized value, I guess, as you do with other chains, but you can get pretty reliable value nonetheless, or at least there are a number of situations where you can get pretty good value. And I've, I've considered Wyndham properties a number of times now on trips that I, it hasn't ended up being the Wyndham property in each case, but certainly it's been a consideration.

The one thing that I like with Wyndham is that on top of the free night Redemptions and of course, Vacaso, which Greg mentioned, and that's probably my favorite use of Wyndham points, cottages.com is a similar idea, but in the UK. But I think that the thing that probably is the unsung piece after you consider those things is the cash and points rates with Wyndham can be pretty good sometimes. The 3000 points per night or 6000 points per night depending on the level of the property plus some cash component often yields surprisingly good value for your points. It gives you a pretty good discount.

So that's another option for using points or at least getting decent value out of them. So it's not my favorite hotel program ever, but these are pretty good bonuses. So if you've been eyeing them, then now may be a good time, at least on the consumer cards. Yep. Yep. All right. Let's move on. What crazy thing did city do this week? City's back. So it was a little thing. City just accidentally credited a client's account with $81 trillion. That'd be a nice surprise, huh?

$81 trillion. Now, you would think that they were supposed to credit like 81 million or 81 something. No, they were trying to credit two hundred and eighty dollars. Two hundred and eighty dollars. This is a small mathematical error there. Yeah. Stopped by a couple of zeros. Yeah so that's that's not so what happened? I mean this one there wasn't really any fallout because they figured it out themselves internally before anything. The money never

left the bank. I mean, I don't think they have that much money anyway, so I don't know how it could leave the bank, but it was resolved within, I think they said like 90 minutes before it. So yeah, no big fallout other than being publicly embarrassed once again for a big mix up. They did something similar a couple of years ago and I was reading this New York Times article about it that I think it was a year ago or maybe two that they had an error that caused a stock market collapse in Europe.

Wow. Whoops. Yeah. So this one, you know, stock market collapse in Europe. Wow. Whoops. Yeah. Yeah. So this one, you know, is a bigger total number and, you know, bigger headline number, but smaller outcome to it other than more embarrassment for Citi. Well good for you for not crashing anything Citi.

All right. But they're not the only ones this week with something interesting. American Airlines also is out there making a mistake. C partner, American Airlines is also out there with mistakes. It's contagious. Yeah, so this one was reported by View From the Wing and what happened was a passenger was due a refund of about $1,000 from American Airlines. And American Airlines did that city thing and actually credited them with not $1,000, but $100,000. Well, they're just anticipating. They know that over time.

They're just saving themselves the time in the phone calls. That's right. So the customer actually called American Airlines and said, hey, you made a mistake, and actually had a lot of trouble getting anyone to acknowledge that it was a mistake. Like one person actually told them that, no, it was correct. We credited you the correct.

So they finally got someone to acknowledge that it was an error. And so you would think then that American would do something like nice for them to, you know, say thanks for not taking the money and running. They should take back the hundred thousand and give them the thousand, but maybe give them some extra credits or something. No, what they did instead is they for some reason charged this customer $28 million. Well, I mean, they had to make up for city's mistakes.

Somebody's got to be their driver. It's got mean, they had to make up for city's mistakes. Somebody's gotta do it. They're a dirty work. It's gotta come from somewhere. Might as well be this passenger. Yeah. Oh, man. No good deed goes unpunished, I guess, right?

Right, right, right. You know, it's so funny. The first part of it about calling American and American refusing to acknowledge the error reminded me of something that happened with me years ago. I had sent watches to fulfillment by Amazon. I had bought watches online through a portal and got like this incredible deal like 140 points per dollar or something buying these GPS watches. And so I sent them to fulfillment by Amazon to sell them for roughly, you know, face value. And so I learned a little, I lost a little bit because of the fees, the fulfillment by

Amazon fees, but I had earned so many points, it was well worth it. So, so these 10 watches, they sold and that was it. But then a year later, I got an email from Amazon saying, I just sold something like 14 more watches. Well, I hadn't sent them any more watches. So they sent me all this money. And I contacted them saying, hey, well, just telling them a story that I didn't have any watches to sell.

And they wrote back saying, we're very, very sorry about this mistake, but the watch is already sold. There's nothing they can do about it. So sorry. So sorry. So sorry we paid you for the watches that you didn't actually sell.

So my outcome was a lot better than this. Right, right. Well, right. Well, I was imagining trying to call and speak with a frontline representative and explain the idea that I got refunded $100,000 by mistake. And the chances of that person having, even if they understand, they're like, oh, wow,

yeah, that's crazy. Like the chances of them having any ability to get ahold of anybody who could do anything about that just seems so infinitesimally small. I can't imagine how much time you would have to waste. I think that's the thing that would really annoy me about this. The wasted time, because it probably wasn't an instant thing, right? Convincing somebody that they gave too much money and probably multiple calls, explaining the situation to multiple people, time on the phone, blah, blah, blah.

And so that whole process probably took a while. Then you get charged the 28 million and who knows how much time that's going to take up too. And that's just, that's the annoyance. It's easy to laugh about, but that's because it didn't happen to me. Right, right, right. So you know, in the meantime, he needs to call his credit card company asked for a bigger, bigger limit because 28 million is going to be tough. But think about how many points he's gonna earn.

A lot of points, a lot of points. All right. So that's crazy thing for this week. But there are some other crazy things there in our Bonvoyed section this week because there was some crazy bonvoying going on. And of course, if you're not familiar with the verb to bonvoy, it means to do something very customer unfriendly. So that must be where Marriott got the name from. So speaking of Marriott, what did they do this week to bonvoy us a little bit more? Yeah, they're always looking for new ways to bonvoy us

because it's in their name. So Marriott has rolled out a new brand called Studio Res. And it's a, I guess, a long term, you know, one of those like less expensive because they expect people to stay long-term brands. But what they did is they rolled out a particularly poor point earning rate of only four points per dollar. So until, except for this one,

except for like a weird exception, other property type, all other properties earn either 10 points per dollar, that's the default, or five points per dollar for the long-term brands. Well, so they decided to go one less with this one. But that's not even close to like the worst part of this. Next part, there's no elite bonus, meaning like platinum members who normally get

a 50% bonus on points earned, no, you don't get any. You don't get any bonus, meaning like platinum members who normally get a 50% bonus on points earned. No, you don't get any, you don't get any bonus. Like four points per dollars enough, that's all you're gonna get. But it gets worse. Oh no, oh no, stop, make it stop. If you're interested at all in Marriott elite status, which they're working really hard to disinterest us all

in Marriott eliteests, but if you're interested in it, then you're not going to want to stay here because you're not going to earn elite nights from your stay. No elite nights at all. Well, that's why they're not giving you any elite bonus. They're like, we don't want any elites here. Get out of here. No belong here.

Go somewhere else. I mean, I don't get it because like the whole point of like why a hotel would wanna be a Marriott is to appeal to the huge Marriott customer base who are interested in Marriott because it's a way to earn points or an elite status, get benefits from your elite status, all that stuff. You get pretty much none of that here. Yeah, no, the appeal here is to have a cheap way

to get on a reservation platform, essentially, right? Good Maria just must not be charging them very much and they can be on this reservation platform with a lot of eyeballs now. Yeah, you know, and that's, well, okay, I have so many feelings about this. But my first one is that the whole idea of the elite program, as you said, is to incentivize people to keep staying and come back and blah, blah, blah. And so the people that the elite program likely wants to appeal to most are the business travelers who are traveling all the time, right? Who frequently travel or constantly traveling.

And you want to get those people coming back to you again and again and again. So your long-term stay brand doesn't earn elite night credit. Like what sense does that make? The people staying there are the people traveling for work that you want in your hotels, right? Apparently not. Yeah. And imagine how angry people will be when they think they're going to be earning 30 nights for a long stay or whatever it is and they get nothing. And you know, Marianne might say, oh wait, it says it right in the reservation booking system. I don't know if it does or not, but even if it And, you know, Marriott might say, oh wait, it says it right in the reservation booking system.

I don't know if it does or not, but even if it does, I mean, often business travelers have an admin who book for them and they might just tell the admin, make sure to book me in Marriott, you know, and done. And, you know, and admin's probably not gonna even know what an elite night is, let alone, right. So anyway, so yeah, Marriott, man, they are just killing us with like a thousand cuts,

just over and over and over, one thing after another, they make the Bonvoid list and it's depressing. Right. When they first bought Starwood hotels, they took a lot of what made Starwood great in their elite program. And so it made the Marriott program way better at that time. And their points also were super valuable for a while

because of that. And just over time since then, they've chipped away, chipped away, chipped away until they're, you know, there's just so many asterisks with like, do you want to go with Marriott? Well, you know, and that's- One thing after another. That's the piece apart from everything I already said

that really, really kind of irks me here is that, so Marriott, I just looked it up, they have 36 brands and how many different ways does breakfast already work? I couldn't even tell you, but there's like already so much confusion over that, right? Yeah, I couldn't tell you either. There's just too many, right? And then you have the, you know,

which brands earn 10 points and which brands earn five points. And now we've introduced four points. So that opens the door to introduce three points or six points or, you know, brands that only earn eight instead of 10 and whatever. So there's gonna be like a million different things. I see it going that way. And of course they went to Protea earning one elite night for every two nights

stayed. And now they have this one that doesn't earn any elite nights. There's going to be so much variance. That's going to be impossible to keep track of. I'm not going to remember what you get where pretty soon. I mean, this one isn't going to make me forget all of that, but this one indicates to me that they want to do that with more. So I can imagine a future where not all of the brands that earn 10 points per dollar continue to earn 10. There's going to be like an eight and a six and whatever else that stinks.

It certainly could be. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Marriott. I don't know. And, and now like, what am I going to do? So I have this post that desperately needs to be revised, but where I compare the different hotel chains to say, which ones give you like the biggest rebate? You know, we sort of convert the points, like 10 points per dollar, we convert that into like a cash equivalent in order to estimate the rebate value.

Well, how do I handle Marriott now? Before there were so few chains that gave you less than 10, or so few brands, that it was okay to just sort of gloss over that, but I don't think I can going forward. Yeah, yeah. No, it's just a complicated program, needlessly complicated, not easy to navigate. Sure, they've got properties everywhere, but it's just not one that I would recommend to people. I look forward to hitting my lifetime platinum status so I'll get my breakfast wherever I get it and lounge access now and then and I'll be done trying to focus on Marriott because it's just getting too confusing. Too much. All right, thanks for all that, Marriott. But Marriott

is not the only one out there this week. Not to be outdone. Southwest decides that they are going to out-bonvoy Marriott. Bonvoy. It's hard to imagine. Yeah. But they did it. Somehow. In a week where Marriott introduced a chain that doesn't earn Elite Night the credit and earns fewer points per dollar, Southwest still beat them to the punch and bonvoyed everybody

a little bit more. They sure did. They sure did. They sure did. Okay. So they just overnight decided to drop the number of points per dollar you earn on their flights by a lot, uh, unless you're, unless you're getting the most expensive flights. So you're wanting to get away fares, which I assume that's what most people book.

Cause that's like the cheapest fares. You start in six points per dollar, now we're in two. And it just happened like overnight with that warning. That's like a 67% decrease overnight. It's approaching, yeah. I mean, it's, I guess it's worse than going from, that's much worse than like Marriott going from five to four, which is essentially it. Anyway, so then I want to get getaway plus fares, which are the next

level up that I think a lot of people also book those because they're even more flexible and want to get away. That dropped down a little bit from eight to six points per dollar. Wow. Yeah. I mean, I'm wowing it because both of the cheapest fares, which are clearly the ones that the vast majority of people must be booking, have decreased the lower amount by 25% and the higher amount by the 66.6, 67%, whatever you want to call it. That's just a huge cut. And then of course, anytime fares are still going to earn 10. So there was no change on the anytime fares.

And business select will go up from 12 to 14, but those are the most expensive fares that really are not generally worth buying unless you're buying at the last minute and that's all that's left because the only measurable benefit I think that they offer is the A1 to 15 boarding, which you could just buy a want to get away plus or an anytime and then upgrade to that hopefully at the airport. So it... Don't they also give you a free drink to that hopefully at the airport. So it's it. Don't they also give you a free drink or something or I don't know. Maybe they give you a $5 or $6 drink, you know, right?

So yeah, it's like they're tough to justify most of the time. So yeah, I mean, this is just nuts. And I think the craziest part for me, I mean, it's pretty crazy to decrease the earnings that much. And for your elite members, the top tier elites earn 100% bonus. So they went from earning 12 points per dollar on a want to get away fare to earning four points per dollar on a want to get away fare. And the two things that I think are completely nutty about this is number one, that makes a companion pass way harder to earn for somebody who was earning it by buying flights and earning their points that way, you know, through paid activity. Because the old fashioned way, a lot more during a companion pass.

Now, of course, people listening to this show probably mostly earn it from welcome bonuses on credit cards. And so it's not going to affect you. But but the customer that they design that incentive for is presumably the person who's paying for a lot of flights and they just move that carrot way out. But even worse, I think, is that they did this overnight right away. There was no warning period. So people who bought flights, like people who bought flights expecting to earn X number of points are now going to earn way less than what it showed them on the checkout page that they would earn. And that's, what a slap in the face that is to people who've been giving their money.

Oh, totally, totally. So shame on you, Southwest. I've put you into our list for a candidate for the Bonvoit Awards for 2025, which we'll announce at the end of this year, but you're, I think, our first major contender for this year. Certainly a front runner at this point, Southwest, for the place you don't want to be the front runner for.

So, all right, so that's Bonvoid. And now we've got some better news, some sunnier skies and awards points and more. First up, Alaska is apparently going to start rolling out the mixed partner awards. Now they kind of did sort of on some, but the pricing was all kind of wonky. So what's going on with this now? Yeah. So, you know, they had promised, I think they had originally promised it to start at the end of last year, but they didn't quite make that deadline.

But what we're starting to see are some flights to Europe where you can mix partners on a single Alaska award. And that's important because up until now, when you're using Alaska miles to book a partner, you could only have that one partner and maybe an Alaska flight itself. And that was particularly challenging for those of us not on the West Coast

where Alaska has a lot of flights, because if you need a short, let's say, American Airlines flight to your departure airport and then you fly a different airline, British Airways, Qatar or whatever from there, you would have had to book two separate awards with Alaska and that's not ideal and of course costs more to do it that way.

So anyway, so it's good news that they're starting to roll that out. We're starting to see the ability to combine American Airlines and British Airways on a single award to Europe. The pricing was a little bit off from what was expected, but Alaska tells us that that's not the intent. That was an error.

And the intent is for the pricing to be the same, whether you have a single partner or multiple partners on the award. The pricing will still be based on where you're coming and going to and the distance flowing. Nice, nice. Yeah, you know, I was running into this the other day where I wanted to book. Now actually, here's a question. Are we going to be able to book Do You Figure stopovers with these mixed partner awards? As far as I know, I mean that's one of the things that's going to make this super valuable

beyond what any other program can do for free. I know Air Canada can do something similar for 5,000 points per one way. Right. Yeah, and that's the situation I was in the other day where I was trying to book an option that would have worked really nicely with a stopover, but it was two different partners, and I couldn't get the tool to price it out, and I didn't figure I'd get a phone agent yet.

But hopefully soon, that'll be really nice, because that would have saved me a few miles per person, anyway. Right. Right. All right. Let's see. What else we have?

Aeroplan Family Point Sharing is back. It's back, baby. It's back. So, you know, the ability to combine your points with family members, that's awesome. You know, they, I think they had to pause the program for quite a while because they probably had a lot of points brokers using this as a way to basically sell points but buy and sell points but My assumption is what they've done under the scenes is is put in some safeguards to Make sure that people being added are actually family members or you know are likely to be family members You know some way of ensuring that and as long as they do that. I think that's great. I mean because What a great feature especially since they don't charge for it.

Yeah, yeah. The fact that it's free is awesome and it's so intuitive and easy. In fact, it's so intuitive and easy that I had forgotten that my wife and I had done this previously when they offered it for a while before. And then at some point when I had taken advantage of the built transfer bonus and transferred her built points to Aeroplan, I noticed my Aeroplan balance was way higher than I expected. And it took me a minute to realize that it was because Aeroplan, my Aeroplan, my Air Canada app was showing me the combined balance in our pool. And so, you know, and it was so super easy to use them that way. And then totally forgot about it again for a while. And then just the other day, I was booking an Aeroplan award. and I was thinking to

myself okay well I want to transfer points from Capital One but most of our points were in my wife's Capital One account so I wasted the time sitting there writing out how she could call Capital One and give her the phone number giving her her credit card number and my credit card number so she could move her Capital One miles to my Capital One account so I could transfer them to Aeroplan and after I wrote all that out but before I handed the note to her, I said, wait, what am I doing? I can just transfer them to her Aeroplan account, and they're going to be in my Aeroplan account. And I was like, she doesn't need any part of this.

I can handle all this myself. And so I crumpled that piece of paper up and threw it away and didn't tell her about it and just transferred it. I told her about it. She knew about the award booking, let's be clear. But not the whole process of calling to move the miles, because it wasn't necessary. It's awesome because they're pulled together. So it was great.

I can handle everything. Yeah, no, it's totally. And when you have families where, I think there have been times where I have not suggested to my wife that she sign up for an airline card because I didn't want to have to deal with points being separated between my program and hers and then having to remember all that. And now with this, there's no reason if the aeroplane card has a particularly good welcome bonus, there's no reason for her not to sign up because we could family pool and I'll have

easy access to it. So that would be great. Yeah, absolutely. Some exciting stuff there. So I would recommend getting that implemented and put together because I was really glad we had done it before. I don't anticipate it's going to go away again, but it's worth taking advantage of just in case, I guess.

So I would certainly sign up if you've got family members on that. All right, Hilton has added some more SLH properties. We love SLH, Small Luxury Hotels of the World, lots of really nice places. And they added some new ones that you can now book with Hilton Points or free more SLH properties. We love SLH, small luxury hotels of the world, lots of really nice places, and they added some new ones that you can now book with Hilton points or free night certificates. Yeah, yeah, and that's always good news. I mean, Hilton surprised us by adding way more

than we expected, way faster than we expected, and it's awesome that they're not done. They keep adding more and more. We're seeing so much value in that program. This almost made it to our, what crazy thing part of the show because Hilton puts out a webpage that lists their participating SLH properties, small luxury hotel properties.

And Stephen found something like 15 more that are not listed on that page. And so their map that you have to kind of scroll around to look at all the properties, their map shows them, but not this page. So you can't count on that page to be up to date. Unfortunately, Stephen has been helping them with some mistakes on that page.

So maybe they'll get it up to date with Stephen's help. One other thing I do want to mention about SLH is that I have noticed that Hilton has updated the messaging on the site whenever you're looking at an SLH property, it makes it very clear that the second guest is free in your room, but beyond that, it's up to the property as to what the fees are going to be, and it basically says you just need to contact the property to find out how much that's going to be if you're going to have more than two guests in a room. And so for me, obviously, it's an issue because we travel as a family of four usually, and there's just no way to know through Hilton how much that's going to be. And this came up the other day because somebody emailed about a

property in Fiji that's the property accommodates six, and they have apparently we're considering and bringing six people but the SLH booking through Hilton only covers two and they contact the property and there's an additional fee for each person after that was higher than what they found to be reasonable for most of their family. So anyway, it's just worth mentioning that if you've got three or four people you're traveling with, even if you're booking a room that accommodates three or four, each properties may add an additional fee and you're gonna wanna contact that specific property to inquire as to what that'll be.

Yeah, yeah. And I think especially in properties that have sort of all-inclusive type of situations, it makes a lot of sense that they're gonna charge for extra people because they're providing all the meals or activities or whatever it is they provide. And we see that quite a bit, I think. Some other ones will charge more because they need to put you in a bigger room because the basrooms aren't necessarily set up for more people.

And some others will charge you more because they can. They'll be that too. So, you know, you'll just have to check that out in advance. All right. That's Hilton and SLH. If you're interested in booking Hilton or an SLH property through Hilton, you know, you'll just have to check that out in advance. All right. That's Hilton and SLH. If you're interested in booking Hilton or an SLH property through Hilton, you might be tempted by a current transfer bonus. And there's quite a few different transfer bonuses out right now. So let's talk about several of them.

And I'll start with the MX to Hilton transfer bonus. Since I just mentioned it, there's a 25% transfer bonus from MX to Hilton that runs through March 14th. So that one's only on for a little bit longer, again about another week or so from the time this publishes. So a little bit less probably. So to the 14th, you can get that 25% bonus. Now keep in mind that a thousand membership rewards points

transfers to 2,000 Hilton points. So with a 25% bonus, Greg the Frequent Mylar, help me with the math here, is that 2,500 points? So thousand membership rewards points becomes 2,500. I believe that's right. Very good. So 1,000 to 2,500, which is not the most incredible deal ever because you can buy 2,500 Hilton points for $12.50

most of the time. Essentially, it's saving you 1.25 cents per point. But if you just don't want to put cash out of pocket to buy Hilton points or you need more than what you can buy, there's certainly opportunities where this could be a reasonable use. Yeah, it's not a bad deal. But also, I want to point out Amex, we often see 30% to 40% transfer bonuses to Hilton. So this is a little bit less good than others.

But if you need it right now, yeah, compared to buying the Hilton. So this is a little bit less good than others, but if you need it right now, yeah. Compared to buying the Hilton points, it's like getting 1.25 cents per membership rewards point in order to do that transfer. And then of course, if you use your points well to book something that would have cost way more than the points are worth, then it can be a really good deal.

Yep. All right. Very good. Next up, Citi to Qatar Airways Avios. And that one runs through the 15th of March. So March 15th, there's a 20% bonus transferring to Qatar Avios. Amex also has a 20% bonus from Amex to Qatar Avios,

though the Amex bonus lasts through the end of month, through March 31st. So difference in end date, but both of them are offering 20% and not to be outdone there, Chase also is offering a 20% transfer bonus to Avios through the 31st of the month. Now the difference here is that Citi and Amex I think are both to Qatar Avios and Chase, if I remember correctly, is to the other Avios programs. Right, to all the Avios programs that are direct transfer partners with Chase. Keep in mind that it's possible to move your Avios around from Qatar to British Airways, to Iberia, you know. So you can get the points, as long as you get the points into the Avios format, it's possible to move them to the program you actually want to book with if Qatar is not the one you ultimately want.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I think that's the strength of Avios and what might make this more interesting to some folks that you can combine forces too from different currencies by just taking advantage of the transfer bonus offered by a couple of different currencies and then putting your Avios together, which might not be obvious that you can combine your obvious, but we have a post about it. Another dad joke time. All right.

All right. That's it for awards points and more. Let's get into this week's main event. Main event time. The five best award search tools. I spent the last three weeks or so diving in to award search tools. Once again, I've done this in the past, but I refreshed or rewrote or created initially a whole bunch of individual posts about each of the award tools I looked at.

And I also heavily rewrote my post that compares all the award search tools. Now these are flight award search tools. I have separate posts about hotel award search tools. So we're talking about flights now. And so these are the tools that you can use to find those great awards that we talk about on the show all the time. They're not always easy to find. Yeah, so being able to do this is super helpful, and we're going to talk about some of the

parts and pieces and some of the different tools, because as I said at the beginning, I find these to be huge, huge time savers. And also they find things sometimes that I wouldn't have even thought to look for, so I find these really interesting and useful. I'm glad to see the development that's happened over time to improve these. Yeah, 100%. And this stuff changes so quickly that it wouldn't surprise me at all if, you know, a month from now, I would draw a different conclusion about which ones are best. But

as things stand, as we're recording this, what we're gonna talk about are what I think are the best. First, some background, because you need to understand that there's different ways these work. Most of these tools, if not all of them, have work in two different ways that I'm gonna describe. One way as live searches, and the other way as cache discovery. A live search is where you say,

I wanna fly from Detroit to Paris on this date, or maybe a range of dates. Tell me what flights are available to book and how many points it would cost across a whole bunch of different programs. That's a live search. And generally, with most of these tools, you put in that kind of criteria, you press go,

and maybe in around 20 seconds, you either start to get results or have all the results in about that amount of time. And what they do is they list, for example, there might be a Lufthansa flight where you can fly Detroit to Frankfurt to Paris, and they'll generally tell you which award program you could book it with. Lufthansa flight where you can fly Detroit to Frankfurt to Paris and it they'll generally tell you which award program you could book it with you

wouldn't necessarily book with Lufthansa miles you would book with United or Avianca life miles or Air Canada aeroplane for example. So and the good tools also show you how much the taxes and fees would be for those awards as well. That's live search, so key, but another thing is key too, cached discovery. What this is, is tools pre-search a whole lot of routes and cache the results. And they do this every few hours, every few days, whatever, they have different periodicities that they do different routes and everything. But the point is they have a big database of awards

that at least at some point in time were available and they make it easy to find them quickly. So a typical cache discovery tool would be like, I wanna fly from Detroit to Europe anytime over the summer, like in this like 60 or 90 day range, show me what's available and it's gonna just look at its cache results

and show you like nearly instantly. Here's what at least was available five hours ago, two days ago, you know, whatever the, however old the cache results are, it'll tell you that, usually it'll tell you. That may not sound as good as live search because you know, you need to,

you're often gonna get wrong results but it's also way better than live search because live search, you can't ask it. Like, hey, tell me, are there any flights to Europe during this really broad timeframe? Or, you know, so the cash discovery is so key to finding things that you might not have thought to look for that specific flight.

Yeah, and I think that that's where I tend to have the most success. It's oftentimes not looking for specifically what I thought I was seeking out. Or maybe in my case, I guess I do search from a broader perspective, like Greg's saying, where I'm most interested in just getting to Europe and it doesn't necessarily matter where. But that often means that I do end up finding awards that I, in fact, just the other day, I wrote about booking with Alaska and I booked a Condor flight from Frankfurt to JFK, so Frankfurt

to New York. And Condor wasn't anywhere on my mind when I decided that I was going to look for this trip. It wasn't something that remotely had entered my brain. And in fact, I so associate Alaska, when I'm thinking about Europe with British Airways, that it's almost an afterthought because the taxes and fees are higher than what I want to spend on the British Airways flights. So it's like the last program that I typically think to search for flights to and from Europe. And then here I found five seats on a nonstop flight on Condor that I wouldn't have considered and Condor looks nice.

Everybody that I've known that's flown it said it's been really good. And so it was just a great example of a time where a search tool showed me something that wasn't anywhere near my brain before. Which tool did you use? I used a Word tool. I used a Word tool.

Did you use their cache discovery or did you put in a whole bunch of destinations? I didn't. I put in a whole bunch of destinations. I mean, I put in a lot of destinations, though I put in more than most people probably do, and it probably would have been faster because I ended up doing that six or seven times

instead of just using the discovery tool. Well, you just never know, because the live search is gonna find things that might not have been cached. True, true. So they're both worth looking at for sure. All right, next thing I wanna explain is how important alerts are.

If you go to do an award search and say you've got your heart set on going to Australia somewhere in this time window, you know about flexibility, so how important flexibility is, so you're smart enough to look at flights to Melbourne and Sydney and wherever and you still don't find anything, that's not the time when you give up. You don't just say, oh, there are no awards available. I give up. I'm going to fly. I'm going to just pay for an economy flight. That's an 18 hour flight or whatever. No, what you do is you use a tool that lets you set alerts so that you'll be alerted when these awards open up because

when these awards open up because award availability changes all the time and if you just give up after you do your live search that's not going to get you the best flights at all. So yeah and I'll mention with that that I so I think a lot of people that especially people who are newer to the game, but still probably a lot of people that have been in it a while, think about searching for a round trip before they want to book anything. They need to have availability in both directions before they book anything. But these award alerts, I think, make it a lot easier to accept booking half of a trip. I mentioned in the post I wrote about Alaska Miles again the other day that I booked half a flight to Bora Bora, like a half a trip to Bora Bora.

I booked the return flight from Tahiti to the United States and I booked the hotels. I don't have a way to get to Tahiti and Bora Bora yet, but I set up alerts for a bunch of different routes and I'm confident that in the many months between now and then, I will hopefully, probably, find something else available. So I'm not going to wait until I find both directions. If I find one that fits my plans really well, as I did, I'm going to lock that in and book it, particularly since I was booking with a program that

offers free cancellation, and then set alerts for the other direction. It kind of frees up the brain to do that and say, OK, I don't even have to think about this on a day-to-day basis. I can let the tool do the heavy lifting and it'll let me know when it finds something. Yeah, totally. And I've used it many times that way as well. Like I've booked an outbound, you know, because I found it and I just set up alerts for the

return knowing something will come up and it usually does. And obviously we can't guarantee you that it's not gonna work 100% of the time, especially if you're like traveling over holidays that are very busy and to and from Hawaii, just forget about it. But for more general searches, in most situations, something decent should come up, especially if you have transferable points

so that you can transfer to whatever program has the best awards available. So, you know, I mentioned, for example, before flying Lufthansa, you might book with United or Air Canada or Avianca LifeMiles. The reason that those are all on the table for me is because of transferable points. I can move points to one of those programs as needed. The other thing I wanna point out before we give the awards is how important having a flexible live search is. And what I mean by flexible is, let's talk about what inflexible is.

Inflexible is where you can put in exactly one starting airport, one destination airport, and one day. Like, I wanna fly on this particular day. That's sort of how the tools that first appeared on the scene, that's all they could do. And the problem there is, as we know, success in finding awards involves being flexible, being willing to fly to multiple different airports, even from multiple different airports, and having a date range like, oh, I can travel anytime from, you know, this state of that

day. So just finding what's available during that range. So those are having the flexibility to have multiple dates and multiple airports in a single award search, I think is very, very important. Agreed, agreed. And that's super helpful. And for somebody who has some flexibility but maybe not as much as we're talking about with the discovery tool, you know, that it's just it's

incredibly valuable because I did this, Greg asked if I used the live tool when I found that award the other day and I did. I think I searched from eight different airports in Europe to two or three or something like that in the United States for like a couple of different dates. So I could play with which parts of it I wanted to be flexible. So having some flexibility like that, and we'll talk more about that when we discuss the awards probably,

it really does open up the ability to find more stuff. It sure does. All right, ready for the awards? Yes. Awards for the award tools. All right. So we're going to have multiple categories. And I'll start with the best overall.

I'm going to give that award to Points Yeah. So Points Yeah, it's a capable fee-free tool. It allows you to do live search across, if I remember right, a four-day date range. Only allows for the free version, only one origin airport and one destination. But still that's pretty good. I think if I remember right, it allows some alerts even at the free version. It also has what I consider the best cache discovery capability. And it's

not really because of its features. It has good features, but it's actually because of its results. So I did a couple different times, I did experiments where I just imagined, for example, a family, in this case, in the most recent case I did, imagine a family of four that live near, in Denver, and want to go to Europe during summer break. They don't, you know, just tell me, and they want to fly business class, you know, show me what's available. I tried, I tried this on all the tools

that do cash discovery. None of them came up with anything good, except Pointchia came up with a really good answer. And we were able to fly the whole family and business class to Paris at a very good rate. And somehow none of the others had that in their cashed systems to be found. So Pointia, you know, came through and that's huge. Pointia, now if you go to the pro version of it, it goes to an eight day date range for live searches and allows you to origin into destination airports at once.

So that's all very, very solid and it supports a lot of different loyalty programs as well that it searches across all of those. So all around it's just a solid tool. It also throws in a pretty capable Hotel Award Search capability as well. Nice. Yeah, the Hotel Award Search tools don't sleep on those because those can also be very helpful, especially for setting alerts. So we can talk more about that on a different day and talk about those tools. I used Points tool or a points a lot when it first

launched and I haven't been using it as much lately and really it's a matter of habit and I think that something important to point out here is what Greg said at the beginning that he completely rewrote his post about this stuff because so much has changed and so even if you've used one of these in the past it's worth checking it out again because a lot has probably changed since you last used it. Even if you only last used it six months or a year ago, I'm willing to bet that there's probably a fair amount that's changed in the time since. So it's worth checking this out again.

Okay. Now I have the runner up for the best overall tool, which is Award Tool. Now Award Tool feature wise beats the heck out of points yeah because it allows, it gives you what I'm calling 32, well the pro version, gives you what I'm calling 32 degrees of freedom and what I mean by that is you can choose whether to use those 32 degrees of freedom to do a huge date range. You could search like from Detroit to Paris across a 32 day date range and do a live search across a whole month at once and it comes back pretty quickly. Or you could choose to do a pick exact dates.

I have to fly to Europe on this exact date, but I'm gonna put in 32 different destination airports. I'm gonna pick every airport in Europe pretty much as my destination. Or you could do like a bunch of combinations where you multiply the numbers together, like four origin airports to four destination airports that's 16 degrees of freedom because four times four and so then you could do a two-day date range on top of that

and so the flexibility is just amazing and I use those features all the time but it's very very buggy and and even though it's a discovery tool appears to be more capable that is has more features than points. Yes I just haven't found good results when yeah. Yeah, you know, the buckiness is certainly an issue I in fact while we were talking here, I Took a look at particular route just out of curiosity and it came up with no results at all And I was like that can't be right. I like tried it a couple times and didn't work so then I added an airport code, didn't take anything away, just added an airport code and all of a sudden one of the airport codes that was already in there found the availability and so and and that doesn't happen to me all the time but

then I guess I don't know how often it happens because I don't always hit the button again. So that's the downside. I think you're absolutely right. But for me, the upside is enough that I still end up using this tool all the time. I didn't do the math well quickly before, but when I said I found that flight the other day, it was because I had two dates when I was like, okay, well, this is the tail end of the trip. I want to go home this day or it could be the next day. We could extend the trip by an extra day if need be. So I had two dates when I wanted to fly and two airports in the US that I was willing to fly into so I had the ability to have eight different origin airports in Europe which

was fine because we didn't know where we wanted to go exactly at the end of the trip so I could take a look for availability and then see what works around that availability so you put in eight different airport codes for and have those 16 sort of routes searching over two days. It is so powerful. Or then when I was looking for the Tahiti trip, I was like, okay, well, it could be anytime during this month because there's availability basically all month at the hotel that I want. So I could search 30 days on one route because there's only a couple of routes anyway, where you could get to Tahiti from the US. So I can just do a a couple separate searches for 30 days and see, you know, okay, which one has availability.

So yeah, I find the ability to customize that to be the feature that I use the most. So I really love that. Yeah, 100%. For live searches, that's so key. I should have mentioned before that cash discovery tools also allow alerts. So even with like points, yeah, you could do something like say,

I wanna set an alert for Europe to New York or Europe to United States if you want even more broad and just have it tell you, and you can set some criteria, like I'm looking for, for business class seats or whatever it is. And, and then you get an email when whenever it's, it's a cash discovery information adds a qualifying flights. And so that's, that's really, really powerful as well.

Very good. All right. So best overall was points. Yeah. And award tool is a runner up. But we said five best award search tools, so you've got some other awards to hand out. Yeah, OK, so best for beginners.

Point me. Now, this one, it's so weird that this is on the best of list because it doesn't offer alerts. I mean, I said before, like to me, that's like a minimum criteria for a good tool. It doesn't allow you to have multiple airports, you know, except for like where like New York city, if you put in New York city,

then it'll do like the New York city area airports, but a lot of tools will do that. It doesn't let you do a date range. It pretends to like it'll show that it's doing plus and minus one day, but in the search results, you're just seeing the one day you picked and you have to click a tab to see the day before and it reruns the search for the day before.

So it's not really, it's not searching three days at once. It's just making it easier to navigate back and forward one day. And it's really slow. It does come up with some results right away, but it takes like almost two minutes to finish its searches. So why would this be on the best-of list at all is because they have really thorough guides for beginners. So when you find an award and you don't know what to do, like, okay, it found an award that you could use your Air Canada aeroplan miles to fly to Europe in business class for

70,000 points. A lot of people don't even know how to begin. They might say, I don't have Air Canada aeroplan points and how do I book this? So it'll step you through, you know, here's how you could transfer your Amex or Chase or Capital One points to aeroplan and here's how then to, here are the steps to then book that award that that we showed you and I I just think that's so key because That is such a hurdle. I think for people that are starting out new it is it's it's it's a daunting process That I often find people are just intimidated by Even people that have booked plenty of awards through their main airline of choice in the US whether that's American or United or Delta

often I think it's really common for people to feel intimidated by the idea of a foreign partner of like creating an airline account and transferring the miles and booking and how does it work and what's different and what's the Same and so I think people find that really really intimidating and the walkthroughs that PointMe has are super helpful for that. And so for a beginner, I agree. I think that that is the tool to use because once you've done it once or maybe twice, I think that the intimidation factor like plummets. It goes from being really high to not really being a factor anymore pretty quickly. But you need that in the beginning. And if you don't have somebody in your family or social circle that knows how to do this stuff,

there's not an easy way to get that hand holding otherwise. I mean, you can pay somebody to do it for you, but that's not helping you. You're not learning how to catch a fish on your own that way. And this will help you learn how to catch that fish so that you can fish for yourself in the future. Yeah, yeah, totally. All right, next award, best for experts, seats.arrow. I just love this tool, but it's super geeky. I mean, this is like the opposite end of the spectrum from PointMe. You really, to get the most out of this tool, you need to know what you're doing.

And so for example, it handles cache discovery differently from all the other tools. My favorite feature is it has this explore capability where it lets you quickly explore its cached results. So Cetadero runs searches all the time behind the scenes, caches all the results, it's constantly refreshing them. And if you know which loyalty program you wanna search, you go to that one and you quickly get a table

of all the results and you could quickly filter it to what you want. And here's the thing, like let's say you're looking for a Qatar business class awards, it to what you want. And here's the thing, like, let's say you're looking for Qatar, you know, business class awards, you don't go to explore Qatar obvious, because that's not an option in its menu. Instead, the best one to search is is is Qantas. So Qantas is a partner and is Qantas. So Qantas is a partner and will have the best award availability for searching for Qatar flights.

And so it really takes the level of understanding of this stuff that's way beyond most beginners or even mid-level, I think, award bookers to really know how to get the most out of this tool. But once you do, it can't be, I just, I use this tool all the time for special purpose things, like what I just described, finding that specific, you know,

Qatar business class flight, finding a specific Japan Airlines first class flight, whatever it is. Yeah, yeah. It's a really cool tool to use. And if you have the pro version, you can look at 365 days of results at once. So you can look at a whole year across a bunch of different programs to find cash results. So if you just got points and flexibility and you want to take a look around and see what there is out there

It's definitely an awesome tool for that and I enjoy using it that way And being able to see what's available and then sometimes it's helpful too because there are a lot of programs with this You know married segment logic where the non-stop that you were looking for might not be available Maybe maybe that flight is available with another leg in it and tools like this can help you find that more easily. 100%. All right, final category, best add-on. I had trouble thinking like, what do I name this category? But basically the idea here is there's a tool that regardless of what you use as your primary award search tool, you should add this one on as well. And that's called Points Path. And what Points Path does is it's a browser extension that when you're doing a search on Google Flights

for regular paid flights, it automatically pops up the point price next to your paid flight results. And I can't tell you how many times I've gone to do searches for paid flights domestically and seen, oh my gosh, instead of paying like, let's say $600 for this American Airlines flight, I can pay 4,500 Alaska miles. And it's because of this tool showing me that. Yeah. You know, this tool to me is like, I remember back when smartphones were kind of first

becoming a thing. And I resisted it for a long time. I was like, I don't need a smartphone. I have a laptop. Check my email and surf the internet. I don't need a smartphone. I don't need access to all that in my hand. I got that covered.

I just need a phone that makes phone calls. All I want is my phone to make phone calls and maybe send text messages. And I resisted for a long time. I was like, I don't need that stuff. And then of course, now I can't imagine life without a smartphone in my pocket. It's like, it's so convenient. It's so helpful. It's so useful. I do all this stuff. Points path is that way to me. It is the smartphone that I was like, no, I don't need that. I don't need that. And then I installed it and I was like, and now I can't imagine life without it. It is so convenient to have it there to automatically show those things. Because a lot of times I won't even think to look at awards first, or I'll be a

little lazy and just look up cash prices and be like, Oh, well, these are cheap. There's probably some good awards available. I have to search around and look for that later. And then maybe I don't look later on. This is so nice to just be able to see it side by side. So, so yeah, even though I, you know, I, I don't search cash flights nearly as often as I search awards. So I use most of the other award search tools, I

guess, more intentionally, a search for awards. This is the one that I accidentally use most frequently, where I'll just be looking at something I was going to look at anyway, you know, for a trip that I have to take where I wanted to see what's available with cash. And I've been surprised numerous times. I said, oh, wow, there's a great award. And I wouldn't have even thought about using points here. But wow, for 4500 Alaska miles, yeah, I'm going to use points instead of paying for

this flight. Yeah, yeah, I'm gonna use points instead of paying for this flight. Yeah, yeah, totally. And you can get a good amount of functionality for free with the free version. And so you upgrade to the pro if you want ability to set alerts and see across, I think it's a seven day date range or something.

And some other, I have access to other, some foreign programs added in, not just domestic ones. Anyway, that's Points Path. I've got a few more. So that's a five. Those are the five winners. But there's a couple more tools that are definitely worth mentioning. They all have their place. First one is Point Hound. So Point Hound is a great alternative to beginners who don't want to pay for PointMe. So Point Hound, it's free and it's faster than PointMe. It has some more functionality than PointMe. It doesn't have as many loyalty programs covered, but still it has a pretty good number of them. And it has guides showing you how to book things.

From when I looked at it, I don't think they're anywhere near as like, well, flushed out like handholding as PointMe. And that's why PointHound didn't win that category, but I think it's definitely worth looking at if you're a beginner. Plus you can actually start using it without even signing up, which is really unique.

I love that feature of Point Hound that you don't have to create an account, you can just start doing searches and see if you like it before you commit anything by, you're not really committing much, but if you sign up, then you start getting emails and whatever with it. All right, that's not the only one worth mentioning though,

you got another one in the list too, right? Yeah, yeah. So, Rome, if I had to pick like a third best all around, it would be Rome. Rome, R-O-A-M-E dot travel is the URL. It's pretty solid all around. It just doesn't have quite as many features as pointsinsettia and Award Tool, so it didn't make it in the top two.

But it does have some things like, and these things change all the time, like which loyalty programs are supported by the different tools changes all the time. But as we're recording this, Rome supports Qatar Avias. So searching directly through Qatar's website, or program. And the other two contenders there don't. And that's so important because there's a lot of awards

that are available directly to Qatar's own members that aren't available to partner programs to fly Qatar. So if you really have your heart set on flying Qatar, Rome is probably right now is the way to go to look for those awards. Yeah, that's really good to know, especially with the 20% transfer bonus to Avios as we record this, so the time when this is going to release, then knowing that that would be your tool for finding some good opportunities through that program is important to know. So yeah, I think that goes to the point that even though we're picking bests for various categories, A, we couldn't just

pick one, we had to have various categories because there's different tools to like for different reasons. And even with the best for this and best for that, there's still caveats because there's still stuff that's going to vary from person to person. So it's worth checking out all the different tools. They're kind of fun to play with if you like searching for awards anyway. So it's worth kind of checking them all out, I think, and giving them all a test drive to see which one or ones

might make the most sense for you. Yeah, and it's worth mentioning all three of my picks for best overall have free versions that are not as powerful as the pro versions, but you could sign up for all three and you get a good amount of functionality with those three and then also add on the free version of points path, you know, and so on. So as Nick said, it's you totally can just play around with a bunch of them even before committing any money. Yeah, very good. All right, I think that wraps up our main event. Don't forget to check

out our posts, our accompanying posts, which award search tool is best. Greg has done a great analysis. And so you can get more detail. Or if you can't remember everything all at once, you want to go back and read more about this. That's where you'll want to check it out. There'll be a link in the show notes. Yep.

You'll also find some discounts if you are going to pay for any of the tools. So definitely check that out before you sign up for any tools, because you might as well save a few bucks. There you go. Good tip there. All right. That brings us to this week's question of the tools. So definitely check that out before you sign up for any tools because you might as well save a few bucks. Good tip there. All right, that brings us to this week's question of the week and this week's question of the week goes back to a recent main event and asks what to do with my Capital One miles. So Matt wrote in, instead of sitting on 100,000 Capital One miles since earning the initial Venturex welcome bonus in 2021, been sitting on these for four years now. So I was very eager to listen to the Frequent Miler

on the Air episode 293, Capital One, get more for your double miles. However, I finished the podcast still not knowing what to do with my miles. Of course, I always check to see if I can get better value transferring to partners than using the travel purchase eraser. But whenever that's the case,

I've always opted to use Amex membership rewards because they offer most of the same partnerships as Capital One Membership rewards points are more easily replaceable and Amex often features better and more frequent transfer bonuses Furthermore Turkish isn't as useful after their big devaluation last year and United is releasing fewer and fewer seats to partners While I would love redeeming Wyndham points for Vakasa stays I replace those with easy spend on my Wyndham earner business card or when they sell points for under a cent each. So do you think I should just start using my miles to erase non-flight hotel and travel purchases?

Would you recommend holding onto a minimum stash of Capital One miles and how many? Thanks, Matt. So what should Matt do with these Capital One miles? Yeah, I thought this was a great question and really insightful, you know, especially about what he wrote about American Express points being easier to replace, have most of the same partners

that you're gonna transfer to, and having more transfer bonuses, more frequent transfer bonuses is so true. Like, you know, when Capital One first started doing these transferable points, they would have like a new transfer bonus every month or so. We haven't seen that in a while. And so they do seem to be a lot less common than Amex. Yeah, and I have the same issue.

So, you know, my wife has the Venturex card, now my son has the Venture card. And so we have a bunch of points and questions how to use them. In my case, I am kind of just waiting around to see is there gonna be a transfer bonus that's exciting enough to take advantage of? Is there gonna be a baseball game where you

could use your capital one miles to good value? But in the meantime, yeah, I wouldn't feel bad using mine as purchase eraser and just getting the one cent per point, as long as I know. I've got so many like Amex points that for airline transfers, I have something else I can do, which is the case for me as well. You know, I've been tempted to use some as travel, you know, as purchase eraser for travel.

So I think there's nothing wrong with that, Matt. Personally, so what I found really interesting here is, of course, I agree, Matt's right. Amex membership rewards points are much more easily replaceable. There's so many more cards that earn membership rewards points. They have so many more opportunities for welcome bonuses, better spending category bonuses, authorized user bonuses, this bonus, that. There's lots of different ways to earn AmEx points, Rakuten, et cetera. So they are super convenient and useful. Now that out of the way, they each have some unique partnerships And so for me the key unique partnership on the capital one side is Turkish and the key unique partnerships

or unique out of the two anyway on the MX side or a and a which I don't often get a chance to use and Maybe Hilton with a good transfer bonus to use and maybe Hilton with a good transfer bonus. Otherwise there's a lot of overlap. And I actually like that because what I do is I'm more likely, like I mentioned earlier in the show that I used aeroplan points the other day to book flights. I'm more likely to transfer those from Capital One

because my only other really unique use out of Capital One for the most part would be Turkish. And I haven't found any uses for those lately either. So I'd rather keep the MX points so that when there is a good transfer bonus I have the MX points around or if that, you know, mythological A&A around the world trip ever happens, I'm in position to do that. So I actually prefer to keep my MX points flexible and transferable and I'll use the Capital One miles first.

So I'm kind of almost in an opposite boat in the sense that I'm using the Capital One miles because I'm going to save the MX points for those better uses. I don't expect as many on the Capital One side. Greg mentioned the baseball tickets and that's something that's certainly been on my radar written about it each to the last couple of years. I've gotten tickets to games the last couple of years. If you're not familiar with that, they release cardholder exclusive tickets to baseball games. They have four tickets to every game and they're usually great seats a few rows from the field.

There's only four though that are cardholder exclusive for each game. So they disappear within hours of when they launch and they don't let anybody know. Just a reader tends to find it and comment on our post and we republish it. then within a few hours all the desirable games are gone. So you have to be ready to really jump on that when it happens. But when it does, it can be pretty cool. And so, you know, I wouldn't mind having some around for that, but at five thousand a ticket and only four tickets per game, I don't need a hundred thousand points kicking around in Capital One for that. So I actually use them more often. The transfer partners I use most often between those two programs are Aeroplan and Avianca LifeMiles. They both share both of those transfer partners. So again, I'll transfer from Capital

One first and keep my MX points for brighter, sunnier days. I think that's a really good point. And I think you convinced me that I'm going to start doing that when it's a choice between which program do I transfer from, I might as well transfer from Capital One because I can think of it as, instead of getting one cent per point as a purchase eraser, I'm getting, I'm sort of keeping one membership rewards point per Capital One point by spending it that way.

So as long as I value the membership rewards points more than a penny each it's better than using it as well If you get the Schwab platinum card, then you could cash out membership awards points at one point one cent per point Which is better than the purchase racer anyway, so So and then use whatever card you want to make the purchase. So that's so yeah, that's my perspective Matt There you go transfer your points use use those capital one miles Matt use them All right That's the end of today. There you go. Transfer your points. Use those Capital One miles, Matt. Use them. All right. That's the end of today's show. If you've enjoyed today's episode

and you'd like to get more of this stuff in your email inbox each day or each week, you want to go to frequentmiler.com slash subscribe. Again, that's frequentmiler.com slash subscribe. You can join our email list. Follow us on all the various social media. Join our Frequent Miler Insiders Facebook group, where you can ask and answer questions all the time.

And if you have a question, like Matt's, that you'd like to be considered for a future question of the week or a piece of feedback for our giant mailbag, you can ask and answer questions all the time. And if you have a question, like Matt's, that you'd like to be considered for a future question of the week or a piece of feedback for our giant mailbag, you can send that too. Send it to mailbag at frequentmiler.com. Bye, everybody.