Booking Flights with Points and All Things Award Travel with Tiffany Funk

All the Hacks with Chris Hutchins

Chris Hutchins

Business, Education, Investing, Society & Culture, Places & Travel, Self-improvement

4.7 • 1.4K Ratings

🗓️ 23 November 2022

⏱️ 77 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

#89: Award travel pro Tiffany Funk joins Chris to talk about booking flights with miles, the advantages of having travel flexibility, the ins and outs of transferring points, ways to put your points and miles to good use, and the best sites/tools for booking award travel. Tiffany Funk (@tebfunk) is the co-founder and president of point.me, a one-stop tool for maximizing points and miles. She's also the Executive Director for the premium travel site One Mile at a Time. Having visited over 80 countries and written more than 300 travel blog posts, Tiffany is one of the world’s top experts on airline award travel and loves sharing her passion with travelers on frequent flyer programs, earning and redeeming miles, and maximizing points. Full show notes at: https://allthehacks.com/award-travel-tiffany-funk Partner Deals Inside Tracker: $200 + 34% off personalized wellness & nutrition plans backed by science Daffy: Free $25 to give to the charity of your choice DeleteMe: 20% off removing your personal info from the web Vuori: 20% off the most comfortable performance apparel I've ever worn Point.me: First month for $1 with code HACKS Selected Links From The Episode Connect with Tiffany Funk: Twitter | Website | LinkedIn One Mile at a time point.me (first month for $1 with code HACKS) Expert Flyer FlightsFrom Google Flights Loyalty Programs Aeroplan American Advantage Flying Blue United MileagePlus Full Show Notes Introduction to Tiffany Funk (00:00) Award flights vs. redeeming points for cash back (01:31) General guideline to aim for when redeeming points through loyalty programs as opposed to a credit card portal (03:47) Determining the best value of your points (05:44) Tips for using points to purchase multiple tickets (09:12) Transferring points: where to start (15:18) Flexible points (20:46) The sweet spot for when to book a trip (25:01) The best use of points when you have flexibility (26:55) Things you can do with miles that you can’t do with money (27:58) Advantages of having a destination, itinerary, or dates that are flexible (29:19) Amazing trips with better availability for someone with points (33:30) Using points on airlines vs. hotels (39:06) Why technology has made it difficult for people to use points for flights, and what to expect in the future (43:32) The secret to point.me’s success (45:33) How point.me works (51:09) How to save money on your first month of point.me membership (53:46) Chris’s airline search advice (55:04) Listener suggestion: find flights using FlightsFrom.com (56:08) Tiffany’s tool recommendations for reward travel (58:12) Married segment itineraries (59:47) How to get a good sense of how much a trip may cost (1:01:35) Hacks to reach your mileage goals (1:03:30) Chris addresses the issue of the difficulty in combining points for a trip and provides tips for getting around certain obstacles (1:06:26) Tiffany Shares Her Opinion on the Best Use of Your Points (1:11:59) How can point.me teach users to build better reward travel booking skills? (1:13:11) Tiffany’s Travel Recommendations (1:15:27) Connect with All the Hacks All the Hacks: Newsletter | Website | Facebook | Email Chris Hutchins: Twitter | Instagram | Website | LinkedIn

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, and welcome to another episode of All the Hacks, a show about upgrading your
0:05.8	life, money, and travel, all while spending less and saving more.
0:09.5	I'm Chris Hutchins, and I'm excited to have you on my journey to optimize and upgrade
0:13.0	my own life.
0:14.2	Now, a good portion of the emails I get from you all are about how to best use all the
0:18.1	points and miles you've racked up for travel.
0:20.8	And while I've covered parts of that, and at least it does in episodes, I felt like it's
0:24.1	time to have an episode solely focused on booking or travel.
0:28.5	So for the last few months, I've been trying to track down someone who is truly world
0:32.2	class at this, and I did.
0:34.2	So today, I'm joined by Tiffany Funk, who knows this game in and out.
0:38.6	For the past decade, she's produced, written for, and been the managing editor of One Mile
0:43.1	at a Time, the largest independently owned travel and loyalty blog, and she also ran operations
0:48.0	of one of the top award booking services points pros for nine years.
0:52.0	Then she took all that experience to co-found Point Me, one of, if not the best award-searching
0:57.1	product out there.
0:58.4	So today, we're going to break down the why, when, and how to search for award travel.
1:03.4	Talk about some of the philosophy about how to think about travel with your points and
1:06.9	with your miles.
1:07.9	We're going to get tactical so you can confidently put your points and miles to good use.
1:12.0	I'm also going to try to get a few travel hacks and tips from Tiffany because after visiting
1:16.2	80 plus countries, I'm sure she has plenty.
	...

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