The Tools We Use (for playing the points and miles game)

The post “The Games We Play,” outlines some of the top techniques for earning more points & miles, for getting more out of our points & miles, for saving money, and getting elite perks for less. In this post, you’ll find the tools we use to help us achieve these goals.

General tools for playing the miles and points game

• Podcasts: Listening to podcasts can be a great way to get up to speed. We publish our “Frequent Miler on the Air” podcast every Tuesday and Friday on all popular podcast platforms.
• YouTube: Like podcasts, YouTube videos can be a great way to learn. On our Youtube Channel, we publish our podcast in video form, host “Ask Us Anything” question and answer sessions, and post “How-To” and other miscellaneous videos. Subscribe to our Youtube channel here.
• Social media: Instagram and Facebook are the top public options for interacting with us. Join the Frequent Miler Insiders Facebook group to ask questions and learn from others. For post notifications, you can also follow us on X (Twitter), Bluesky, and Threads.
• News readers: Use a news reader, such as Feedly, to subscribe to blogs like Frequent Miler.
• Forums: Reddit Churning and Flyertalk are filled with great information provided by forum members.
• AwardWallet: Use this web app and mobile app to keep track of points and miles across many different programs.
• Understand your credit:
  • How new credit cards can impact your credit score
  • Complete Guide to Free Credit Scores, Reports, and Monitoring

Tools for earning more points & miles

The heart of this game lies in earning points & miles, usually without traveling. Here are some of the top tools for miles & points.

Credit card bonuses

Credit card welcome bonuses are the quickest and easiest way to earn crazy amounts of points & miles quickly. We use these tools to make the most of it:

• Travel Freely: Use this free website to track your credit card signups, to remind you when to cancel cards, and to intelligently recommend new cards. You can read my take on this tool here: Take the stress out of credit card bonus hunting: Travel Freely.
• Frequent Miler’s Best Credit Card Offers page: Lists all of the best public offers along with application tips for each card issuer. Offers are automatically sorted by estimated first year value.
• Greg’s top 10 picks: Lists my favorite current offers along with a short explanation for why each card made it to my top 10 list.

Credit card bonus categories

Many credit cards offer extra points for spend within certain categories.

• Best category bonuses: Visit this page to see which cards have the best bonuses for different categories of spend (e.g. drug stores, gas stations, dining, etc.)
• Award Wallet Merchant Category Lookup Tool. In addition to keeping track of your point balances, Award Wallet provides an easy way to lookup merchants to see how those merchants have been coded so that you can determine whether or not you’ll earn a category bonus.
• Doctor of Credit’s Payment Workshop: Doctor of Credit maintains a table indicating whether or not various purchases earned category bonuses with various cards. The data mostly comes from reader reports.

Shopping portals and card-linked offers

If you’re planning to buy something online, you might as well earn extra miles, points or cash back by starting your shopping with an online shopping portal. Use these tools to maximize your rewards:

• SaveWise: Shows the best portal options and card-linked offers for online shopping. See: Savewise — An awesome shopping tool (compare portals + find stacks)
• CardPointers: Automatically enroll all of your cards in card-linked offers (Amex Offers, Chase Offers, Citi Merchant Offers, etc.). This functionality overlaps with SaveWise. At the time of this writing, CardPointers doesn’t help with finding portals, but it has more extensive options for automatically enrolling in card-linked offers. For details, see: CardPointers — Automatically enroll offers to all of your cards.
• See also: Top 6 shopping portal myths.

Increase credit card spending

It’s possible to increase credit card spend without draining your bank account.

• Start here: Guide to increasing credit card spend
• Also see:
  • Staying organized: A sheet for gift card purchases
  • Complete guide to paying taxes via credit card, debit card, or gift card
  • Best Options for Buying Visa and Mastercard Gift Cards
  • Increase Spend (and do good) with Kiva and Kivalens
  • Rewards for Charitable Giving

Award bookings

Once you’ve earned points and miles, the next step of the game is to use those points towards maximum value. Here are concepts and tools for getting more out of your points and miles…

Transferable Points

Transferable points, such as Chase Ultimate Rewards, Amex Membership Rewards, Citi ThankYou Rewards, Capital One Miles, and more are awesome because they make it possible to find the best award deals and then transfer your points to the appropriate program to book those deals. Here are some helpful resources:

• Current Transfer Bonuses: There are often bonuses when transferring points to airline or hotel programs. Use this page to see which bonuses are current and which have expired (the latter gives you an idea of whether to wait in the hopes that a similar bonus will happen again).
• Complete List of Transferable Points Partners: Use this page to find all transfer options from major transferable points programs.

Hotel awards

• Trip Planning:
  • Awayz: Awayz makes it easy to find points-bookable hotels for your upcoming trips. Simply enter the location where you’re going and the dates when you’ll be there and Awayz will show you all of the points options, cash prices, and will recommend whether each hotel is a better deal paying with points or cash.
  • PointsYeah Hotels: Like Awayz, this tool makes it easy to find points-bookable hotels for your upcoming trips. PointsYeah also throws in useful information that is uniquely of interest to point-collectors such as the price to book hotels through AA or United (and how many miles you’ll earn), the price for booking through Fine Hotels & Resorts (and what benefits you’ll get), and more.
• Hard-to-find hotel awards: Some of the most popular hotels can be difficult to book with points or free night certificates because their base rooms fill up quickly. My favorite tools for finding these awards are Rooms.aero (which is a sister site to Seats.aero), and MaxMyPoint.

Flight awards

Finding flight awards can be really tough. Fortunately, 3rd party tools can help. For a comprehensive comparison of flight award search tools, see: Which award search tool is best?

If you’re looking for a free general purpose tool, PointsYeah and AwardTool offer similar capabilities. Both offer date range searches, award alerts, and capable discovery functions. PointsYeah has an edge because its discovery function is very good and it isn’t limited for free users. On the other hand, if you want to search multiple airports at once, you’ll need AwardTool. Of course, since the tools are free, you might as well use both!

For the paid tools, again my favorites are PointsYeah and AwardTool. As a power user I prefer AwardTool thanks to the fact that its possible to search up to 32 airports at once, but I’m not a fan of its bugginess.

Among the other tools, Seats.Aero is my go-to. I love that I can do things like find available Qatar QSuites awards or Emirates first class awards, anywhere in the world, in seconds.

Regardless of which of the above tools you decide to use, if you regularly use Google Flights, you should consider installing Points Path so that you’ll automatically get award prices within your Google Flights search results.

More flight award tools

• Curated Award Alerts: Several services such as Straight to the Points and Thrifty Traveler Premium alert readers when great flight awards are available.
• Which routes exist? To find the best awards, it helps to know your options:
  • FlightConnections.com: Graphically displays all direct routes from any given departure airport.
  • FlightsFrom.com: Shows all flight routes that depart any selected airport.
  • Wikipedia: Pull up the Wikipedia page for any airport, then click to “Airlines and destinations.” This will show you all of the direct flights, by airline, from that airport.
• Award Booking Services: If you don’t have the skill, knowledge, or time to find the best awards for your needs, consider employing an award booking service instead.

Deal seeking

Often, this hobby is purely about seeking the best deal. Usually these deals are travel deals, but not always. Here are some tools for finding good deals, (with and without points and miles).

Flight deals

• Google Flights: The great thing about this flight search tool is it’s speed. Put in your parameters and results come back instantly. For details about how to use this tool for finding cheap flights, see: How to find incredible flight deals with Google Flights.
• Flight deal websites: Sites like Thrifty Traveler, The Flight Deal and Secret Flying specialize in publishing the very best deals when they appear.
• Flyertalk: Mileage Run Deals Forum.
• Momondo and Skyscanner: These are additional flight search aggregators. They include more online travel agencies than competitors like Kayak and can therefore lead to better deals at times.
• ITA Matrix: This is an incredibly flexible flight search engine. Limit searches to particular airlines or alliances; specify specific stopovers, and much much more.
• Skiplagged: Find cheaper flights by intentionally skipping the final leg of your itinerary. For details about this technique (including important cautions), please see my post: Skiplagging for the best flights at the best price.

Hotel deals

• Current Hotel Promotions: We keep a running list of all of the best hotel promos here.
• HotelSlash: Email your hotel confirmation to HotelSlash and they’ll alert you if/when the price goes down.
• Google Hotels: This is an excellent and easy to use site which shows hotel prices across many platforms.
• Kayak: This is a general tool for searching for the best airfare, car rentals, hotels, and more. I especially like how it compares prices across many different sites. Make sure to log into Kayak to see member-only pricing.
• Pruvo: Use this tool to get alerted to price drops after you book a hotel. See this Travel with Grant post for details.

Car Rental Deals

• Use AutoSlash to find great deals and to alert you to price drops (even if you initially booked elsewhere). Regardless of what deal I find on a car rental, I use AutoSlash to alert me when it finds a better deal (which happens frequently).
• Kayak: This is a general tool for searching for the best airfare, car rentals, hotels, and more. Make sure to log into Kayak to see member-only pricing. Nick has had good luck using Kayak to find great car rental deals.
• Consider renting through a car dealership. See: Surviving the car rental apocalypse by stepping outside the box.
• Use the Amex Platinum Hertz benefit to save big. See: The American Express Platinum Hertz benefit has saved me over $1000/yr on rental cars.

Other travel deals

• Airport Parking: Airport Parking Reservations (I haven’t tried this one yet, but it was recommended by a reader)
• City Parking: Try the apps ParkWhiz and SpotHero to save on city parking. See: How Park Whiz Saved Us $100+ On Parking In Chicago
• Trains: Visit Seat61 for everything you need to know about booking train travel.

Non-travel deals

• SlickDeals Hot Deals Forum: If a good deal exists, it can probably be found here. If you register for an account, you can setup alerts for specific stores or products. Or, if you prefer to see all the best deals as they’re happening, try Live View (see this post for details).

Elite perks

• Best Credit Card Offers: Many credit cards offer elite status directly or elite benefits (such as lounge access). This page shows the top perks for each listed credit card. Look for the “noteworthy perks” section for each card.
• Best Big Spend Bonuses: Many credit cards offer elite status with high spend. This page lists the best options for earning status with big spend.
• LoungeReview: This is an app that details lounge options at airports. Quickly see which lounges are available and the access rules for each.
• StatusMatcher.com: One of the best ways to get elite status is by asking for a match from another program. StatusMatcher is a useful site for finding out what status matches work and don’t work before trying yourself.

What should beginners do?

I imagine that this post must be overwhelming to those just starting out in this hobby. If that’s you, I recommend starting with these free tools for points and miles enthusiasts:

• Join the Frequent Miler Insiders Facebook group.
• Sign up for Travel Freely to track your credit card signups, to remind you when to cancel cards, and to intelligently recommend new cards. You can read my take on this tool here: Take the stress out of credit card bonus hunting: Travel Freely.
• Subscribe to Frequent Miler’s email posts and podcast.
• AwardWallet: Use this web and mobile app to keep track of points and miles across many different programs.

Want to learn more about miles and points? Subscribe to email updates or check out our podcast on your favorite podcast platform.