Air Travel Redemption
Guide to Maxing out Your Points for Air Travel
Intro
Per below, Slack user Navigating requested a post dedicated to discussing best practices for transferring your points for flights.
As always, feel free to submit any post requests in the #postrequests channel in the Slack Group. If you’re a paid sub and not in the Slack Group yet, please DM me for access!
Airline Travel Intro
Many of you are earning (or on pace to earn) $10K+ in credit card rewards this year.
While that’s great, it’s easy to be frivolous and not put a lot of thought into how we spend this as it’s “free money.”
To be honest, I’m guilty of this myself.
Just because you can earn a ton of points easily doesn’t mean you should waste them, and not put some thought into redeeming them.
This used to be more of a process that involved manually searching various airlines and transfer partners to find the best deal.
Fortunately, there are a few tools that take all the guesswork out of it and make our lives much easier.
The two we’ll discuss today are PointsYeah and AwardTool.
PointsYeah
PointsYeah is a comprehensive search tool that we can use to make sure we get the best value out of our points. It’s fairly intuitive, powerful, and the free version offers enough features to keep me satisfied.
Two really cool features that I want to point out, and then we’ll get into an example of a real booking.
First, the multi-day searches allow travelers with flexible dates to ensure that they get the best value. For example, If I’m traveling to Europe for a week and taking one week off from work, I’d usually be fine with leaving Thursday afternoon/night, Friday (any time), or Saturday in the morning, if I was getting a much better deal at any one of those particular times.
I prefer to spend as much time as possible over there, but on the way back, I’d be willing to either leave Saturday afternoon/night or Sunday. Being able to search with multiple days of flexibility each way unlocks many more flights and we can look at all of them with a single search.
Second, if we know in advance that we are traveling several months to a year from now, we can fill out all our search criteria, set a maximum number of points (or cash) per person, and then opt in for any alerts, once any of that criteria is met. Sometimes, there might not be any available flights initially, but availability will open up down the road, and we can get notified instantly.
I would have killed for a tool like this when I got into this game years ago.
NYC to London Example
Below is a simple example of me trying to find a Business Class or First Class flight from New York to London.
As you can see it looks like any generic travel portal, so pretty intuitive. I chose August 9th-10th as flexible departure dates and August 17th-18th as flexible return dates. I also filtered to only show “Business & First.”
PointsYeah will usually put the best option at the top of the search results…In this case it was an American Airlines Flight for 45,000 points each way.
Towards the right (in the below picture), we can see we can use our Bilt points to transfer to Alaska Mileage Plan, and then book directly on the Alaska Airlines website.
Below, we can see that it’ll confirm the option of transferring points from our BILT credit card to Alaska Mileage Plan. When you click “Yeah, Let’s Go” it’ll take you directly to the Alaska Airlines website and show you the exact flight to book.
Below we can see the same flight on the Alaska Airlines website. This is a fantastic deal, and with two seats left, I’d want to book ASAP.
On the way home, it shows the return flight costing 45,000 points and $332. While the fee is obviously higher than the way there, it still is a fraction of what the cash price would be (we’ll get to this later).
Here, is the same as up top. The link will take you straight to the Alaska Airlines website where we can book directly there after we transfer our points.
Below, you can see the cash equivalent price of this flight. We’d pay nearly $3,000 if we paid for this flight with cash.
Instead, we’re simply redeeming 90,000 points and paying a little over $300 in fees.
This is a solid redemption.
Below, I did a quick hotel search for a week long stay in Cancun.
I found a Hyatt All Inclusive hotel for 21,000 points per night (when the cash price was $495/night)
At 21,000 points per night with free food and drinks…This is a fantastic deal.
One really cool feature that I’ll probably use at some point is the Daydream Explorer. You can say I want to go from NYC to Europe on these dates, but I only want to fly Business/First.
The results will only show biz/first class flights and you can choose which city to visit after seeing the results.
Award Tool
Award Tool is very simple to PointsYeah…So I won’t go into much detail, but I’ll give a simple example showing how it works.
In the below example, I’m looking to fly from Charlotte to Los Angeles and spend a week in LA. I can leave 4/19-4/21, and come back 4/26-4/28, I just want to use my points to get the cheapest possible flight.
Similiar to PointsYeah, it’s an intuitive portal with a few extra fancy options.
Same deal as PointsYeah here. The results show transfer partners and have a link to click to take you to the website where you can book directly.
In this example I found a flight that costs 12,500 points each way + $18.10.
Clicking “select deal” allows me to book directly on the Alaska Airlines website after I transfer my Bilt points.
One final note about AwardTool…They have a whole section dedicated to guides Amex, Bilt, Chase, etc…. I definitely recommend reading these for some extra ALFA.
Additionally, they have a guide to setting alerts, which can be an extremely useful feature. If we don’t see any flights that we like (or we’re hoping they come down in price), we can set an alert that will notify us when there is a flight that meets our criteria.
Conclusion
While the two above examples were for Bilt points, both PointsYeah and Award Tool cover redemption options for all major credit card issuers, so these two sites can both be considered a one stop shop for redemptions.
If you’re planning a trip, you’ll definitely want to check either site for your flight options to maximize your points value.
Good luck!
If you have any question on any of the above, feel free to ask in the Slack Group!
Disclaimer: None of this is to be deemed legal or financial advice of any kind.