Frequent Miler on the Air - Tools we use to win the points & miles game | Frequent Miler on the Air Ep348 | 3-6-26

Episode Date: March 6, 2026

In this episode, we'll talk about the tools that can help you earn more rewards, organize your points & rewards, and spend your points wisely.Learn more about the tools we use here(01:52) - General / Misc Tools(25:57) - Flight Trip Planning(39:23) - Hotel Trip Planning(45:31) - Car Rentals(50:28) - TrainsSubscribe and FollowVisit https://frequentmiler.com/subscribe/ to get updated on in-depth points and miles content like this, and don’t forget to like and follow us on social media.Music Credit – “Ocean Deep” by Annie YoderMentioned in this episode:Check out all of our other travel podcasts from around the worldThis podcast is part of Voyascape, a podcast network that brings together the world's best travel podcasts. You can find all of our podcasts from around the world at Voyascape.com. If you are interested in advertising or sponsored content on any of our shows you can find out more at the link below.Voyascape Podcast NetworkVisit FrequentMiler.com Did you know that Frequent Miller is also a website? At frequentMiller.com, you'll find all the latest deals, news about points, miles, and rewarding credit cards, the single best, Best Credit Cards page on the web, guides to all popular rewards programs, and many other terrific resources. If you'd like to get our posts sent to your email, go to frequentMiller.com/subscribe and sign up for free. https://frequentmiler.com/subscribe/

This is a Voyescape podcast. You can find all of our travel podcasts from around the world at voyescape.com. On today's show, Nick and I are going to talk about the tools we actually use day to day to earn more rewards, to organize our points and rewards, and to spend our points wisely. Frequent Miller on the air starts now. Today's main event, tools we use to win the points and miles game. I like to think of points and miles as a game where the way you play is you do stuff to get points and miles, and then you do other stuff to redeem the points and miles for travel. And you win by collecting as many points as miles as you can for the lowest possible cost in terms of time and money,

and even more importantly, by redeeming that stuff for the best possible experiences you can get. And so to do that, to win at this game, it helps to know your toolbox, to have a toolbox of tools that can help you, both on the collecting side of things and on the redemption side of things and also miscellaneous other stuff that goes on around the edges. Yeah. And so wherever you're watching, you're listening, don't forget to like this video. Give us a thumbs up. Leave us a review. We always appreciate that.

We always love to see and read your comments. So we thank you very much for that. But now before we happen today's main event, we should mention that this one was pre-recorded. Yeah, I'm on vacation as you're listening to this. And so we didn't have a chance to record it in near real time. So as a result, what we did is we recorded this main event about tools as a standalone show today. So we have none of the usual mailbag question of the week or any of the other segments that we normally. do, we're going to just jump right into the main event.

So main event time. All right. Let's start with miscellaneous tools that we use to play the points in miles game. I'm going to kick it off with a plug for our own site. Frequentmyler.com is a, it's a blog, but it's also a website that has lots of useful resources. And in this show, we're not going to try to talk about all the tools. tools that are out there. We're talking about tools we actually return to time and again to do what we do. And even though we produce the content for Frequentmyler.com, we use it as consumers to figure

out what's the best credit card to sign up for. What's the best card to use for different purposes? Things like that. And those kind of resources are all over Frequentmyler.com. And we believe it to be the best of that sort of thing on the internet. And we behave that way. So when people ask us, what card should I sign up for under these conditions? I mean, we don't know the answer off top of our head. We go to our own site and check it out. And so hopefully you will too. Yeah, I do that all the time. I just opened a few new credit cards. And the first place I went was the best offers page to look at the best first year value out of the different things on the market. And then I decided I specifically wanted to also open a cash back.

card. And so I was looking through the best cards with cash back bonuses and whatnot. So a lot of stuff there that we use. And not just that, but also when I'm trying to figure out how something works within a particular program, I'll often go to our resource page and look at our guides. So it really is a great, great tool. Now, we do between the two of us, probably apply for open quite a number of credit cards. So the next tool that I know you use quite a bit, use more than I do, is travel freely. Yeah. Travel freely. It's a, it's a free tool. And, It's really designed to help you through the process of serially signing up for credit cards for the purpose of getting big welcome offers.

So what it does is it'll recommend cards. And when you apply for one, you just need to enter in what card you applied for and then it will, and when you applied. And then it will do things like remind you that, that, you know, you have to have spent a certain, you know, $3,000, $5,000, whatever it is by this given date. It'll send you email reminders about that. After, as it gets close to a year of you having the card, it'll send you reminders saying you might want to downgrade or cancel this card if you don't want to pay the next year's annual fee, that sort of thing. And what I really like about this tool, too, is that it's a few things. One, the travel freely owners follow the same rules that we do about credit card bonuses,

where on frequentmiler.com, we only show the offer that is best for the consumer, even if it doesn't pay us anything. Travel freely follows that same approach, which is fantastic. The other thing, another thing that I really like is they've done their best to try to code sign-up bonus rules into their system. So, for example, Marriac credit cards, if you already have a Marriott card issued by American Express or Chase or you've had one in the past, understanding which card you're eligible for is really difficult because they have very complex rules about that. travel freely has, has, you know, incorporated rules like that into their system. So when it recommends cards, it'll recommend cards that you should actually be eligible for,

given that it knows what you've signed up for in the last, you know, however many years you've been using it. So anyway, so that's a really cool free tool. Yeah, and that's one that I honestly, I didn't use in the beginning because I didn't think I needed it. And now I have so many cards that I wish I had set it up sooner. And so I'm constantly like, oh, I don't have all the old data now. I can't do it. And really actually, as you were talking about it, I thought to myself, I know when I just opened up a bunch of them recently at least.

So at the very least I can start there and try and keep better track moving forward. So I'm going to do that because it is a good tool. And now I need to get disciplined with that because it'll really help me organize things. As you get complicated in this game, it's hard to keep track of it. everything. It is. And so I do recommend when people are just starting, you know, that's a great time to get in the habit of using travel freely because, I mean, both you'll be in a position where its advice will be most meaningful to you, I think. Because once you get into the game more, you know, you're going to have your own ideas of what the best card is. You're not going to need their recommendations necessarily.

But that way, too, you'll have all the data all the time in there and that's that's really helpful. Yeah. Speaking of keeping track of everything, one of the tools that I use all the time for that is a ward wallet. A word wallet is a tool you can use to track your balances and all the various frequent flyer programs to keep track of how many miles and points you have when they're set to expire, which free night certificates you have, what the expiration dates are. And most programs, not all, but most programs, it can track automatically for you. So that's really helpful. I get reminders all the time when something is about to expire so that it doesn't go unused. And because I manage not only my own frequent flyer accounts, and I've got tons of them because I've, you know,

opened up all the various accounts over the years because I've had to transfer some miles for this or that. And sometimes, you know, an award gets canceled. And then I end up with a balance in an airline that I don't use all the time. And so I'm managing all of mine. I'm managing my wife's. I'm helping some other family members too. And so being able to do all of that centrally in one place for me is huge. That simplifies my life so much. And I, before I got in the habit of using it frequently, there were times I wrote about where I had some miles expire unused and I was kicking myself because if I had just put that into a ward wallet, then I would have gotten a notification before it expired and would have made sure not to let that happen. So that to me is invaluable.

Yeah. So just last week, I use it exactly as Nick described. And just last week, I got an email from Ward Wallet saying that my 10,000-mile choice benefit selection from Alaska's Atmos program was about to expire. And now that wouldn't be like the end of the world because at 10,000 miles, you don't get great choices. But I was able to pick, I don't remember something like 750, you know, points. And so I just jumped on and picked those points. And so that's like 750 points. I would not have if it wasn't for a Ward Wallet. Normally, you know, I'm mentioning that because it just happened. Normally, it's bigger things like, you know, this free 85K, Marriott Free Nighter Do gets going to expire in a couple months, so I make sure to find a good use for that. But still, you know,

every little bit matters and having a tool watch out for you for those things is absolutely huge. Well, and I should add on to that. I think if I remember correctly, correct me if I'm wrong, But a few years back, I say a few years, it was probably six or seven now at least. You had your Hilton account hacked. And wasn't a word wallet how you found that out? Because you got a balanced notification, I think, that it had dropped or something. That could be. Yeah, I don't remember the details with that, but that sounds right.

You know, it probably is that I was like, wait, where, you know, what's going on here with that huge decrease in points? So, yeah, that probably is the case. For that, too. All right. Next up on the list is Tripit. I don't know if you, do you use Tripit as much as I've been using it lately or I've used Yeah, I've used Trippett for many, many years and absolutely love it. There are several tools that do the same thing are a very similar thing.

But at its core, the way I use Tripit is I, every time I book a hotel, a flight, a tour, a activity, I forward the email confirmation to trip it, and it puts it all into a trip in order. So, for example, you know, I book a trip to Hawaii. So I send it the confirmations of the flights. I send it confirmations of, you know, maybe I'm staying on multiple islands during my trip and staying at a lot of different, you know, multiple different hotels. I send all that to trip, and it automatically puts it into one trip and lines it all up. And it makes it really easy for one to see if there's something missing.

Like, oh, I forgot to book a hotel for that night. Or if there's something wrong, like, oh, I accidentally booked this flight for the day before I'm going to be arriving. In fact, when a few years ago, Nick and I traveled to Dubai and then onward to the Maldives. And there was a point where he was sending me like all these confirmations and I put it all on Trippet. I think it was before Nick was using Trippet. And because it was intrepid, I noticed exactly that, that one of the flights was taking off before we would arrive. So it's luckily easy to fare. And, you know, I find it's just also a great way to have all the confirmation numbers at your fingertips.

One time, like, at a transfer desk at an airport, they were like, I need to see your onward flight information and just showing them Tripit was enough. You know, it's just super easy for so many reasons to do that. And great for families who organize stuff kind of together so that you can share all the stuff and you can each send different confirmations to the same place. Yeah, that aspect I love because some things I'll book under my wife's account, some under mine, but we've got all the email addresses in there so that I can forward from multiple email addresses and it knows it's all under our account and puts it all together in the trips.

So that's super convenient. also super convenient for me. For years, I had kind of a mind like a steel trap in the sense that I could just somehow mentally keep it organized as to where we were going and when and what time things arrived. And that's fading. So I'm not always remembering all the day. And my wife will ask me, when am we getting here or when is this flight or what is? And she'll ask me details that I'm like, I can't remember off the top of my hat.

I have to go to my email. I have to search for it. I have to look for an airport code. You know, it takes a while to find. With Trip, it's so much easier because it's just there. And you got the confirmation numbers and the times, like you said, when I had a flight where it was disrupted recently, it recognized that I should be eligible for an EU 261 claim. That's really handy. I used this years and years ago, and my wife and I were kind of backpacker style traveling so that family

would be able to track where we were and know where to find us in case of an emergency as we were traveling around. Then I got away from using it for a while, and I came back to it in the last year or two. and I'm glad that I have because it's helped make things much more organized. So that's been useful for me. You use another tool that kind of has some similar functionality, but some different stuff too called flighty, right? Yeah, I actually wouldn't say it has similar functionality, but they go together well.

So flighty can you can hook it up to your Tripit account to see which flights you have, and it'll monitor those flights in-depth. And it'll tell you everything you could possibly, want to know about your flight, including many details that you probably don't care about, like tail number was assigned. But it often comes in really handy to where, like, I'll know way before the airline will tell me that a flight is going to be delayed, for example. So it's monitoring not just your specific flight, but how that the plane that is scheduled to

fly you, where it monitors where it is. and whether it's arriving at your departing airport on time or not. And if it's not, it's going to let you know that, you know, oh, the incoming plane is delayed by an hour or whatever it is. So that is likely to affect your departure, things like that. And equipment swaps, it'll let you know. It'll even tell you what gate to go to and show you airport maps. So we had this. We were flying to London from Detroit to Chicago to London, and our flight to Chicago was very delayed.

And so it looked like we would only have 15 minutes once we landed to get to the gate for departure. And, you know, it was pretty helpful seeing a little map right in. I think actually Tripit does this too, but flighty had a really good one showing exactly where we were expected to pull into the airport, and luckily in that case, it was very close to our departure gate. Nice, nice. That's helpful. Yeah, so there you go.

And so flight E automatically integrates with Trippit so that you don't have to feed it the it, the itinerary information separately. You don't have to double up on that. Exactly. There's other ways to feed it the information, but I just do it just through Tripit. One thing it doesn't do or it doesn't do yet is no to remove a flight

when you remove it from Tripit. So I often have flighty telling me about flights that I had long ago, you know, canceled or changed. And then it's easy enough to delete it out of flighty. But it can give you a little shock when you realize your flight is departing 10 months early and you haven't even thought about going to the airport because you don't think you're actually flying. Right. Well, you know, but that's, you know, as funny as that is, that's one of the reasons.

why I've been using Tripit more and more is because I do book some things that are speculative. I don't know whether we'll take this trip or that trip. And again, that was all stuff that I just stored mentally for a long time and kind of kept track of mentally. And then I started to just realize it wasn't even necessarily the difficulty. It's not necessarily that I can't remember it. As much as it is, I'm feeling the mental burden of remembering it. Like, I feel my brain sifting through, okay, if I done this, have I done that, I've done the other thing. And so I'm trying to eliminate some of that. So Tripit helps with that because it'll let me know. Okay, I got this thing. I got to cancel if I just keep an eye on it. So very helpful for that. All right. Another helpful tool is savewise.

Save wise is kind of similar to cashback monitor in the sense that it monitors a whole bunch of different shopping portals so that if you're looking for a particular store, you can compare and see how many miles per dollar the various airline shopping portals are offering or how much cash back. the cashback platforms are offering. So it's a good tool for comparing cashback. And cashback monitor is a tool I still use that does that job very well also. The reason I've been using SaveWise more and more lately, though, is because it also keeps track of card-length offers.

And so when I'm looking to buy something and I just want to know, is there a card-linked offer for it, then I'm very frequently using SaveWise. Now, we also have a current MX. offers page on the Frequent Myler website. And I used to use that a lot looking for Amex offers. The reason I'm using SaveWise more and more now is because it also has the Chase offers and the city offers, city merchant offers. And I find that helpful because sometimes there's a place I'm shopping that doesn't have an Amex offer, but might have another offer.

And I don't want to have to go through all of my cards every time I want to buy something and see, is there a card linked offer for this? So it saves me a lot of time. I can narrow it down and say, oh, there is a Chase offer. So I guess I do have to go through the Chase cards looking for this one. Or, oh, there's a city merchant offer for this one. I just have to go through the city cards or whatever the case might be. So I'm using that quite a bit. Now, there's some additional functionality where you can track things and get alerts and whatnot.

I'm using it primarily as a shopping portal comparison and more importantly, as a card-linked offer comparison and database. Do you use it? It also will let you, it'll automatically add the offers to you. different accounts. I have not been using it that way. And maybe I'll change on that at some point. I've been a little conservative on that and wondering if that's not going to cause a problem at

some point. But it hasn't for a long time now and it's not the only tool that's offering that functionality, as we'll talk about in a second. So I was a little gun shy on that because I thought that maybe the card issuers wouldn't like that. but thus far it hasn't caused anybody a problem. So I might consider doing that. My main hesitation with that is that I won't see it when I log in.

I might notice the new offers because they're constantly added. So I won't discover offers, so to speak, except probably there's more value in making sure that they're added and I use them even accidentally than there is in the chance that I might discover a new one at some point. Right. All right. So speaking of automatically adding offers to your account. So, you know, American Express, Chase, like a lot of these programs have these offers that are linked to your card. And so, for example, you know, 10% back when you spend at least X amount at at this store or whatever. But you often, you have to log into your account and go and actually, add that offer to your account before it'll work. And so save wise and also the next tool,

we're going to talk about card pointers, have the ability to automatically add offers to your account. And all you have to do is you have to have the toolbar on your browser, and then you log in to your American Express account or your Chase account, whatever it is that we're talking about. And then it notices that you're logged into that and automatically adds all the offers that are available. That's great for, that works out great for me because I don't tend to, you know, take the time.

These offers come and go so often that I just rarely even bother looking at what's there. And yet because I'm using card pointers to automatically add the offers, I've actually probably five times in the past year, I'm kind of guessing, have just, received cash back for things that I had no idea that I had an offer for. And that's awesome. You know, and sometimes that's like 75 bucks or, you know, it's sometimes that's significant. So, you know, for me, having a tool like that, I think you'd probably need to pay for the pro version to make them do that.

It easily pays for itself from that kind of automatic use. The other thing these tools can do is with some programs like Amex where you're only supposed to have an offer link to one card, it can sometimes load that same offer to multiple cards and then you can use it multiple times. So that could be really great too when you need to use an offer more than once. Yeah. Yeah. And I think that that has lots of potential value. I that was really what made me hesitant on this that obviously amex went through the steps to make that difficult to do because it used to be easy to do and then it was kind of difficult to do and then it became

basically impossible to do and so there's a little concern that they didn't want that behavior and so they may decide they don't like it sometime but you know like i said so far so good so one of these days maybe i will start using that all right next up google gemini now whereas most of the things we talked about so far, I've been kind of more administrative, keeping track of everything, staying organized. Google Gemini is one that I've been using more and more lately. It's Google's AI tool, so similar to chat GPT or Claude or all the other AI tools. So really lump in your favorite AI tool, whatever it might be. I've been using Gemini because I got a free year because of my Google one subscription or whatever. So that's why I'm using that particular tool, not because it's better

than others at what it does. But I've been using it more and more for trip planning, asking about areas to go, and particularly about family travel stuff, things that are more kid friendly. And so I've used it quite a bit for stuff like that. I've also used it for asking for tips like I'll talk a little bit more about trains in a little while, but I asked it about the best trains to take in different scenarios in Europe and European trips. And so it's able to give a pretty detailed breakdown. And then I follow up with additional questions. And so it's, I found it particularly helpful in figuring out where I want to go or what types of things I want to do and then being able to get basic simple answers. Like to give you a, for instance, this summer, we're hoping to do some kinder hotels and

maybe not that specific brand, but that kind of idea. So Austria and Switzerland have a bunch of these kind of family-oriented hotels with a lot of stuff for the kids. And both of those countries, Austria and Switzerland, have a number of these alpine coasters that you can do in the mountains and stuff that look like a lot of fun. But some of those places are geared towards certain age levels and not others. And so I've been using Gemini to ask about the ages where you're allowed to do A or B or C and stuff like that. And that has helped me narrow my search down because sometimes when you start with a really broad search, it can be hard to figure out, well, there's a choice, privileges, you know, preferred hotel over here and there's this over there and I don't know which

area to go to. And so I found it particularly helpful for narrowing things down in situations like that. I don't tend to lean on this. And we talked about this on a recent episode and a question of the week. I don't tend to lean on this for like finding me points in miles sweet spots or summarizing points and miles related information. It's more of the travel stuff that I'll ask for good advice with. Yeah. No, that makes sense. That makes a ton of sense. You know, I don't do this, but not because not for any good reason other than it just doesn't occur to me to.

And I really probably ought to try that out more often. My son had a lot of good success with using ChatGPT to plan his trip around Japan with a friend. And that worked out really well for him, even with like finding what train to get on, you know, to get to his next destination. nation, everything like that. So yeah, it definitely could be a fantastic trip planning tool. I think so. And I like to be able to follow up with questions to like narrow things down a little bit more, whereas I can Google basic details like the age types of things that I was talking

about a second ago. But I can give it some more information about our tastes and wants and it can help narrow things a little bit. So that can be helpful, I think. But all right, we'll be back after this message with even more tools. We hope you're enjoying the Frequent Miler on the air podcast. Did you know that Frequent Miler is also a website? At Frequentmyler.com, you'll find all the latest deals, news about points, miles, and rewarding credit cards,

the single best best credit cards page on the web guides to all popular rewards programs and many other terrific resources. If you'd like to get our posts sent to your email, go to Frequentmiler.com forward slash subscribe and sign up for free. And we're back. We're now going to cover specifically flight trip planning, so where we're looking for, you know, how to find the best flight for what we need. And I'm going to start this off with a tool that I use quite a bit to figure out which flights are available to and from different airports that I want to get to. And that's called flight connections.

It's just a super easy to use visual tool that just shows a map. And you put in, you could put in, for example, a destination airport and it'll show you all the flights that go to that airport. You could filter it to specific airlines or particular airline alliances. You could even filter it to class of service, like if you only want to fly business class, things like that. And it's, so it's not really, it's never the tool that I use to like, you know, figure out exactly which flight I'm going to get, but it gives me a really good idea of what flights are potentially available so that then I know where to begin looking.

For example, like, maybe I'm going to the Caribbean and maybe it wouldn't even even occurred to me that JetBlue would be a good option, but I see that JetBlue is one of the airlines that fly there. And so I'm going to be looking towards JetBlue as one of the, options when I'm going to be figuring things out. Yeah, I find it especially useful as somebody who's not located next to a major airport and I'm kind of equally distant from the New York City airports or Boston. And I've even gone to Philadelphia once or twice before. That's a little extra far. But at any rate, I've got a number of different options. I normally fly out of Albany if I'm

flying domestically. But for instance, I got a trip coming up to the West Coast in a couple of months. And I wasn't sure can I get to the specific airport I want nonstop from anywhere in the east? Because if I get there nonstop from Boston, maybe we would drive to Boston for that rather than having to connect. And so there's a lot of routes that I just wouldn't know where to start looking if I don't, I just don't know the routes. So I find it really helpful for that type of situation where it's an airport. I don't know very well. I just want to know who goes there and where do they go there from, more importantly. Yeah. Yeah. Recently, I was looking at, um, how to get back from Australia.

We're going to be in Perth at the end of our trip. And one of the routes is to fly through Japan, you know, through Tokyo and back to the U.S. But the best flights from Tokyo to where I want to end up are through Haneda Airport. Yet, you know, connections or flight connection showed me, well, wait a minute, the direct flights from Perth to Tokyo go to NRT to Nerita. airport. And so that connecting between the two is like forget it. I mean, that's a long train ride. So, you know, that tells me, all right, look, look elsewhere. That's just one of many examples where I turn to flight connections. Yeah, very useful tool. I use it all the time more and more. Anyway, speaking of flight connections, though, then obviously the next step after you found the airports that

are going to work for your situation is to find flights and compare against cash prices. Because if you're going to use points, then you want to know, well, am I getting a good deal? And the way you know whether you're getting a good deal or not is by comparing against cash prices. And I use Google flights. And I know you do too, just flights.com. It's probably the site I visit the most often, which is a little ironic. I laugh at myself a little bit over that because I don't book that many paid tickets. But I do want to know, okay, well, how is this a good value? Should I be paying cash instead? And also, it helps me know, what is. for sale that day. Whereas flight connections might let me know which routes exist. That doesn't

necessarily mean that they're available for sale at the time when I want to travel. So it might be only certain days a week or certain seasons. So I use Google flights all the time to look at schedules. Same for me. I mean, there's not a single trip I take by air where I haven't opened up Google flights to see what the options are, what the prices are, what, you know, nonstop versus multi-stop routes are available. And even like some little details you wouldn't think of, let's say you're looking to fly business class. And you want to know, is this like a true live flat business class?

Is this even better? Maybe one of those, what they call a suite where there's like a door that closes. When you pick a flight and when you're searching business class in Google flights and you click on a flight, it'll actually tell you that this is a recliner seat, which that's what you don't want if it's a really long flight, or it's a live flat seat, or it's a suite, you know, that kind of thing is all listed there. So there's endless amounts of good information. The ability to use it to find cheap flights is tremendous.

You can do things like you could use Google Explorer by just saying, I want to fly, for example, I want to fly from Detroit to Europe. and I'm open to going just about anywhere in Europe, you could actually put that Europe as your destination, and it'll show you all the options, and you can find great deals that way. So so much to like and love about Google flights. Yeah, and because both of us use Google flights so much,

a tool that we always use, without even trying, is Points Path. So Points Path just plugs in. It's an extension, plugs into your browser, and looks for award flights on those flights you're seeing at Google flights and gives you the award pricing information among a number of programs. Now, if you use the free version, I think it's just the major U.S. airline programs that it shows. If you have the pro version, then there's a bunch more airlines that it supports

airline programs, I should say, that it supports. So you can see award pricing right there, side by side with the cash prices. Yeah, it's so valuable for that. I can't even begin to say how great. how much I love that feature of it. There's also some other features I really like that Points Path has. If you have the pro version, you can look at award availability for a week at a time. There's a way to see like a calendar, and then you can actually move the week over, I think, to see multiple weeks.

What I use even more than that is I watch fares. I watch point fares. So, you know, maybe there's no award for a given flight that I really want. and points path will let me like watch it and it'll alert me if it becomes available with points. Or maybe it is available with points, but it's just way more points than I want to spend. I could watch it for that reason. Or another, maybe, you know, like some programs like Delta, the word pricing is variable. It changes all the time.

So maybe I did book it, but I just want to be alerted when the point price goes down so that I can rebook it at the lower. price and get some miles back. For all those reasons, I use that feature a lot. Yeah. Yeah. It's super valuable for that. And you mentioned that and that actually brings me back to Google flights for a second because I hadn't been on my mind. But you mentioned recently because I can't remember how this came up, but you mentioned using Google flights to track prices on flights, cash prices on flights. Yeah. And that's something I hadn't really been doing. Because like I said, I don't book lots of cash tickets every year, but lately I've booked quite a few because I've got a bunch of United Travel Bank credit to use, a bunch of Southwest credits to use, and a few trips

this year planned like, you know, for work-related stuff. And so I've started tracking flights and even right now I'm not at home as we record this. And I saved a bunch of money on flights home this weekend because I was able to change when Google flights alerted me. I tracked the flights that we've already booked, and I've been able to rebook a few times already because Google's let me know when the prices have dropped. So I find that tracking feature to be more valuable than I had given it credit for before because now it's just automatically doing that. Several times now, I've just automatically saved money that I wouldn't have because I probably wouldn't have checked and noticed that the price had dropped. Yeah. And just anecdotally, this has happened to me a

couple times where I track, I use both Google to track the cash price and points path right next to it to track the points price. And sometimes those change together, where the points price is tied to the cash price in some way. And so in two cases recently, I've gotten the alert from Points Path before getting it from Google about the price change. So just kind of interesting. My guess is that points PoncePath does checks more frequently than Google does for you. Yeah, nice. That's awesome. That's great.

All right. So then we use PointsPath quite a bit, but of course it doesn't support all of the programs that we want to use or have quite all of the functionality that we're going to talk about here in a second because we both frequently use, I think, a word tool to search for award flights. That's the tool I use most. PointsPath does a lot of very similar stuff. So that's another good tool.

I just am in the habit for whatever reason. I don't know if it's just I like the interface or really what I like is the ability to search with so many parameters, like the 32-way search that you can do with the pro version there because I can put in so many airports and a set of multiple dates or just a couple of airports and like 30 days. And because we often have a fair amount of flexibility, I'm looking at any flight over the course of a week or two between several different airports. and so I find it really useful to be able to search in multiple different ways and decide how I want to use that multi-way search. So I use that to search for award flights all the time and to set award alerts so that I can snag an award when it comes in. And that has been really helpful a number of times in snagging a hard-defined award that I used to search obsessively for. And now I don't obsess over because I know that there's a tool automatically searching for it in the background.

So that takes some of that mental load off that I was talking about before. I don't actually think about it so hard anymore. So I use a word tool all the time. Yeah, same for me. So it's more about the ease of use of being able to search multiple things at once and setting set up an alert that tracks multiple things at once. Even though it uses up like behind the scenes, it's basically creating lots of individual alerts. You don't need to know that when you're saying.

setting it up. So I could say, you know, I'm going to fly from, I want to fly to Europe, but I want to fly from Detroit or from Chicago or from New York or Washington, D.C., you know, any of the places I can get to easily. And I want to get to Paris or Amsterdam. Like, I could put in a, I could put in several destinations. And then I could say, you know, let's say I don't find anything good in a live search, I could just click a button to make it a alert and it'll alert me when I put in like only show me when it's when the price is less than 100,000 points or something like that, whatever I choose. Yeah.

And a couple of key pieces to put along with that, a Word tool doesn't search every program on Earth. So there are some other programs that aren't covered there. But what's useful for me is that it covers so many programs that I have a pretty good idea if I see a particular flight that it might also be available via a program that's not in there. And so then it gives me the sort of the motivation to go, oh, okay, I should check British Airways and see if this is available there or Cathay Pacific and see if it's available there. So it's useful in recognizing the awards that are available to partners so that I know to search

another partner to. Delta flights, I'm frequently seeing this, Delta flights that are available via Virgin Atlantic maybe, but aren't showing up for some reason via Air France. And I can find them on the Air France. website also or SaaS sometimes too. So it's useful for all of that, I think, in discovering the awards that might be available, even recognizing those situations where it's not one of those programs that's covered. Also, sometimes people will write in and say, I'm looking to go to Athens in the summertime and I can't find any awards. And so I'll take a look every now and then and be like,

okay, well, if you're willing to position to this airport, you can get this flight and that one, another flight to a different place because I can search multiple things with just one click. And so it helps me broaden my perspective and say, okay, maybe I want to go to Athens, but maybe I can fly into Rome and then get a cheap cash ticket to Athens from there and go see the Coliseum for a day or something. So I find it helpful for broadening my searches. Yeah. Yeah, totally.

And there's a lot more functionality and award tool, but we're just talking about the stuff that we use most often. Yep. Yep. All right. Hotel trip planning. You use way more tools for this than I do. So tell me, how do you plan hotels for your trips?

Yeah. Well, you know, I make heavy use of Google hotels in the beginning of my work just to see, like, what hotels are highly rated in the place I'm going to. It has the, you know, Google reviews right in there and that sort of thing. And also get an idea of the cash prices for when I want to go. Gondola is the tool I use to do broad. searches for both cash rates and point prices. So it searches across a number of hotel programs and we'll show you the point prices.

And I'll let you do things like sort results by the best point value. And by that, I mean, like, it actually has some understanding of what points are worth relative to each other. So a Hilton might cost a hundred. hundred thousand points, but that might actually be much better value than a Hyatt that cost 60,000 points because Hilton points are worth so much less. And so the tool understands that and we'll sort it accordingly when you're sorting by point value, whereas most tools won't, you know, we'll just sort by number of points required. And so in that case, Hyatt will always

look better than Hilton, regardless of whether it's actually better. Then, And let's see. Yeah, so that's gondola. Rooms.ero, that's a add-on to seats. So seats. dot arrow is an award search tool, which it's a flight award search tool. Seats. dot arrow is.

And I realize we didn't mention that before because we're talking about the tools that we go to over and over and over again. And seats. dot arrow is not one. It has certain really great uses, but it's just not one. that I tend to turn to regularly for flight planning. But its sister site, Rooms. Arrow, is one I turn to, because if you want to stay at a particular points hotel,

I don't, it's super, super easy to use it to find points availability or to set an alert to let you know when the points availability shows up. So, for example, I recently book the Hyatt Regency Coconut Point in Florida for me and three other family members. So we had four rooms there. I had to do it in steps because that hotel in the wintertime is really hard to get. Like they charge like over $1,200 a night in high season, which is insane. But it's a reasonable number of points. And you have to wait for a standard room to open up. And so a great way to do that is to set alerts on with a tool like that.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, that's, I think that's an awesome capability of some tools. Now, I haven't been using rimstad arrow for that. I've been using Max My Point for that. And so Max, my point does basically the same kind of idea where you can, you can set alerts for award availability. You can also, I like this. I don't know if Rooms.

Arrow does this, actually. I haven't looked. So tell me if it does. But I like that you can set alerts. for instance, for the ability to use a Hyatt Suite Upgrade Award. I don't know if Rooms. Arrow offers that, but Max, my point does. So I've set alerts for, man.

Yeah, I've set alerts for, let me know when a room is available for a Sweet Upgrade Award. And that's been useful, as well as, of course, like Greg explained, when I need multiple rooms, I'll book one that's available and then set an alert, book the next one, and then the next one. So I've been very happy with Max, my point for that. And I've been using Max FHR, which is basically, the sister tool, sort of like you explained, Rooms. Dot Arrow is a sister tool

to seats. Arrow. MaxFHR goes along with Max, my point. Max FHR, though, instead of looking for award availability, helps you search for good uses of fine hotels and resorts, maybe not even good uses. It helps you search for which properties

are in fine hotels and resorts without having to log into Amex and without having to know where to search necessarily. You could look at all of the properties around the world and sort them by price. Or, you could search for a particular area, country, or a city. And so I've found that really useful because we have so many FHR credits to use. That's really helped me narrow down.

Is there any FHR or hotel collection property where we're going that'll fit our needs? And because we've got so many of them, I have spent quite a bit of time in recent months anyway looking for those opportunities. So Max FHR has been a tool. I keep going back to for that. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Yeah, you know, I think rooms.0 versus max my point, I think there are pluses and minuses to each one of them. And it's hard to really say that one of them is necessarily better than the other.

One thing that I believe rooms.org does better, but I haven't used max my point for a while, is that a number of hotels will only release rooms with a minimum number of days that you stay. and so if you go to one of those highly sought after hotels, and if you're looking like night by night, you're not going to find any availability, but when you go to a particular hotel in Rooms. Arrow, it'll actually show you right up front like how many awards are available for one night,

how many are available for two nights, how many available for three nights, it looked kind of like that. And so you can see at a glance, oh, there's a ton available for three nights, but none available for one or two nights, that means they have a minimum length of stay. And then you can more easily find those nights that are available.

Very good. Yeah, great tool for that too. All right. Now, next up, we got car rentals. What do you use for your car rentals? I use auto slash. It lets you do two different things. One is you can put in, you know, the dates and location where you want to rent a car,

and I'll send you an email of, like, the best prices it found. the other thing you can do is if you've booked a refundable rate with a car rental company, you can put it into auto slash and they will email you if they find a better price, and then you can rebook at that better price. And so I honestly use it a good amount, not all the time. And I'm not always renting cars either. So it's more of, you know, maybe a few times a year. I turned out of slash. Yeah, so we almost always rent a car by contrast. So we're kind of on the

opposite end of that. So I use it all the time for researching. I'm not always booking through it because Capital One shopping has had so many good rental car offers. I mean, just yesterday, I booked a whole bunch of rental cars because I had 45% back at 6th. I had 36% back at Hertz. I had 30% back at dollar. And so I have had to book direct in a lot of those cases because the, the, amount back, the potential amount back has been so high. But I almost always search via auto slash first to see who's got the best price to know. And then I will frequently track also through auto slash to make sure that I keep the best deal that if a better deal comes along that I can jump on that. Now, a number of readers have mentioned anecdotally, I've seen this in our Facebook group

quite a bit, that they've found even better pricing than what they've seen via auto slash in two places. one some people say Costco travel even though auto slash searches for Costco discounts I frequently see people say that they get a better deal through Costco travel sometimes personally I haven't found that to be the case when I go to Costco travel I can't I just I'm not running into that situation where they've got a better price than whatever I've already found via auto slash maybe it has to do with where you're going or when so it might be worth of your Costco member checking Costco travel and making sure that it doesn't have a better deal available because enough people have mentioned it over time that it must be the case in some situations.

I mean, the flip side there is I have had auto slash tell me the Costco rates that were better. You know, like, so it does raise Costco rates. But yeah, I understand that you're saying that people claim that it's not necessarily finding those best rates all the time. Well, or that even that is the rate that they see through Costco travel is better. And so I don't, I don't know that. Again, I haven't had that experience, but I've seen it from enough people that I feel like must be some truth to it. The other thing that people have pointed out and that now that I've done some searches, I've anecdotally found to be true, is that Capital One Travel has surprisingly good

car rental prices. And so there's been a number of situations lately where I have found better pricing via Capital One Travel. And often Sixth in particular, has had very good pricing through Capital One Travel. I don't know why, because I never in the past found Sixth to be my best option. But now I've got a couple of sixth car rentals. So anyway, it's worth checking. And that's, I bring that up specifically because I rarely ever think about looking at the credit card portals because they just so rarely in the past have ever even been close to competitively priced. But I kept seeing people say it. So I started doing some searches. And I said, well, well, it has actually beaten what I've seen elsewhere a few times lately. So it might be worth checking if you got a capital one card. Yeah. Yeah. And this is sort of

worth saying overall, almost all the things we talked about, especially where we use tools to find good prices or point prices, there's often alternatives that those tools can't capture, like what you could get through a portal in the example that Nick just gave or when you're looking for flights. There are definitely times where maybe you have the ability to get, you could transfer your points to Cathay Pacific, and Cathay Pacific itself might have better pricing than you could get it elsewhere, and the tools don't necessarily know that because they don't have the ability to log in a Cathay Pacific to run their award searches. And that kind of thing happens a lot.

United is very common with that, especially if a united credit card. The tools aren't necessarily going to show you what price you're going to get as a United cardholder. So no matter how many tools you use, you might still have to do the legwork and go to different places to try to find a good deal if you can't find it through. If you can't find a deal that you're happy with through those tools. Yep, very good. Last one at least, I wanted to give a quick mention and trains to the website Manon seat 61, because if you're going to travel particularly in Europe and you want to travel by train anywhere, that is the resource that I use. use and I don't always plan train trips when I go to Europe, but when I do, I almost always end up on Manon seat 61. Just recently, I was looking for information about trains between Zurich and Innsbruck,

and there's one particular train each day that has a panoramic car, first class car, and it so told me which time, you know, which, which one it is that I want to book and which car number I want to get in in order to have that. And so it's really useful for that type of thing. And then also, sometimes comparing, does it matter, should I get first class or very, very frequently I find Manon C-61 saying it doesn't really make much of a difference. You don't necessarily need first class on this particular train. It's about the same as second class. And so there's a lot of times where maybe the price was close enough where I would have been like, I guess let's try first class, where he's probably saved me a bunch of money over time. I'm sure. It's not even worth it in

this particular route. So I find that to be a very useful resource. All right. I think that brings us to the end of today's episode. If you've enjoyed what we've talked about, don't forget to go to frequentmiler.com slash subscribe to 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 just like the questions that we were talking about a few minutes ago. And if you have a question that you'd like to be considered for a question of the week or something that you'd like to be considered for the giant mailbag. You can send that to send it to mailbag at frequentmiler.com. Bye everybody. If you love travel but don't always have time to plan, we've got a podcast for you.

It's called Travel in 10. And in every episode, in about 10 minutes, we give you a smart, practical overview of destinations all around the world. We cover what to see, where to stay, where to eat, what actually matters when you're planning out a trip. It's designed for real life. Listen on the way to the airport, in the car, or while you're thinking about your next getaway. So if you want expert advice, zero fluff, and travel in a travel and travel in a truck. that you can actually use, search for travel in 10 wherever you listen to podcasts, or you can also find us at voyescape.com.

Hi, I'm Mike Siegel, host to the Travel Tales podcast, and I'm a stand-up comedian who's been touring the world for years, and when I'm not traveling for work, I'm traveling for fun. And when I'm not traveling at all, I'm talking with friends, influencers, expats, and other people from all walks of life about the thing I'm most passionate about, travel. So if you want to hear a fun conversation about travel and maybe even learn a few things along the way, Check out the Travel Tales Podcast with Mike Siegel, wherever you get your podcasts.