point fu

In late 2023 I subscribed to a new service called Seats.aero that constantly scrapes airline websites looking for real, bookable points and upgrade deals. They have a slick United PlusPoints upgrade finder which I quickly discovered also finds instantly-bookable Mileage Upgrade Awards (MUA). Given how expensive it is to make 1k and get a basket full of PlusPoints, this discovery was a game changer.  Ideally we always want to have our upgrades confirmed at booking time. Given work schedules and holidays we sometimes have book a flight without confirmable upgrade space and hope for the best when flight day comes. Tim and I have both had instances where, despite being 1k and using PlusPoints, we didn't get an upgrade because all the seats were sold or they were given to people with higher status. The big downer of my new strategy is that in these instances, we'll be even further down United's elaborate upgrade pecking order (i.e., a 1k requesting a MUA will lose the upgrad...

A while back (when my laptop chewed through my entire ANA data plan in like 4 minutes) I lamented the fact that laptops don't have the sophisticated data-throttling controls that smart phones do. One of my readers told me about a cool tool for MacOS and Windows that enables these types of controls for your laptop (or desktop) computer. It's called TripMode . It's US$8, there's a free trial , and you can pay by several means, including Apple Pay. Installation is simple, and once it's launched you have a task bar item that lets you selectively enable internet access for various applications and services. You can completely disable TripMode whenever you want. One cool thing I like about the preferences is that you can tell it to speak every time it blocks something (e.g., "Application Calendar was blocked"). This gives you a great sense of how many things are silently sucking bandwidth when you're not even thinking about it. selectively and inst...

One of the toughest parts of the points game is actually finding the flights you want once you've gathered enough points. Most people end up with a mix of points across several carriers and maybe a pile or two of transferable points like American Express Membership Rewards or Chase Ultimate Rewards. AwardHacker is great for knowing all of the possible rewards and how many points they would cost, but the holy grail of doing a search for actual, available reward seats has remained elusive – in part because the airlines put up IT and legal roadblocks to 3rd party services to prevent their software from crawling through the airline websites and mining the resulting data. Awardex.io (based in the Baltics) tried this, but unfortunately their site has been completely hobbled recently and you're now greeted with a login message about "something new and exciting coming soon". One of the other strategies for this problem is to let users download a software program to...

I used JetItUp.com to look at my flying for the year (it interfaces with TripIt) and got some fun stats: 26 Flights (11 of them international) on  7 airlines on  13 aircraft types to  6 countries I've been trying to rebuild our points balances since we booked the big Japan trip, and to that end will probably churn another Chase card now that I'm below their 5/24 cutoff again. I also milked a bunch of holiday promotions and Amex offers so we're now at around 350,000 points split fairly evenly between Amex and Chase. With the constant point devaluations, though, we'll need 300,000-ish in a single account to repeat something like our Taipei trip this year. (Well, unless we find some unicorn-level availability on ANA and pull the Virgin Atlantic trick to access both our Amex and Chase points for a single redemption). We don't have any big trips planned at this point. We're doing our annual Mexico trip , and we're thinking we'll look for a che...

When you're searching on Google flights, you can put a list of 5 cities into the search fields, separated by commas. The airports don't have to be anywhere near each other . In this case, I'll call this the "they're giving my husband's team the entire holiday weekend off" search 😁 ♨️ 🐷 🥘 🌮 or 🌭 for the weekend?      

I just gave JetItUp.com a try yesterday and it's a fun little tool for visualizing your travel. It connected directly to my TripIt account (after I granted permission) and imported and analyzed 8 years of my travel. ( TIP: you can email old airline confirmations to TripIt and it should be able to import them even though they're several years old ) They support several other types itinerary management software too. First off – who doesn't love a map! From there it shows a bunch of stats about my travel: the types of aircraft I flew, which airports I used, international/domestic breakdown, and maybe most importantly: Economy vs. Business vs. First 😂 Rumors of my glamorous lifestyle have been greatly exaggerated… On the disturbing news front: I've spent 58 days and 7 hours in the air ! There's heaps more info to look at, so if you browse a snapshot of my data, go her e . When you're logged in there's are several other views beyond what you s...

Another useful tool that I've recently come across is a Visa search that helps you figure out what official category the charges from a specific merchant will code to on your Visa statement. Since many cards have category bonuses (e.g., groceries, gas, dining), this can be helpful to figure out which card to use at various merchants. It's especially helpful if it's a merchant you've never been to and you don't have any historical data in your own account to look back on. Check it out !

One of the toughest parts of the points game is actually finding the flights you want once you've gathered enough points. Most people end up with a mix of points across several carriers and maybe a pile or two of transferable points like American Express Membership Rewards or Chase Ultimate Rewards. A great tool for visualizing all of the direct routes from a single airport is flightconnections.com . (The Airlines and Destinations section of Wikipedia is another great resource for this type of thing). If you're just perusing possibilities, AwardHacker.com is great for showing you all of your potential options. You can filter the list so it doesn't show flights with programs you don't have points for. While this is great for brainstorming (and for choosing which new points programs to join), it doesn't show the availability of those rewards , so you'll need to use something different once you're ready to book. Award Hacker (click to enlarge) There...