Finding actual use for your hard earned points may feel daunting, overwhelming and time consuming! Here I am going to give you my go-to hacks for finding amazing point redemptions to booking your flights and hotel accommodations. To start, there are two basic principles to always keep in mind:

• It is a lot easier to find airline tickets in advance. (Smart travelers plan ahead!)
• It is a lot easier to find airline tickets with flexible dates. (This can be more difficult depending on your needs, but can go a long way in saving you A LOT)

These tips are not reinventing the wheel. We all know this as it applies to cash tickets as well. For award seats however, each flight has a certain number of seats that are designated as “points seats”. Once those get booked up, that flight has no more seats available to use your points for; hence the booking in advance idea. Additionally, most airlines and hotels release availability about 1 year in advance. This is when you will see the lowest pricing offered. On the flip side, you can occasionally find good last minute deals, but they can be hard to come by and make happen.

As for myself, I prefer to travel more “last minute”, it is where I am most comfortable. However, since using travel hacking as my main way to book flights, I have found it much more beneficial to book in advance, especially when booking for a family. For example, I found and booked our airline tickets from JKF →Tokyo about 11 months in advance. This helped me find a 1 way ticket for 80,000 points. Each time I looked up these same tickets as the date approached, I never saw them posted for less than 110,000 points. 

So, how do we find these seats or hotel rooms to begin with? Well, most simply (but time consuming), you simply look on the airline or hotel’s own website. By creating a loyalty program (free and easy by signing up on the website) and logging in, you have access to searching flights via points rather than cash. This gives accurate, real time booking costs, however you have to go airline to airline and do the leg work. This is how I found our business class Cathay Pacific tickets and can be beneficial in certain scenarios. For example, if  Denver is your home airport and you know United has a hub, it makes sense to go first onto United.com and search those flights. Now, because United is a part of Star Alliance, the largest airline alliance out there, you will also see other airline options that will be displayed when you perform your search. This makes United.com a great tool if you are using either United or Chase UR points, as they transfer to United and all Star Alliance airlines.

This same principle can be used for hotels- such as Hyatt, Marriott and Hilton. Use their website, see what you can find.

Now, if you want to get more bang for your buck; maybe you have a lot of flexibility in points, locations and departure airports. This is when I would recommend using a more “search engine” approach. My favorite airline search comes from seats.aero. I personally pay for the Pro version to search up to 1 year in advance, but the free version lets you search up to 60 days in advance and gives a ton of flight options for anywhere. There is also a tool to search the hard to find Qatar QStuites! 👀

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Here you can search regions- like North America traveling to Europe, more specifically like IAD airport to LHR airport or by specific airline such as filtering all Delta flights. I use this regularly when I am searching for deals but have no specific destination in mind. In this case, I can book wherever I find cheapest!

The other tool that I think is user friendly and a good “catch all” is maxmypoint.com. This is a free site that you can use to track Marriott, Hyatt, Hilton, and IHG hotel options. Check this amazing option to spend just 21K/night at the Hyatt Andaz Costa Rica Resort in Costa Rica. 

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Lastly, PointsYeah.com lets you search just like you would in, let’s say google flights. In this tool, you can use the filters to sort any way you like, including points, taxes, time, points range, stops, programs and more. They even calculate promotion points transfer for you which can come in very handy when you’re specifically after a certain deal. It tells you what points can be transferred from where and will take you directly to the site to complete the transfer.

As you can see, it will list who transfers for this flight which can be very handy if you have points in different locations and/or want to combine points.

So that’s a few of my favorite ways to search for flights and hotels! All of these offer a free option which is super valuable and worth looking into!

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