The Tools We Use (for playing the points and miles game). 2021 Edition.

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

General tools for playing the miles and points game

• Social media: Twitter and Facebook are the top public options for learning and sharing.  Join the Frequent Miler Insiders Facebook group and/or follow us on Twitter.  Also consider subscribing to our podcast, joining our Youtube channel, and following us on Instagram.
• 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:
  • Best Low Spend Offers
  • Best Transferable Points Offers
  • Best Business Card Offers
  • Best Mastercard Offers
  • Best Visa Card Offers

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.
• Visa supplier locator: Search this site for local merchants to see how Visa codes them.  To get a grocery store category bonus when you use your credit card at a particular store, for example, the transaction has to be coded as a grocery store purchase.  This is determined by how that store setup their merchant account for credit card processing.  Some stores have multiple supplier codes.  For example, a purchase at Target may code differently depending upon whether you check out at the pharmacy, electronics department, or main registers.  Also, Amex and Discover may code stores differently than Visa.
• 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.
• COVID Credit Card Enhancements Ultimate Guide: During the pandemic, many card issuers have introduced temporary bonus categories.  This post is regularly updated with everything you need to know.

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:
  • Staying organized: A sheet for gift card purchases
  • Complete Guide to Plastiq: Pay bills that can’t usually be paid by credit card.
  • Complete guide to paying taxes via credit card, debit card, or gift card
  • Miles for college: Earn miles saving for college or paying for college.
  • Current Visa and Mastercard Gift Card Deals
  • Best Options for Buying Visa and Mastercard Gift Cards
  • Kivalens: See: Manufacture Spend (and do good) with Kiva and Kivalens.

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:
  • Amex Transfer Partners
  • Capital One Transfer Partners
  • Chase Transfer Partners
  • Citi Transfer Partners
  • Marriott Transfer Partners

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.
• 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.
• 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:
  • Hyatt cash or points? Which should you book?
  • Marriott cash or points? Which should you book?

Flight awards

Finding flight awards can be really tough.  Fortunately, some 3rd party tools exist to help.  The post “Which award search tool is best?” compares the following tools:

• Juicy Miles: This is a great tool if you know when you want to travel and to where.  See:  Juicy Miles – Finally, a Kayak-like tool for flight awards!
• SeatSpy: This is a fantastic tool for finding specific non-stop routes on supported airlines.  The main downside is that relatively few airlines are supported so far, but they have been adding new options regularly.  See: SeatSpy -An awesome tool for finding non-stop awards.
• Expert Flyer: An excellent tool with support for a huge number of airlines.  Unlike Juicy Miles, though, with this tool you have to search one airline at a time to find awards.

More award flight tools:

• 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:
  • AwardHacker
  • Travel Codex Award Maximizer
  • FlyerMiler
• Free tools to help find awards:
  • award.flights Award Finder: This one is a Chrome browser extension.  Unfortunately, this tool is very tricky to get to work properly.
  • 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).
• Additional paid tools to help find awards:
  • Award Nexus
  • KVS
• 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 an example of how powerful this is, see: How to find great business class fares with Google Flights.
• Mighty Travels: Use this tool to search for low and mistake fares. Setup alerts based on things like cabin class, airline, cents per mile price, mileage program, and more.
• 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.
• Mighty Travels: Use this tool to find low and mistake hotel rates.
• Google Maps: This is a great tool, in general, for turn by turn directions, but it’s also pretty good for finding the cheapest hotel rates. Enter a location, click “nearby”, then select “hotels”.
• Kayak: This is a general tool for searching for the best airfare, car rentals, hotels, and more. I especially like how it compares hotel prices across many different sites.  When searching for hotels, make sure to log into Kayak to see member-only pricing.
• Greyhound Road Rewards: Sign up for Greyhound’s free rewards program to get access to their member-only hotel deals. See: Look to Greyhound for hotel deals (yes, Greyhound).
• Pruvo: Use this tool to get alerted to price drops after you book a hotel. See this Travel with Grant post for details.

Other travel deals

• Car Rentals: Use AutoSlash to find better deals and to alert you to price drops.
• Parking: Try the ParkWhiz app 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.