The 5 Best Award Search Tools | Frequent Miler on the Air Ep296 | 3-7-25
Frequent Miler on the Air
Frequent Miler
4.9 • 640 Ratings
🗓️ 8 March 2025
⏱️ 80 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In today's episode we'll talk about how American Airlines out-crazies Citi, Southwest out-bonvoys Marriott, and we'll talk about what we think are the 5 best award search tools that make it much easier to find those coveted awards.
(01:25) - One reader shares their concerns about tax payments made by an American Express card not counting towards sign up bonus spending.
(05:28) - Read more about paying taxes with a credit card here and check out our podcast Episode239 about paying taxes to earn rewards.
(05:45) - Capital One Venture X Business cards have a Rideshare Protection benefit (which you can read more about here.)
(08:00) - Hilton cards offer free night thru 4/29 (which you can read more about here.)
(10:29) - Wyndham Earner cards big bonuses
Read more about these Wyndham Earner bonuses here.
(13:39) - Citi: accidentally credited a client’s account with $81 trillion when it meant to send only $280 (Read more about this here.)
(15:22) - American Airlines made a huge blunder which you can read about here.
(19:25) - Marriott StudioRes
(26:00) - Southwest for the win
Read more about Southwest slashing points earning on Wanna Get Away fares here.
(29:52) - Alaska starting to roll out mixed partner awards
(32:23) - Aeroplan Family Points Sharing Returns
(35:20) - Hilton adds more and more SLH properties
(38:06) - Find current transfer bonuses here.
(41:14) - Read our post about award search tools here.
(42:47) - Live Searches vs. Cached Discovery
(47:23) - Alerts are KEY
(50:25) - Flexible Live Search is very important
(51:59) - Which is Best?
(54:57) - Runner up
(59:07) - Best for Beginners
(1:02:28) - Best for advanced people
(1:05:10) - Best add on (to use in addition to these other tools)
(1:08:15) - Worth mentioning
(1:12:17) - Discounts available in our post about which award search tool is best here.
(1:12:28) - What should you do with your Capital One miles?
Mentioned in this episode:
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is a Voyescape podcast. |
| 0:03.9 | You can find all of our travel podcasts from around the world at voyescape.com. |
| 0:11.0 | On today's show, American Airlines out craziest city. |
| 0:15.9 | Southwest out Bonvoys Marriott. |
| 0:18.7 | And we go over the five best award search tools frequent |
| 0:22.6 | miler on the air starts now today's main event the five best award search tools finding |
| 0:30.9 | awards using your points and miles can be really difficult especially if you want to find |
| 0:35.2 | those really good ones where your points get way outsized value. But there are some great tools on the market that actually can make it |
| 0:42.7 | pretty easy to find the awards that you're looking for. So we're going to get into that and give |
| 0:49.3 | awards to the best award search tools. Awards for the best award search tools. |
| 0:54.8 | Yes, that sounds pretty good. |
| 0:56.3 | So, yeah, I'm looking forward to this because I've said before that I kind of resisted |
| 1:01.2 | search tools in the beginning because I thought, ah, I could do everything they do for |
| 1:04.8 | free on my own. |
| 1:06.0 | I just need to search multiple sites. |
| 1:08.1 | And my goodness, they've just cut down on the amount of time I spend searching for awards or increase the efficiency anyway, with which I find them by such an order of magnitude. So I look forward to talking about those today. But remember, if you want to jump ahead to something or you want to come back to something later on, you can always find the timestamps in the show notes. So just expand the show description, find those timestamps wherever you're watching or listening to this. Don't forget to like it. Give us a thumbs up. Leave us a review. We |
| 1:31.4 | appreciate your comments, your feedback, your thoughts about everything we're talking about. |
| 1:35.6 | Speaking of what we're talking about, let's talk next about this week's giant mailback. |
| 1:39.6 | This week's giant mail comes from Thankful. Thankful wrote in as a comment to our post on how to pay taxes with a credit |
| 1:46.8 | card. And Thankful wrote, not sure if this has been addressed in the comments, but there's a non-zero |
| 1:54.3 | risk that tax payments made by an Amex card will not count towards sign-up bonus spending, though they still will |
| 2:03.0 | earn regular spend-based points. I just ran into this for the first time recently, after many |
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