163. Booking Award Travel and Business Class Deals with Thrifty Traveler

Points Talk®: Your Travel Dreams, Made Possible by Points

Alex, Pam and Jess

Education, Places & Travel, Society & Culture, How To

4.8 • 1K Ratings

🗓️ 13 January 2026

⏱️ 54 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Do you get overwhelmed booking award travel, especially business class flights? In this episode, Alex and Jess are joined by Gunnar Olson and Kyle Potter from Thrifty Traveler to talk through what really goes into finding great award opportunities. They share how they each got started with points and miles, how they approach finding strong redemptions today, and how deal alerts can support trip planning without requiring you to constantly search on your own.

The conversation explores the types of routes, programs, and business class products that still tend to offer solid value, including for longer flights or trips that would otherwise feel out of reach. Whether you're just getting started or already booking award travel, this episode offers expert insight into what's working right now and how to think about using points in ways that support how you actually want to travel.

You can find links to resources mentioned in this episode plus the transcript here: pointstalksquad.com/163

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Points Talk is also on YouTube! You can watch this episode here: youtube.com/@pointstalksquad

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Transcript

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0:00.0	We all know searching for award flights is one of the trickier things to master in points and miles.
0:05.9	Today's special guests share tips and tricks for booking award flights.
0:10.4	Welcome to Points Talk.
0:12.0	We are three moms who've discovered how to leverage credit card welcome offers to get hundreds of thousands of dollars of travel expenses for nearly free.
0:20.3	We've used credit card points of miles
0:21.8	to take vacations to places like Hawaii, Paris, Greece, Maldives, Japan, and so much more. And the
0:28.2	best part, we each still have 800 plus credit scores. Imagine being able to take the vacation of your
0:34.2	dreams for nearly free. It's totally possible and we're here to show you how.
0:40.7	Hey, I'm Alex and I'm Jess. Let's Talk Points. Today we are joined by two members of the Thrifty Traveler
0:49.4	Team, Gunner Olson and Kyle Potter. We are so excited for you both to be here. You know that we are
0:55.6	huge thrifty traveler fans. I think we've created a bunch of thrifty traveler fans in our audience.
1:01.5	So thank you for joining us today. Of course. Thank you so much for having us. You certainly have
1:06.2	created a lot of thrifty traveler fans in your audience. So it's a pleasure to get to speak to them
1:10.4	directly today.
1:11.5	We're going to get into a little bit more details about Thrifty Traveler and Thrifty Traveler premium a
1:17.0	little bit later in the episode. But just to kick it off, why don't you just give a quick overview
1:21.8	of like how you got started in Points and Miles, how you got started working for Thrifty Traveler
1:26.9	and all those good things.
1:28.3	Oh, man. How far back do we need to go? No, you know what? I think everybody gets started in
1:34.4	points of miles in some version of the same way, which is you go on a trip and you catch the bug
1:40.3	and you also see how much better you can do it. So for me, that was when my wife and I took
1:44.8	our first really big international trip through Thailand, Vietnam, and Japan in 2017.
	...

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