As someone who holds a number of ultra-premium travel-related credit cards, one of the things I find most tedious is needing to log in to multiple sites to search for qualifying properties where I can use any of my multitude of credits, whether for lodging, dining, or otherwise.
Additionally, I would love to find opportunities to combine forces and use a dining credit on the same trip where I’m using a lodging credit or find events that are eligible for a StubHub credit.
Enter Award Helper, an awesome tool built to both make the maps of eligible Fine Hotels + Resorts® and The Edit credit properties highly visual and also make it far easier to find great opportunities to use associated dining and event ticket benefits. As with any of these types of tools, the usefulness will be directly proportionate to the frequency of updates, but as it stands at this moment in time, it’s an awesome tool for your belt.
Key tools offered by Award Helper
Award Helper is a site that provides easy-to-search or easy-to-scroll maps that help identify places where you can use the following benefits:
- Chase Sapphire Reserve-related resources
- Hotels eligible for The Edit credits and places where you can stack with the special 2026-only $250 credit for “select hotels”
- Sapphire Exclusive Tables restaurants
- The Chase “Triple Stack”: a map that shows all of the above and offers a link to StubHub with area events so you can find an opportunity to use all of these credits in one trip
- Amex Platinum-related resources
- Bilt-related resources
- Amex + Chase resource
That’s an awesome amount of information that will be incredibly useful for those with the Chase Sapphire Reserve or Chase Sapphire Reserve for Business card, an Amex Platinum card or Business Platinum card, or those with Bilt Gold status or higher (as Bilt Gold status is required to make Home Away from Home bookings).
In addition to the above, Award Helper also offers a map of Clover-listed restaurants where you may be able to use Paze, a resource for those buying precious metals, and a map with links to join lounge waitlists. Each of these can be very useful — if they are kept up-to-date.
The next sections contain a little information about each of the core map tools.
Hotel maps
One major pain point for me over the last year has been finding properties where I can use my Chase Sapphire Reserve Edit credit, or one of our Platinum card benefits for Fine Hotels and Resorts or The Hotel Collection. In some cases there are properties that overlap and participate in programs with both issuers, but in other cases there are different selections of properties. Being able to visualize where all of the eligible properties in both sets of programs are located is really useful.
I have a trip coming up to Europe where my initial searches had missed a hotel eligible for an “Edit credit” because I had searched the name of a different nearby town. The hotel I ultimately booked hadn’t shown up in my early search results. I had searched a neighboring town, not realizing that I might find an eligible property just 10 or 15 miles away. A map tool is a great way to identify that type of opportunity by simply dragging around on the map (and in my case, the exact town didn’t matter; I just wouldn’t have known where to search!).
Next year, my family is talking about doing a tour of national parks. I find it really helpful to be able to look at a map of the United States and see where I can find FHR, THC, and The Edit properties. I don’t expect to find many right near the entrance to a national park, but I could see planning a driving route that includes some hotel-credit-eligible properties while driving between parks.
Award Helper can be really handy for that sort of thing when you know a general vicinity you’d like to visit, but you aren’t committed to a specific city.
The map offers a robust set of filters, so you can filter to hotels in a particular loyalty program, country, etc.
The map also includes information about the benefits you can expect to get at each property. For instance, some FHR hotels offer a credit of more than $100.
Chase dining map
Award Helper also has a terrific map of properties eligible for Chase Sapphire Exclusive Tables credits. With the Sapphire Exclusive Tables being mostly limited to larger metropolitan areas, those of us who live in more rural areas will find this map very useful when planning domestic trips to larger areas.
While I have used OpenTable to look at restaurants in cities we will visit this year, I can’t easily see on OpenTable whether any of those restaurants are in close proximity to the area where I’ll be staying or attending an event. Award Helper does a great job with this.
The map even includes color-coded pins with approximate expected price ranges (see the key at the bottom right).
Each location pin includes useful restaurant information, including the address, phone number, and links to Google Maps and OpenTable.
The Chase Triple Stack map
As stated already, the maps make it much easier to identify opportunities for stacking. Award Helper anticipated that and created a map specifically aimed at identifying those places where you can stack multiple card-linked benefits. For instance, the Chase Triple Stack map color codes hotels eligible for an Edit credit, hotels eligible for the $250 “select hotels” credit, restaurants eligible for Sapphire Exclusive Tables, and there is a purple pin point with a link to local events on StubHub.
The burning question: will it stay up to date?
As noted at the top, probably the biggest pain point with tools that have created maps of places to use particular credit card benefits has been the fact that any of these tools is only as good as their data is recent. With properties eligible for one type of lodging credit or another and restaurants that participate in the restaurant-related benefits constantly changing, there’s a chance that the map data you see may not match the actual eligible locations for any particular benefit. You should definitely double-check against an original source to confirm before making finalized plans. Earlier this month, we saw Chase remove many restaurants from Sapphire Exclusive Tables (while also adding some eligible restaurants). So far, the Award Helper maps seem accurate in all of the situations I spot-checked (including a few places I checked where I knew there had been changes made this month).
As long as the people behind Award Helper keep the data up to date, these maps will be highly useful. I have to imagine that there will be a good deal of effort involved in maintaining all of the associated databases, but as things stand, the maps at Award Helper are incredibly helpful.
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“An awesome tool for finding places to use premium credit card benefits”
No. That is Pepperian hyperbole. It didn’t tell you that Seated would give you up to 35% at Rolf & Daughters, saving your Chase credit for uncovered restaurants.
It didn’t look at how much Bilt or Citi hotel credit you had left, because it is so badly designed that it only looks at the seller’s side of the equation. It is ignorant of your credits.
It doesn’t cover Citi, which has a massive travel operation through Citi Travel, and where you, yourself, got the best rates (for car rental) recently.
This is a marginal first effort. No awe involved. It bettter stay free.
Is there a tool that shows a map of Hilton properties eligible for the Hilton resorts credits?
The list on the Hilton website can’t even be sorted by country, other than the US and Canada, and some of the properties listed under United States are in Mexico, French Polynesia, or Costa Rica.
AI
looking for united 50$ hotel credits and chase 100$ CSP credits.
Those credits can be used to book any hotel on their respective booking platforms, can’t they? I don’t think a dedicated map for those would be necessary. They should work almost anywhere.
best tool ever for FHR!
I hope they integrate a Resy map to stack with the FHR THC.
Looks good but what about Citi and C1?
“up to date”- not exactly. The Chateau Frontenac in Quebec City has been an FHR property for many years, but it is listed only as EDIT.
My The Edit booking here was upgraded to a turret room and a very nice stay all around. I don’t have an FHR credit in my current line-up, but it would be interesting to compare.
Nick – This is outstanding! Thank you so much for writing this article. As a player in this game – I find it very difficult to track down all of this information…so I am very Grateful that you shared this with us. Thank you!
Part of what has made award availability dry up, enshittification of benefits, and acceleration of devals is the availability of tools to make it easy to find availability and make such opportunities much more expensive to offer for banks/airlines/hotel chains. What set this hobby apart was the requirement to do legwork. Now there’s none required. Obviously not your fault, it’s inevitable, but you don’t need to grease the wheels.
True.
That is true of most things. Things like coupons work or other discounts because a lot of people are too lazy to use them. Once things are automatic then companies will lose too much on them and pull back the offers.
It is like the over crowding of lounges. When you can’t get in, or have to wait an hour to get in, the lounge isn’t what it was supposed to be, a relaxing place for people to get away from crowds.
well, all I can say it that without the FM team and their hard work, I’d still be using my cash back Discover from 1990. Thank you all for what you do and I’m looking forward to using this new tool thanks to you….