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.
This post has been updated with additional award search tools and numerous small updates.
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 Saturday morning 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 “As Us Anything” question and answer sessions, and post miscellaneous other videos. Subscribe to our Youtube channel here.
- Social media: Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter are the top public options for learning and sharing. Join the Frequent Miler Insiders Facebook group and/or follow us on Instagram or Twitter.
- 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: 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 signup 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. See also these related pages:
Shopping portals
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:
- CashBackMonitor: Once you know where you want to shop online, use this tool to find the portal that currently offers the best rewards for shopping with that merchant.
- See also: Top 6 shopping portal myths.
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.
Manufactured spending
It’s possible to increase credit card spend and to get most of that money back to use to pay your credit card bill.
- Manufactured Spending Complete Guide: Start with this page.
- Also see:
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 some tools for getting more out of your points and miles, or you can find our series of sweet spot award posts here.
Transferable Points
- 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 gone before (the latter gives you an idea of whether to wait in the hopes that a similar bonus will happen again).
- Transfer Partner Master List: Use this page to find all transfer options from major transferable points programs. Or, see these specific pages:
Hotel awards
- Award Mapper: Use this web app to find hotels near your intended destination that accept points for free nights. Award Mapper shows the hotels on an embedded Google map and lets you narrow results to just the point programs you are interested in. Unfortunately, not all programs are regularly updated in this tool, but it’s still a useful resource.
- StayWithPoints: Use this tool to find award availability at select hotels. This is best used for popular hotels that are often sold out of base rooms during peak dates.
- MaxMyPoint: Very similar to StayWithPoints, above.
- Open Hotel Alert: If you can’t find award nights for the dates and hotel of interest, use this free tool to alert you when rooms become available for sale. With most hotel chains, you can book award nights whenever standard rooms are available for sale. This tool is ideal for hotels that aren’t available through StayWithPoints.
- Points vs Cash Worksheets: We’ve developed worksheets for some hotel brands to help you decide whether booking with points or with cash is a better deal:
Flight awards
Finding flight awards can be really tough. Fortunately, some 3rd party tools exist to help.
Flight Award Tools for All Skill Levels
- Roame.Travel, Point.me and AwardLogic work like regular airfare search tools, but for award flights. With each tool, you can enter your desired route and dates for travel and these tools will show you which award flights are available and how much they cost. You can read my comparison between Point.me and AwardLogic here: Point.me vs AwardLogic. Which award search tool is best? Of course, point.me has one huge advantage over AwardLogic: you can use a version of Point.me for free by creating an account with Bilt. Roame.Travel, meanwhile, is always free.
- SeatSpy: This is an excellent tool for finding specific non-stop routes on certain airlines. Full details about the tool and what it is best used for can be found here: SeatSpy: A tool for finding non-stop awards. Why is that useful?
- AA Award Map Tool. Find available awards based on how much you’re willing to spend. See this post for details.
- United.com: This one is pretty good for finding awards across most Star Alliance carriers
- BA.com: Good for finding awards across most OneWorld Alliance carriers. AA.com is better but doesn’t provide support for as many OneWorld airlines.
- Air France website: Good for finding awards across most SkyTeam Alliance carriers (note that the calendar tool doesn’t currently work for carriers other than Air France and KLM so you have to search for specific days).
Flight Award Tools for Experts
With each of the following tools, you need to know what you’re doing to get the most out of them, but each is very powerful:
- Expert Flyer: Use Expert Flyer to search for award availability on specific supported airlines. Expert Flyer lets you search a week at a time, but only one airline at a time. It will also let you set alerts for specific flights. This tool is best used when you know which airline you want to fly and want to find award or upgrade space.
- Seats.Aero: This is a mostly free tool which makes it easy to find close-in awards on long-haul flights. This is especially useful for finding otherwise very difficult to find award space. Full details here: Seats.aero: a wonderfully nerdy tool for finding Unicorn flight awards.
More flight award tools
- 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.
- How much should an award cost? A number of tools exist to try to answer this question. Try these:
- Additional paid tools to help find awards:
- 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.
- Extreme Hotel Deals: True to its name, this site publishes extreme hotel deals.
- 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 (Affiliate Link): 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.
- Capital One Spring: You don’t need to be a Capital One cardholder to sign up for this free service. While not all of the “deals” on this site are good, some are excellent.
- 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
- Kayak (Affiliate Link): 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.
- 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).
- 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)
- 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).
- Current Amex Offers: Many banks offer deals for using their credit card with specific merchants. Amex, though, tends to have far more offers than its rivals and at times these offers are crazily generous. Use our Current Amex Offers page to see which offers are current before logging into each of your Amex cards to see if you’ve been targeted for any of those deals.
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.
- Lounge Buddy: Lounge Buddy is an app that details lounge options at airports. You can set up Lounge Buddy with information about the credit cards you have that offer lounge access and any elite status you may have with airlines. Lounge Buddy will automatically use this information to tell you which lounges you should have free access to.
- 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:
- AwardWallet: Use this web and mobile app to keep track of points and miles across many different programs.
- 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.
Want to learn more about miles and points? Subscribe to email updates or check out our podcast on your favorite podcast platform.
Thanks for the suggestions! Added SpotHero, MaxMyTrip, and AirportParkingReservations
Excellent episode! Regarding whether it’s useful to check in online for an international flight, I still think it’s worth the time savings — sometimes I can get a boarding pass and just have my passport checked at the gate.
A specific incident in favor of this applied to me today: I’m flying LAX-BNE-ADL tonight booked on Qantas through Alaska (thanks to last summer’s tip here about wide-open Qantas business-class availability!) but had a positioning flight this morning booked separately (EWR-LAX on JetBlue). Having the Qantas boarding pass meant that I could freshen up in the AA Flagship Lounge on arrival at LAX and have a bite there.
Seth
As a Chicagoan, I’d add SpotHero to the ParkWhiz mention. SpotHero usually has many more options.
The Kivalens link is insecure non-https://. Hope it is a reliable site. The last comment in your old “Kivalens resurfaces better than before” post is from 4 years ago.
You guys Rock!
AirportParkingReservations.com for parking deals at airports when you are travelling – YMMV on rates/airports/dates.
I Told u that Many years ago the best thing u ever created . Anyone can travel the world or at least upgrade what their doing . V Bernie
Another one I like is WalletFlo. Good for those that can’t remember which card to use for which category
Great resource
For hotel availability, I use https://maxmypoint.com/ to find availability at a glance, especially for Hyatt since the native award calendar/search is not useful for seeing availability
Shouldn’t the car rental section be a little more than just autoslash, esp considering the latest post from Nick?
Updated with an expanded car rental section. I had scheduled this update before Nick wrote his post.
AVS but not ExpertFlyer?
I don’t understand this question. Expert Flyer is listed under award booking tools
I am a longtime churner (>8 years). I am a regular reader of Reddit r/churning as well as this site and have learned much from the blogs, but find them often inefficient to slog through as they does not summarize DPs (data points of various persons’ experiences).
Q: Many churners struggle with failed cc applications. Is there any good relatively accurate tool available to predict the probability of (a) the success of a credit card application and (b) which credit bureau it will pull from, based on others’ recent data points, using data like: card applied for, applicant history (x/6, y/12, z/24), applicant residency state, income, applicant made reconsideration call, applied online/at bank etc? I know DoC did a very valuable survey like this (link) but it was short lived and is now 6 years old.
Q2: If not, isn’t this a REALLY GOOD idea?
I’m not aware of anything like that
Wow, what an amazing list. There are quite a few resources I need to investigate.
CardPointers is a good tool for tracking credit card category bonuses of credit cards you own. For me it finally replaces Wallaby app which I think got bought out by TPG, was discontinued and never replaced.
[…] And I want to keep doing those things. With trips obviously on hold given the COVID-19 pandemic, of course I miss traveling to exotic locales in comfort. Like many readers, I’ve been somewhat spoiled by the premium cabin experience: while I traveled to Europe, India, and Far East Asia a couple of times in economy class before discovering frequent flyer miles, these days I find myself more turned off by the thought of 8 or 10 or 14 hours in economy class simply because I know how to get there more comfortably by leveraging credit card welcome bonuses, category bonuses, manufactured spending, and the other tools we use to play the game. […]
[…] don’t expect we’ll be able to make more payments for 2019 than normal. See our guide to Pay taxes via credit card 2020 edition for more on paying taxes by credit card to earn […]
This is awesome!
Thank you! Again, and again, and again!
You are incredibly generous with your knowledge and time.
Thank you for all you do….
Great, great, great! It’s so easy to get locked into one way of doing things that you forget other other tools that are out there, some of which may be better for a given task. Thanks so much for this incredibly detailed and valuable list!
[…] recently wrote a post about The Tools We Use (for playing the game) that talked about many of the tools we use to earn more miles and points. In email chatter between […]
[…] I’m getting the best possible deal on hotel rooms is Pruvo. And just last week I was happy to see Greg at Frequent Miler suggest Pruvo as one of his recommended tools to use for hotel […]
[…] A nice recap of some web tools we use in this hobby. Or whatever the hell is left of it… […]
[…] The Tools We Use (for playing the game) […]
Greg, This post is a direct gift from above. Thanks.
LOL. Thanks!
Wow, wonderful information! This post may be easily overlooked and underappreciated. But I know a few of them and I can tell that, with these tools, you can create tremendous value. Will visit each of the website today and enrich my own “tool set” :). Thanks, Greg. You are awesome.
frugalman
Blogs are unreal if it doesn’t work IT costs u Nutthing ..CHEERs
Thanks!
Looking at this post reminds me how much I have used and learned from this blog. I want to say thanks to you and Nick for all that you do.
Thanks!
Unless I missed it, there’s no mention of DoC. That blog is a must for anyone in the game. It’s one of the few places readers can get an unbiased opinion on an offer/deal/site and the breadth of information and data points is astounding.
+1
Good suggestion. I did consider adding DoC, but then I thought “if I add DoC, I should add blog X too, .. and what about blog Y, and…” So I left it out. I’ll consider adding it though. I imagine that this post will evolve quite a bit over time.
Nice summary, Greg. Thanks!
Thanks!
Can u put a link on the website so this post is easy to find ? I will save it too but this post makes it easy to send to someone interested but I think 99% won’t act on this.
Thanks
Thanks for the suggestion. I can and I did. See the section titled “Must read posts” on the right of the screen (if viewing from desktop). Look for “The Tools We Use”
That’s Good u keep updating the links . I’ve not looked @ this in awhile good to get back to basic’s.
Cheers
great idea