Education of a Points Freak, Q6 – What are some other useful tools I can use?

 

• Education of a Points Freak – Introduction
• Question 1 – Is accumulating points and miles for everyone?
• Question 2 – Won’t applying for credit cards hurt my credit?
• Question 3 – What are the pros and cons of different airlines’ mileage programs? (US Legacy Airlines)
• Question 4 – What are airline alliances and how are they useful?
• Question 5 – How can I keep track of all my account balances?
• Question 6 – What are other useful tools I can use?
• Question 7 – What are some good credit cards to start with?

 

There is obviously a wealth of information out there for frequent travelers and budding points freaks like myself. There’s also a lot of information you can use if you just want to be a savvy traveler. I’ve highlighted a few of these resources below – some of them I consider absolute musts if you are serious about traveling.

ITA Matrix Airfare Search: my go-to search engine

ITA’s Matrix Airfare Search has become my go-to search engine for flights. I find it to be the most powerful search engine out there, with only a few drawbacks. Major drawback first: You can’t book tickets directly from ITA. The other drawback is that it only will search for one minute, so sometimes you will miss search results if your search parameters are too broad. Other than that, ITA is great – especially if you have very specific travel criteria.

ITA’s strength is in the plethora of search options available to you: you can designate stopover cities, specify the airline/alliance you want to fly on, and see your results in a variety of ways. If you’re looking for cheap airfare, it’s really worth trying out. Other travel aggregators have a lot of the same features, but I like the ability to combine multiple search parameters. It definitely has a steep learning curve, but still, I think it’s worth it. If you want to learn more of the in and outs of ITA, Hack My Trip has a great three part tutorial.

Seatguru.com: how to find the best seat

Once you’ve found your flight, it’s important to find the best seats. That’s where Seatguru comes in. Above is the layout for my flight to LA last week. You can enter in any flight number and Seatguru will give you a layout of the entire plane, including what seats are considered good and bad. It’s simple: green means good, yellow means some drawbacks, red means a lot of drawbacks, and anything else is just an average seat for that class. This can be very useful when trying to make your seat selection. Obviously, the “green” seats are usually reserved for elite members or people who pay for preferred seating, but it’s still important to avoid the red seats. Another nice feature is Seatguru’s description of WHY the seats might have drawbacks.

For more advanced users, you might want to pull up Seatguru to check what type of plane a particular airline flies on a particular route before you book it. For example, some cross country flights have full lie-flat premium cabins: it’d be much better to get in one of those planes if you are redeeming for miles (or paying) than into one of the standard recliners which is comfortable, but not necessarily worth the premium. Seatguru came in very handy when we went to Asia this year – seat maps helped me zero in on which flights I wanted and avoid flights that wouldn’t have been worth the mileage outlay.

Flightstats: keeping track of flights in the air

When I’m monitoring a flight that I’m taking or if I’m picking up someone from the airport, nothing tops Flightstats in my book. You can get up to the minute information on whether flights are on time, delayed, or cancelled. Flightstats also gives you information about general airport delays. The interface is easy, type in the flight name and date and it will give you up to date information about what’s going on. Other sites like Flightaware do the same thing, but for some reason I just prefer Flightstats. Honestly, it doesn’t matter, it’s just important to have a way to find out whether your flight is on time or not. If you download the mobile app it’s much easier than checking the board every 2 minutes.

Expertflyer: for the serious award enthusiast

Expertflyer.com has a ton of tools that are very handy for the serious award enthusiast. Unfortunately, most of those tools cost money, especially the most useful ones like award space availability for a bunch of airlines. Still, Expertflyer’s “create a seat alert” feature can come in pretty handy to give you an idea of whether there might be award space or not.

This summer, when I went with my wife the points hater to Asia, I wanted to fly via Europe in Lufthansa first class. The problem is, Lufthansa doesn’t open up its first class award space to United Airlines until 10-14 days out. However, I knew if a particular flight’s first class cabin was pretty empty, there’d be a great chance it’d be bookable with United miles two weeks out.

Users with free subscriptions to Expertflyer can use the “create seat alert” feature. I knew exactly what flight I wanted, LH 425, flying from Boston to Munich. I looked for flights with pretty empty first class cabins – one flight I saw had nobody sitting in first class three weeks from my desired departure date. So I just kept an eye on that flight until there were two weeks to go, and lo and behold the award space was available on United and I booked it. Expertflyer gave me the confidence that first class award space would open up. Sure, five people could have booked first class travel in that one week span, but they didn’t. If a cabin is pretty empty on a flight you want, you can generally bet there is a good chance of award space opening up on it eventually – flying empty planes only loses money for airlines.

I just checked Expertflyer to see how many seats are available on that same flight this Tuesday (it’s Sunday night as I’m writing this). As you can see below, only three seats are taken in the first class cabin right now:

So I then went to United to see if I could book the flight. Since I don’t have enough miles in my account, I knew they would let me “reserve” the flight until I can put the miles in my account. I went ahead and searched for two seats for myself and my wife on this imaginary vacation, and lo and behold, the seats were available and I booked them. I took it all the way through the reservation because United sometimes has phantom Lufthansa award space. As you can see below, United reserved the seats for me:

All I’d need to do is transfer miles into my United account, and I could be on my way to Munich on Tuesday in Lufthansa first class! Alas, I need to work, so I will cancel the reservation now (but someone else should book it!) Anyway, hopefully this illustrates how Expertflyer can be quite helpful.

Final Thoughts

There are tons of useful tools out there, but this post just highlighted four of my favorites. Just remember if you’re getting into points – the internet is your friend. Now seriously, someone go book those first class tickets to Munich!