As a travel journalist for over a decade, I travel several times a month to domestic and international destinations which means I’m racking up a lot of miles. While most of my flights are paid for, I have learned a thing or two about booking flights and using points. One of the questions I get most often is, “I have 200,000 credit card points—what’s the smartest way to use them?” Now I finally have a go-to answer. Below are seven tools (many of them free!) that make booking travel much easier and more strategic.
What to do with all your credit card points and airline miles?
If you have hundreds of thousands of credit card points or airline miles that you don’t know what to do with, or you want to maximize your usage, you should know about Roame and Point.Me. These two tools are game-changers for award travel. They search across airlines and loyalty programs to show you the best ways to book flights using the least amount of points so you never waste miles again.
If you have a lot of hotel rewards points, Rooms.aero is a free tool that scans hotel award availability across programs in seconds, making it easy to score free nights with points. Enter your destination, and it will tell you the best point value of hotels nearby.
MaxMyPoint analyzes your balances and tells you the smartest redemptions and best days to book for maximum value.
And for hotel status lovers, Awayz searches hotel award nights and calculates value per point and compares whether you should pay in points, pay cash, or pick another hotel.
A simple tool for checking airline routes and destinations
Have you ever planned a trip across the world and wondered which airlines fly to a specific destination? FlightRoutes is a free tool that shows every route from any airport worldwide. This is specifically helpful if you’re looking for all the nonstop flight options to a particular airport.
The best site for uncovering discount airfare
For hidden deals, Skiplagged finds loophole fares and cheap flights that airlines don’t want you to know about. Skiplagged displays layover cities, which also happen to be your final destination. For example, say you want to fly from Los Angeles to New York. Sometimes, a flight from LA > NY > Boston might be cheaper than a direct flight. Instead of flying directly to the final destination, you would get off on the layover city. It’s important to bear in mind that this only works if you’re flying with carry-on luggage, as checked bags automatically transfer to your final destination. This also works best with one-way tickets and make sure not to add in your airline loyalty number, if you have one—airlines don’t like hidden flights and may flag your reservation if you do this multiple times, so I would use this with caution.