✈️ Award Travel Made Easy: The Tools & Strategies I Swear By

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Good morning ☀️ from Booked It On Points: A curated collection of travel tips and personal stories by me, Allie→ because you’re meant to experience meaningful travel no matter life’s constraints 👊🏽

🐪 Hello from Morocco! This week we took a quick flight and landed in what feels like an entirely different world. And that’s exactly what we were going for 🙌

Let’s dive in.

Here’s what’s on today—

📉 Virgin Air for the win on this trip to Europe! 30k points in BUSINESS CLASS? How you ask? Well this deal is originally 45k points (also a great option) HOWEVER, there is currently a 30% transfer deal going on with Chase and Virgin meaning if you have any points from cards from this family or their business card relatives you can get this flight for just 30K points. 

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✈︎ Points + Miles

TOP STORY: Exactly How I Find Damn Good Deals

While I’ve been known to spend my fair share of time searching award flights, I do have solid go-to tools I use each and every time. Booking flights and hotels on points doesn’t have to be a guessing game.

Today, I’m sharing my favorite tools and exactly how I go about searching and booking award flights each time.

✈️ Best Tools for Flights on Points:

There are a lot of options out there to search reward flights. Here are the top 3 I use every time I search for flights:

1. Seats.aero (Free and paid) I use an upgraded paid version because it allows me to search a year out in advance. This is a large sweep of tons of flights to start to narrow down my options.

• I love being able to search things like “East Coast to Asia” or “West Coast to Europe.” This is how I can see where are the options with the best destinations and then create an itinerary from there.

 
2. PointsYeah.com (Free) – A quick way to check award space after my first sweep with other tools. Here I double check what I found on seats.aero.

• I also love that it can search between 1-3days- you never know when you’ll see a flight for half the cost just by leaving 24 hours earlier.

• You can filter your search depending on which bank points you have as well so you’re not wasting time looking at flights that won’t accept your specific points.

🏨 Best Tools for Hotels on Points:

1. Rooms.Aero – While not quite as intuitive as it’s sister site for flights (seats.aero), it still provides a decent scan of multiple hotel loyalty programs to show you where award nights are available.

2. MaxMyPoints.com – This is my go-to when looking at hotel options. While the user interface isn’t optimal, it gets the job done- and it’s free!

3. Daily Drop Pro – I love that this lets you search both hotels and flights in points OR cash, making it easy to compare value to see if you’re getting a good deal.

💳 Best Tool for Managing Credit Cards:

1. TravelFreely – Easily the best option for being organized with however many travel credit cards you are juggling! This is my go-to (and FREE) app. 

I use TravelFreely to track my credit cards, annual fees, 5/24 status and when to apply for my next card.

What I love most is the Card Genie feature which recommends what card I should consider getting next based on my portfolio.

Seriously, each time I get a new card, I immediately plug it into my TravelFreely app (it’s not connected to my bank account) and it keeps me so well organized saving me time and money.

🧳 So, what’s my process?

If I know where I am heading then I’ll start with a pointsyeah.com search and filter using the points I have available to me and several airports I could have access too. From there, I’ll double check on specific airline websites and their partner airlines to see where I find the very best deal.

• Partner airlines? Just use Google to find out. For example, I can search on Delta.com for a flight, but I know Virgin Air is a partner and therefore will also search Virginair.com because they often have the SAME DELTA FLIGHT FOR LESS.

If I’m open to go ANYWHERE, I’ll start a broad search on Google Flights leaving the destination set to “anywhere” and take a preliminary look at options. I’ll then move over to seats.aero and run another broad search as I explained above by searching full continents.

Lastly, I search to see if there are any transfer bonus’ going on- like this one happening now! Pointsyeah.com will often show these in the results as well.

And just to bring it home- by doing all these steps, you could find a flight to London, England for a measly 4k points right now 🤯 when taking advantage of the Chase transfer bonus.

From here, I would go direct to Virgin Atlantic and confirm this actual flight.

Want to spice it up even more? I head over to seats.aero and run a search from London to “Europe” and let’s see

👀 See how I just flew us from New York to Copenhagen for less than 10k in points?

This is how you search strategically and utilize credit card points to travel at a fraction of the cost, my friend.

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If you made it down here, thank you for being here, I am so appreciative. I hope you’ve got some travel adventures on the horizon of your own!

Cheers,

Allie