A Few New Points & Miles Tools I've Been Using (+ More Biz Class Flights?!?!)

Show Notes Links:

- Savewise: getsavewise.com (referral link!)

- AwardTool: awardtool.com (referral link!)

- Six Suitcase Travel

Claude is claude.ai 

In this episode I'm sharing 4 new things I've been using and really liking lately. SaveWise for portal and card offer stacking, a clean system for tracking credits, a pragmatic way to find rooms for five or more, and the award search method that finally surfaced five business class seats. Along the way we explain why Claude beat ChatGPT for trip planning and how we used Flying Blue to cut the cost for kids.

• stacking shopping portals with SaveWise and auto-adding Amex and Chase offers
• building a simple credit-tracking spreadsheet that proves card value
• using SixSuitcaseTravel to find rooms for five or more with real beds
• validating big-family hotel options against points availability
• switching to Claude for cleaner itineraries and better tone
• mapping routes with FlightConnections to guide award searches
• using AwardTool to locate five business class seats across date ranges
• leveraging Flying Blue child discounts to cut award costs
• setting alerts and caps on taxes and fees to filter noise
• links to all tools in the notes

Transcript

Welcome And Episode Focus

SPEAKER_00 0:00

In today's episode, I'm going to share with you a few new tools I've been using that covers everything from stacking and earning points via shopping portals to flight award searches to family hotel hunting and building itineraries on trips. So listen in. Hi, I'm Raya.

SPEAKER_01 0:28

And I'm Dwayne.

SPEAKER_00 0:29

And we are your hosts of the Travel Party of Five podcast, where we share how we travel as a family of five around the world.

SPEAKER_01 0:37

We will also share how we use points and miles to travel as affordably as possible and sometimes even completely free.

SPEAKER_00 0:44

So if you're wanting to travel more with your family, but you're not sure how, we'd love for you to listen in.

SPEAKER_01 0:49

So welcome to our podcast where we hope you learn a thing or two to get you closer to your next trip.

Shoutout: Trip Tales Podcast

Why New Tools And Approach

SaveWise For Stacking Offers

Tracking Credits With Spreadsheets

Finding Hotels For Big Families

Claude Over ChatGPT For Planning

AwardTool Beats Seats Arrow

Strategy: Routes, Searches, Alerts

Booking Flying Blue For Five

SPEAKER_00 1:05

Before we jump into the fun stuff, I did want to share one thing with you guys really quickly. So as a podcast host, but also avid podcast listener, I am always looking for new podcasts to listen to. And I predominantly find myself looking for either Points and Miles podcasts or travel podcasts in general, just to get trip inspiration. And the last couple of weeks I shared with you the Travel with Kids podcast. And today I wanted to share another one, which I've actually talked about on this podcast before, and that is Trip Tales. So Kelsey Graves is the host of TripTales. It is a travel podcast where every week a real person shares their real trip, like from start to finish. So like where they stayed, what they did, what they ate, and also what they do differently next time. There's lots of practical tips, itinerary ideas. And I find myself inspired after almost every episode to want to go to wherever it is they're talking about. I actually was a guest on this podcast at one point, um, talking about uh our couple's trip that we did a couple years ago to the Kimpton Sea Fire in Grand Cayman. And funny thing about that episode is I was so prepared going into it with like all of the points and miles stuff that we uh had used to book it. And then I was like, oh, she just wants to know about the vibe. Like this this podcast is about the vibe of the trip and really not so much about how you booked it. And so I actually really love that and I find it super refreshing. So it's not a points and miles podcast, although she does use points here and there and talks about it occasionally, but it will absolutely give you so much trip inspiration that I would highly, highly recommend it. Um, okay, let me know if you listen because I love her. Hello, friends, and welcome back to Travel Party if I podcast. My name is Raya, I am your host and I am solo today. And today I thought it would be fun to talk about a few new tools that I've been using. And some of these may not be new for you, and so if they are, apologies in advance. Um, the first thing I can definitely admit about myself is I am not an early adopter for technology for the most part. I tend to watch and wait a little bit and see how other people are using it and you know, pitfalls and pros and cons and all that. And then if it's well received, then I will I will try it out. Okay, moving on, let's jump into the meat of today's episode. I should like, if I had a dollar for every time I've said that on a podcast episode, I would probably have like$50. Um, but okay, so I've got four new tools that I've been using in this hobby. And again, these may not be new for you, but they are new for me. And they're not all like award finders or or they're they're all kind of different. So the first one I'm gonna talk about is called SaveWise. And the website for this is getsavewise.com. And SaveWise is essentially a competitor to card pointers, which I have talked about several times on this podcast before. So what I use card pointers for, or did use as I have canceled my paid subscription, was to keep track of credits on cards and also to activate uh offers within my Chase or Amex portal or whatever um card, I'm whatever bank portal I'm in. And I really liked card pointers because it would activate the offers and sometimes I would get multiple offers on multiple cards, and that was super helpful, but it has not been working the best lately. And so I actually have uninstalled the extension and I have canceled my paid subscription, and I've kind of moved over to get save wise for a couple of reasons. One, I actually don't need card pointers to track my credits anymore because I have this kind of uh compiled spreadsheet that I made that is working really well for me, and I can talk a little bit about that too, maybe. Um, but what I am using save wise for is okay, so it's think of it like a shopping portal aggregator and offer stacker. So if you've ever used cashback monitor, this is similar to that, except it also integrates your credit card offers from like Amex and Chase into the same place. And so you can go in there, open the SaveWise website, search for a store. If you're gonna go buy something at like, let's say Lululemon, search for the store, it will show you every shopping portal's offer. So Rackiton, Chase, Advantage, Capital One, Um, Simply Miles, etc. I think it checks over 20 portals and what their current earn rate is, whether it's miles back, cash back, uh, whatever. And then it will also show you right on the same screen if you have an active American Express offer or a Chase offer for that same merchant. So sometimes Lululemon does like 10% off, you know,$100 or more or whatever. And it will show you if you have that offer on any of your cards in the same window and and which card it's on also. So you can now know, okay, I'm gonna buy these leggings from Lululemon. I'm gonna go through um Capital One shopping. Maybe that's the maybe that's the highest offer currently. And I'm gonna use this, you know, Chase card that ends in one, two, three, four, and I'm also gonna get 10% off as long as I spend$100 or more. So that is incredibly valuable to me, and I have been using that pretty often. Um, I have the browser extension installed. Um, I use it on Chrome, and it like is has been pretty seamless. It also will add the offers to your cards as long as you authorize it to do that. You go in and you just click like you first you add the offers, then you activate them, and then it's very easy. And so that way you don't like my chase and my Amex cards get hundreds of offers a week, and manually adding them is exhausting, and I would never do that. So it also is great because it auto-adds um all the offers, and then sometimes I just get an email saying I used an Amex offer that I didn't even know I had. So obviously that was money I was gonna spend anyways, and I didn't I didn't know there was an Amex offer, right? Because 300 of them got activated at the same time. So it's really just like money back. I got one from CVS the other day and I was like, oh, it's amazing. It's like five bucks, but hey, five dollars is five dollars. So um I've really, really been liking that. I I think I said this, but I do have the paid version. And I think if you are the kind of person who shops online, wants to make sure that you're not leaving miles or cash back on the table, I really think this is worth installing. Um, I did start with the free version and then moved over to the paid version. Um, I I would that's what I would do too. I would not start with the paid version. I would start with the free version, see if you like it, and then you know, commit to a paid version from there. I will put a link for everything that we talk about that I can have that I have a link for or can find a link for, I'll put it in the show notes also if you want to go through there. Some of them may be affiliate links, some of them may not be. I actually have no idea if any of these programs even offer that. Um, but if if they do, I'll I'll put it in there. So, really, really, really good tool that I think is better than card pointers. Sorry, sorry, not sorry. Um okay. You know what? Before we move on to the second tool, let me briefly talk about how I have been tracking the credits. I talked about this on an episode a few weeks ago, but now that I've been using it and now that we're like into March, I've been using it for a couple months. I have been very diligent about going in and checking off where I have used credits. Um, I did miss some last month for the month of February uh in full disclosure. And that's my bad, it's a short month. What are you gonna do? Um, but I feel like I have really good visibility into the value that I'm getting from my cards that have these huge annual fees, and that has been really valuable. So I I'm gonna have to maybe make a reel showing you the spreadsheet because essentially what I did is I took the points talk squad spreadsheet that they have for tracking credits. It's free. You can get it from their website. Um, and theirs is kind of uh I call it my at-a-glance. So I can see on literally one spreadsheet all the cards listed down, and all the credits kind of go across horizontally, and they have them broken down into quarterly, annually, monthly, etc. And they're just a little checkbox. So I can easily look and see which boxes are not checked, which ones have I not used yet for this month or whatever. But then I also have the Thrifty Traveler credit card tracker thing. And again, this is free. You just have to give them your email and they'll send you this document. And they have so many credit cards on there, and you can use um, you can add some for you and also some for your player too. And it populates each card in its own tab on this spreadsheet. And then you go into each card and you it is it is a whole math equation. And there is no way I could recreate this on my own because I'm I'm not that savvy, nor do I have that much time. And this one is so good that I like, why would I recreate the wheel when they've already done it? So highly recommend grabbing that from them, combining them together. So, for example, for my Chase Sapphire Reserve, I can go in there and I can mark out which credits I've already used for the year, which for me is uh both edit credits, the hotel credit of 250, and some DoorDash credits. I've used um what else? Oh, there was a Whoop offer. I just used that. I actually did not include, it's not on the spreadsheet and I didn't include that, but um there was, I don't know, there was one other one that I also used. And so I've already gotten more than the annual fee back in value from that card. And it is literally an equation that tells you as you check off these credits that you're using at the top, it will turn green when you've either met or exceeded the amount of the annual fee that you paid. And so I'm already at like over a thousand dollars in value from that card alone, which is huge. And as someone who has so many cards with high annual fees, making sure that we are getting the most out of these credits in whatever way we can is incredibly important for us to know. So I will commit to making an Instagram reel and showing you how I have this spreadsheet laid out so that you can do the same. Because I did not create either of these spreadsheets, I think I said this before, I'm not comfortable sharing it because it's not my work. Like I didn't do it, all I did was compile it together. So I'll show you how I did it so that you can do it too. Um, and look on Instagram for that, like sometime in the next week is what I would say. Okay, moving on to my second tool, which is not it's not even really a tool, it's more of like a search engine. I heard about this on the uh Point Me to First Class podcast with Devin Gimbal, and I wanna I want to mention it to you because I want you to know it's out there, but I also want to share a caveat that I am not a hundred percent sure how valuable this is for me and our family or for points and miles people, but like the thing I get asked about the most is hotel rooms that sleep five, six, or seven or eight people. And a lot of people suggest that I should make like a repository or something of these hotels. And I love that idea, but it feels very overwhelming to me as someone who has limited time. And so I I hear you, um, but it's probably not something that I'm going to create, even though I do think it would be really valuable. However, this was referenced on a podcast episode again on the Point Me to First Class podcast a few weeks ago, and I wrote it down and I've been checking it out. So it is called sixsuitcasetravel.com. And it's basically a like you can search by different locations. They have the USA, Caribbean, um, Europe, Asia, etc. You can go in there and you can say, like, okay, choose from the major cities. Like I was wanted to see what they had available in in Thailand, and so I went and they had Bangkok as an option. So I clicked on Bangkok and was looking through the options. I can't figure out some of the um cities that you click on. It shows a list, like on their website, of maybe anywhere from four to 14 hotels, is what I've seen. So I think Paris had four hotels that could sleep five or six people. Um, same with Rome. And then, like for Bangkok, there was a few more, but some of them are a list of properties directly on the six suitcase website. And then some of them are links to booking.com where they've already done a search for, you know, a hotel in Bangkok that can sleep six, let's say. So that's the part where I'm kind of like, I don't know if I would use this website or if I would just go to booking.com and do the search there and then start to narrow down if any of those properties are available with points. Um, but I want I wanted you guys to be aware that this exists and I did check it out, and I do think it's a decent resource if you're looking for a place to start. But I've talked on this podcast before about using um either booking.com or hotels.com or I think Expedia was maybe the other one. And just going in and searching. If you need a room for five or six, searching, you know, Paris, five people and see what comes up. Um, the problem there is a lot of those properties, even if they are bookable with points, the room that you need for five people is likely not bookable with points. So you just have to play around with it and see um what you can find. But it's called sixsuitcasetravel.com. Um, I think it was my understanding, it was it was created by a mom of four who was frustrated that the big booking sites make it impossible to find a hotel room for a large family. Not to mention that the hotel industry in general is very much geared towards families of four or less. And so she, according to the the website, her website, I'll just share this little blurb with you. Um, she has a built a web uh excuse me, built a database of over 8,000 hotel properties worldwide, specifically vetted and filtered for big families. So rooms that genuinely can sleep five, six or more people with permanent bedding, so not a roll away cot or you know, something shoved in a corner. So family suites, connecting rooms, that sort of thing, properties that are upfront about occupancy limits and pricing for additional guests is also mentioned in there. Um, and it says you can filter by all the things that actually matter to families. So is there a pool, is there a kitchen, does it have breakfast, etc.? Um, I haven't dove that that far into it because I looked at a few places that we're going and I was kind of like, eh, like, I don't know, none of these, I don't feel excited about any of these properties. But I think if you are either planning to pay cash, right? Maybe some of these are affordable with cash. I actually don't know. I didn't look at the cash price, or you're just kind of looking, are there any options, you know, that might sleep five or six? I would just give it a try. I wouldn't spend a ton of time on it if you're not finding what you need, but it does exist out there. And now I have shared it with you. So um, okay. The next thing that I'm gonna talk about is maybe a little anticlimactic. This is where I really want to hammer home that I am not an early adopter for technology. Okay. The fact that I use Chat GPT is probably surprising even to me, but I do use it pretty regularly. However, I don't love it. Like I don't love the answers it gives me. It's all very like rah, rah, and I don't know. It just feels very like phony, positive, and fake. And I don't really enjoy it. I also can absolutely tell when someone has used Chat GPT in their response and not edited it, and I feel annoyed by that too. Like, it's like I can just tell the writing style at this point. And so I started experimenting with Claude the other day, and I was freaking blown away at how much better it is than Chat GPT. So for ChatGPT, just so you know, I pay for the paid version and I will be canceling it literally today because the free version of Claude over the last few days has blown me away. It is so much better than anything I've gotten out of ChatGPT. And this is in terms of both like sometimes I ask it to help me with podcast episode outlines, sometimes I use it for work, um, you know, help helping me write emails or whatever. And then sometimes I use it to plan trips. And this is what this is the part I wanted to talk about. So I went in and I asked it to, I said, hey, we are a family of five, these are my kids' ages, we're going to Thailand, these are the places we'll be, this is how long we'll be there. Our first kind of four nights is is pretty scheduled, but I asked it to help me with an itinerary for our our other two places, which is Koamui and Bangkok. And it gave me a really nice itinerary that I like when I compare it to what Chat GPT has given me in the past for other places, like not impressed by Chat GPT and very impressed by Claude. So if you are like me and you are have just been using Chat GPT, um, I would recommend checking out Claude and just giving it a go. Use the free version, see what you think. And um, I the reason I'm gonna pay is because I already exceeded my like, I'm not sure if it's daily or weekly or monthly limits with the free version. I I don't know, but I exceeded it very quickly. And so because I really liked the the outputs, um, I am willing to just kind of switch my spending from Chat GPT over to Claude. And so yeah, I'll be doing that today. Um, it did recommend a few things that I'm gonna look up in both Bangkok and Kosamui because as I mentioned before, we actually have nothing booked for either of those spots. And that's unusual for us. If you've been listening for a while, that's weird, but whatever. Um, I it's gonna be a relaxing vacation, and that's that's what I'm going for. So we're gonna go with the flow. We're gonna be type B. Okay. I'm gonna force myself to be type B on this trip. Um, so there's my there's my pitch for Claude. I have been super impressed with it and would highly recommend you check it out if you have not already. Okay, the last tool that I'm gonna talk to you about is probably the one that I am most excited about. Um, because I was able to find some business class flights for our family of five that I've been struggling to find with seats.arrow for months. And so all credit for this tool and kind of the process for how to use it goes to a friend of mine. Um, so I I take no credit for this, and this isn't my process. I just want you to know that. Um, but here is how I did this. And the let me just share, the award tool is called award tool. And so it is awardtool.com. Um, like all the other things, I'll put a link in the show notes to it. They potentially have referral links. I'm not really sure, but if they do, I will put mine in there. Um, I started with the paid version as I always recommend, I'm I'm sorry, no, I started with the free version as I always recommend. And then because I was able to find what I needed so quickly, I was like, immediately take my money. Um, because now I'm gonna use it a lot more and I'm gonna set alerts. And so award tool is a tool similar to seats.arrow. I have talked about seeds.ar a lot. I have previously thought it was the best award tool searcher out there. And if you have done a coaching call or a consultation call with me, we have absolutely talked about seeds.arrow. Um, in my follow-up for my consultation calls, I have seats.seats.ero tutorials. Like I am like deep, I was deep in that tool. But for the last three to four months, I have been using it and been not able to find the award availability that I needed. And I just was refusing to believe that it didn't exist because I'm just I'm I'm booking pretty far in advance and it's not a super busy time. So um, okay, let me walk you through how I found these five business class flights. And um I'll kind of share the process with you. So I started on flightconnections.com. Uh you do not need to pay for flight connections, so don't. I use the free version. Um, even though they make the paid version look very appealing, you really don't need it. So here's what I did. Um, for this trip, we were planning to go to Switzerland and Italy. I have flights into Switzerland, but I have not booked anything else because I've been waiting to find the flights back. Because the the wherever we found flights back from was going to determine kind of how the rest of our trip went and where we went on the trip. So I've had these the flights there into Zurich for months, and I've just been waiting to try to find flights back. I really wanted to end in Rome. I wanted to do Switzerland, maybe Lake Como, and then Florence and Rome. That was that was what I thought we would have enough time for. So I went on flight connections and I first started writing with making a list on paper of all of the direct flights from Rome into the US. And I started with the airports that I would prefer, which are West Coast airports. So LAX, SFO, Seattle, um, obviously Phoenix, Denver. And then I also kind of went central of the country. So um Chicago, Dallas, Houston, um, I don't know, maybe Minneapolis, like, and I started just doing searches on award tool. So I would put in with the free version on award tool, you can search from I think generally like one or two areas to one or two, I'm sorry, not areas, one or two airport codes to another one or two airport codes. So I was just searching Rome too, and then I was going down that list of direct flights, Seattle, San Francisco, LAX, Phoenix, Denver, um, you know, whatever. And so I did that one by one, and I had the date range for the free search. You can choose a date range of four days. And so I put in the four days that we roughly wanted to fly home. And I just kept going down the line. And anytime something looked kind of promising, I would write it down. And like there was a few Luftanza flights that popped up with Lufthansa miles, which I don't have, and they aren't really a transfer partner. So the the way that I would want to book a Lufthansa flight is probably through Air Canada, but they were showing up on Luftanza. So I was just kind of jotting them down to see if they would also pop up on Air Canada, which spoiler alert, they did not. But I was writing, I was going down the airport um searching one by one. So this is a manual process when you start with the free version, but this is still how I would recommend doing it to start because you don't want to pay for a tool that maybe like this made a lot of sense to my brain, but if it doesn't make sense to your brain, you don't want to pay for the tool. So start with the free version and do this manual process once or twice. Um, just trust me. And so I went on my list and then I did Rome to Houston, and these flights on Flying Blue popped up. Five, I'm searching minimum five seats, like I have my taxes set, like I don't want to pay more than$500 in taxes per person. And ideally, I'd like to pay significantly less. And so I see the flights, business class, five seats, Air France, Rome to Houston with a layover in Paris. So even though I did write down direct flights, um, we don't have a direct flight, and I'm okay with that. Um, but it was it's Rome to Paris, overnight layover in Paris, and then direct flight from Paris to Houston. And then we will need to get a flight from Houston back to Phoenix, which is two and a half, three hours. So not terrible. And so then I went over to the Flying Blue website and I searched on there, and sure enough, there it was 270,000 miles for five of us. That is because two of my kids are still under the age of 12, and Flying Blue has a 25% discount on flights for kids um 11 and under. So 270,000 miles plus$1,800 in taxes and fees total for all five of us to fly business class back from Europe. And this maybe took me 20 minutes, so not long from start to finish of this process. And at this point, I'm kind of like, should I keep looking? Like, should like I should keep looking. So I spent another 10 minutes or so continuing down my list, looking for other flights. And I'm not there, are flights, don't get me wrong. There are a lot of flights that I'm finding, but the points cost is too high. When you need five flights, paying 88 to 90,000 points a flight or more is just really like that's not something I'm going to do, especially if it's not a convenient flight and I have to then position, you know. So then I realized, okay, I need to just book this. So I went and transferred points from my American Express to Flying Blue. I booked the flights, chose the seats, paid the taxes and fees, and now we have flights into and out of Europe. And now I can plan, like start to plan and book the itinerary, which is really exciting because I have been looking daily for months and not finding anything. And these flights should have popped up on seats.ero when I was searching, because I was searching from uh Europe, anywhere in Europe, to the USA. And this flight meets all that criteria, but it didn't show up on seats.arrow. So do with that what you will. Um, but I am now an award tool convert and I will be using this going forward, you know, until maybe something else better comes along. I don't know. I think that the free version also it gives you 90 days of route data, a four-day search window, and three award alerts. So again, start with the free version. And if you like it, I think it's like 85 bucks a year or something for the paid version. And that lets you set up to 25 award alerts, unlimited access to hotel data. I haven't even dove into that yet, but I will. Um, and then you know, a bunch of other stuff. So I think what I will do going forward is I'm going to set alerts for the flights I just booked, uh, just to see if anything better comes along. But I think ultimately this is a really easy to understand beginner-friendly tool. It's a good starting point if you're newer to award searching. Um, but I think for me, where I would describe myself as intermediate, um, I also found this incredibly valuable. So again, awardtool.com. I will put a link in the show notes. Um, I'm I'm blown away that it helped me find those flights so fast. So can't recommend it enough at this point. Okay, so we've talked about SaveWise, which is getSaveWise.com. We've talked about uh six suitcase travel. We talked about uh using Claude instead of Chat GPT. As a side note, if you have been using some other form of AI besides Claude or ChatGPT, send me a DM on Instagram and let me know because I'm I'm definitely open to checking out others as well. Um, and then we talked about award tool. So those are the four things that I have been using lately that I've really been liking. Um, obviously none of these things are perfect and a combination, you know, of these, maybe mixed with some other tools, is gonna be the best fit for you. But I think all of these things are worth knowing about, and at least a couple of them are probably gonna change how you do things a little bit because I know they have for me. Um, as always, links to everything that we talked about today will be in the show notes. If you've used any of these tools or have any tips, um, or if you have one that you think I should talk about, let me know. Send me a DM on Instagram. I want to hear what's working for you guys. And until next time, um keep keep searching. Business class flights for everybody. Okay, talk to you guys soon. Bye.