The Ultimate Travel Hacking Bundle Is All You Need to Become An Expert

Welcome to the Ultimate Travel Hacking Bundle

Well the 90 day challenge is almost complete so it’s time to provide a round-up of many of the Travel hacking resources I’ve talked about over the last few months.

This is your one stop shop for all the different tools which you may find useful for collecting points, keeping track of them and redeeming them.

So what do you think of the challenge so far?

Of course, I’d also love to know how you have got on in the challenge and what you liked or loathed so that we tailor future challenges to you. Would you prefer more video, webinars, podcasts or are you happy with the way things are?

If you have any feedback please pop it in the comments below and we will use this to help tailor future events and challenges.

I’d especially love to know what difference it has made to your frequent flyer points. Do you feel like it has been a winning proposition for you?

Register for future events

Of course, you can also register for notifications of future events by simply popping your details below.

Top Travel Hacking Resources

So here’s the links to all the top resources. I haven’t provided masses of detail for each of these, as we have covered them in previous posts, but if you need to know more about each, you can click on the associated links in each section.

Collecting points

You may first wish to download this bumper pack of infographics providing you with a ton of useful references to be able to refer back to time and time again.

Insert your details once to get the Travel Hacking Pro Resource Bundl which includes all the items below. You will be redirected to a Google drive folder containing all the following infographics and resources. I will also be adding to these over the next few weeks.

1. 1. Shopping infographi
   2. Hotels infographic
   3. Best UK Credit cards infographic
   4. Golden rules of Credit card travel hacking
   5. Credit card comparison
   6. Airline alliance infographic
   7. Credit card tracker
   8. AVIOS shopping points calculator
   9. AVIOS points calculator

Tracking points

There are a variety of options for tracking your points ranging from a simple spreadsheet to free apps and those with more functionality such as Award Wallet Pro.

Award Wallet Pro allows you to track all your rewards in one convenient place and sends you alerts as your balances increase. It also notifies you if any points are about to expire,  allowing you to take action to prevent losing those hard-earned points.

Redeeming points

FlyerMiler

FlyerMiler allows you to search for the best award deals in one go saving you a ton of time searching multiple sites. ‘Learn how to get more value from your airmile rewards‘ provides more information on how you can use the tool.

Expertflyer

ExpertFlyer also allows you to search all airlines to find the number of miles you need for your chosen reward flight.

Unlike FlyerMiler though, you can check award availability and set up seat alerts to receive notifications when your preferred award seats become available. ‘Learn how to get more value from your airmile rewards‘ provides more detailed information.

The Mileage Club

The Mileage Club  is another tool you can use to check the number of miles you need for an award flight.

It is however essentially an award miles shop allowing you to purchase additional miles. See ‘How to Get More Value From Your Airmiles Rewards’ from last week for an example of how this works.

Award Charts

If you prefer the traditional method of identifying the number of points you need, Travelisfree is a great resource for accessing all award charts in one convenient place.

Valuing points

It is worth reiterating the need to consider the value you are getting for your points before jumping in and redeeming them.

‘How to score a FREE Layover, FREE Flights and Status Matches‘ or ‘long haul v short-haul‘ offers a reminder of one way to value your points. You can use the AVIOS points calculator to do your own calculations.

Selling miles

Flipmiles

Flipmymiles.com offers a platform for buying and selling points. They market this as a service for those with excess miles but I would have thought the market was for people with smaller balances. What do I know?! That said there are minimums to the amount that they will buy so I couldn’t offload my 10,000 points in the AAdvantage program.

I did get a quick quote for 25,000 points which came back with an offer of $160 within the space of an hour. So far so good!

However this works out at a value per mile of 0.0049 which is pitiful compared to the values I calculated in ‘Long Haul v Short Haul‘.

Furthermore a quick search on the AAdvantage site for a quote to buy 25,000 miles is $737.50 although I do get a bonus of 3,500 for this purchase. Regardless it doesn’t look good value.

That said, if you have points that you are unlikely to ever offload then this could be worth considering.

There’s a bunch of other sites offering the same service which you can check out and value yourself.

Other sites that buy airmiles

Sell My Rewards

Cash For My Miles

The Miles Broker

YYZ Miles

Sell Miles Now

Points Loyalty Wallet

Points Loyalty Wallet is the final site to mention. They also buy your points but this time you can exchange them for gift cards as well as cash. The site also allows you to exchange points from one program to another albeit many of the big name programs are not featured.

Booking non reward flights

If you haven’t quite got enough points, or want to be sure you aren’t missing out on an incredible deal, it pays to check the cash prices too so here’s a few resources ideal for that.

Tripstreak

Tripstreak is a search engine which also shows you how many reward points you will earn for booking any given price.

Skypicker (now known as Kiwi)

Skypicker is a search site which features a cool map allowing you to search for flights within a specific geography or budget.

Google flights

Google flights operates on a similar basis allowing travellers to select the departure month and see results from around the world (or a specific reason) on a map.

Matrix ITA

Matrix ITA allows you to track down hidden fares (flights to alternative airports close to your destination). It is best to search for each route independently and as you can see you can indicate the distance you are prepared to travel from your ultimate destination. Read more on booking hidden fares.

Top Travel Hacking Blogs

There are also a ton of fabulous blogs available which regularly produce content to help you. You can find a comprehensive list in the Ultimate Travel Hackers.

Hotel Resources

This challenge has been very much focussed on building more airmiles but it would be remiss to not even mention hotels. Who knows? Maybe that will be the subject of a future challenge.

Here’s a few useful resources I have come across which may help with hotel awards.

Awardmapper

Awardmapper is the hotel equivalent of FlyerMiler allowing you to check hotels to see which offers the best value. You can search by airport and by the number of points you would ideally like to spend.

This is really helpful when researching what kind of points you’ll need to earn for an upcoming trip and indeed, for comparing different programs.

Hotel Hustle

Hotel Hustle is similiar to AwardMapper but only works for US airports so it has limited use for us Brits!

Statusmatcher

Statusmatcher is a great site providing insight into which hotel chains may offer you a status upgrade to entice you away from your current loyalty program.

This week’s tasks:

• Let me know in the comments below which is your favourite travel hacking tool
• Get the Travel Hacking Pro Resource Bundle
• Pop details of our final Twitter travel chat of the challenge in your diaries
• If you want to bag a freebie, click on the link to download our free E-book showing you how to Rocket Fuel Your Airmiles.
• Alternatively if you would like to be the subject of a future blog post on redeeming miles, please pop your information into the Google form below. We will be in touch with one lucky person to discuss how we can help you plan your trip.

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