My Favorite Tools for Booking Cheap Travel

I love nearly-free travel earned from points and miles. It makes me giddy just thinking about the next trip I won’t pay for.  What I don’t love is how time-consuming it can be to find the perfect redemption. But some simple tools can do the hard work for you.

The most useful award search tools operate like Kayak or Google Flights but for miles and points redemptions. You select what miles or credit card points you have, input your travel details, and they show you all the options available. Other tools can enhance your redemption by helping you pick the best seat, select the right plane and get a good value from your points.

I’ve redeemed millions of miles and points, and these are the tools that help me find the perfect award redemption.

My pick for: Finding award space across dozens of hotel, airline and credit card programs.

Cost: There’s a free basic version and a pro version that costs $11.99 per month or $99.99 annually.

PointsYeah is the award search tool I use and recommend most often for hotel and airline awards. The user interface is straightforward and it searches live award inventory, so you’re not looking into the past for a seat or room that might no longer be available. Searches are fast, and paid users can include multiple departure and arrival airports at once.

But the most useful part of PointsYeah to me is the alerts. All users, even of the free version, can set up email alerts to get notified instantly when award space becomes available. That means you no longer have to find availability at the moment you’re on the airline or hotel website.

PointsYeah lets you filter by card issuers currently offering a credit card transfer bonus — a feature I often use to save miles and get better value from my points. The search results also integrate airline-specific discounts, such as the 15% discount Delta American Express cardholders receive on award flights.

One downside to PointsYeah is that it can’t search for airline-specific stopovers or multicity benefits, such as the United Excursionist perk, which offers a free one-way flight on a multicity award ticket. For those itineraries, you’ll have to search directly with the airline.

My pick for: Searching for very specific redemptions, such as a particular airline cabin.

Cost: There’s a free basic version and a pro version that costs $9.99 per month or $99.99 annually.

Seats.aero is my favorite tool for finding premium cabin award space across a wide range of dates and airports for aspirational redemptions like Japan Airlines first class, Qatar Airways Qsuites and Etihad apartments. Pro users can search over an entire year for availability, and all users can filter by regions, such as North America and Europe.

Unlike PointsYeah, which searches live (real-time) data, Seats.aero uses primarily cached data with some live data depending on the airline and route. In my experience, that cached data can be a few hours to a few days old, so you could be looking into the past for a seat or room that might no longer be available. The company also offers a tool that searched hotel award space called Rooms.aero.

While Seats.aero is powerful, it’s not very beginner-friendly. The user interface isn’t that clean, and to make sense of the results, you’ll need to have more details about each award program, especially around how partner award availability is handled. Additionally, text or email alerts are removed after they’re triggered, so if you don’t like the results from the first alert, you have to set it up again.

My pick for: Determining whether to use miles or pay cash for a flight.

Cost: There’s a standard free version and a premium version for $7.99 per month or $79.99 annually.

Points Path is a great tool for easily determining whether you should use miles or pay cash for a flight. It operates as a browser extension for Google Chrome and connects directly to Google Flights. Search results show both the cash and points cost for a specific flight, making it easy to determine the value of your potential redemption. You can also set your own point valuations, which can impact whether Points Path will tell you to “use cash” or “good deal” for a points redemption.

The free standard version comes with access to five airlines, whereas the pro version provides search results for nine airlines and a variety of other features, including email alerts.

My pick for: Finding route charts from a particular airport for specific airlines or airline alliances.

Cost: There’s a free basic version and a premium version for $39.99 a year, or $133 for lifetime access.

Flight Connections is my go-to tool for finding routes from a specific airport with a particular airline or airline alliance. It’s the tool I use first for many of my award searches. For example, say I want to use United Airlines miles and find routings for any Star Alliance member airline departing from Atlanta — Flight Connections will return a global route map in seconds.

You can also filter by routes serviced by a specific aircraft type, which is useful for airlines that use different aircraft with unique cabin configurations. Years ago, I used Flight Connections to find routes on Asiana Airlines that were serviced (at the time) by a Boeing 747. That particular plane was outfitted with one first-class throne per plane, a large two-seated space in the center of the first class cabin that was ideal for traveling with a companion. With this tool’s help, I was able to book those seats — and I got to sit in the nose of a double-decker Boeing 747!

My pick for: Looking up an airplane’s cabin configuration and seating plan so you can select the perfect seat.

AeroLOPA is a free tool that lets you look up the cabin configuration and seating plan for almost any airplane serviced by over 160 airlines. This can help you avoid picking a seat with limited recline, partially obscured windows or near the lavatory or galley.

Previously, SeatGuru was my tool of choice for this, but that website hasn’t been updated in many years. AeroLOPA is not quite as user-friendly as SeatGuru was and doesn’t let you look up a specific plane by route, so you’ll need to know what aircraft you’re flying on to find the appropriate seat map.

My pick for: Finding the best form of transportation to get between two places.

Rome2Rio is a powerhouse of a tool that gives you all the transit options for traveling between two places, including plane, train, bus, ferry or car. The tool provides the travel path, time of travel and cost for each option.

For example, when I was traveling between Istanbul and Cappadocia in Turkey, I had no idea what the best form of transportation was for my journey. Rome2Rio showed me all the options along with prices and where to book. For that trip, I ended up saving money by taking the train and bus instead of flying — options I probably wouldn’t have even considered without this tool. I booked the transportation using my Capital One Venture Rewards Credit Card, then erased the travel purchase using Capital One Miles to save money on the trip!

My pick for: Finding the best price on rental cars.

Auto Slash is my favorite tool for finding the best price for car rentals, even if you already have a reservation. You input the type of vehicle you’re looking for, what brand credit card you have, what memberships you have (AAA, Costco, etc.) and the loyalty programs you belong to (United Mileage Plus, etc.). Then Auto Slash sends you a curated offer based on the deals you have available.

Even better, if you already have an existing reservation, Auto Slash will track prices and alert you if the price falls. Then you can rebook the reservation at the lower price and save some dough. To save even more money, I usually book rental cars with my Capital One Venture X Rewards Credit Card, which gives me the option to redeem points as a statement credit against travel purchases.