Illustration: Millie Von Platen for Bloomberg Businessweek
Finance apps have grown in popularity to the point where, according to an August 2024 survey, 8 in 10 Americans now use them. But how many of them use apps to be more savvy about how they manage travel points and flight miles? “We often see travelers gloat about how they’ve accumulated points and miles as if they were assets like their savings account balances or investment portfolios,” says Sally French, a travel expert at the personal finance site NerdWallet. “Yet unlike the latter two things, point portfolios don’t earn interest or have the potential to grow in value over time.”
In fact, French says, it’s the opposite: Inflation eats away at the spending power of hoarded points. This should motivate travelers to burn their loyalty currency rather than stockpile it, but sometimes that’s easier said than done. “It’s difficult to peg a true value to a loyalty rewards portfolio,” French says. “When travelers are ready to finally spend down their balances, we tend to see people overspend or make otherwise suboptimal decisions.”
Luckily, there are plenty of websites and mobile apps that can help. We’ve gathered some of the best free and paid online tools to make the travel booking process a little less painful—and a lot less expensive.
Best for finding the cheapest award flights
When you search an airline site for flights you can pay for with accumulated miles, you can usually view what’s available at that airline and some (but not all) of its partners. By contrast, mileage fare search tools such as Award Logic, SeatSpy and Point.me can find better deals and explain how to move your miles around to book them.
Best for travelers with fewer miles
The website Seats.aero unlocks all the flight routes among several airlines on a given date that have award availability at a certain price. Trying to get to Aspen during winter break on a cheap mileage ticket? Good luck! But this site can show all the flights with award space to Denver, or to other ski resorts around the world you might have overlooked.
Best for booking hotels
Dynamic pricing on hotel awards makes it hard to know when you’re getting a good deal, especially because comparison shopping across programs is so cumbersome. Max My Point and Open Hotel Alert target that problem, searching various hotel programs simultaneously. If you don’t find availability for your desired hotel or room type, you can set an alert to get notified when inventory is added or the points price you did find has dropped. Max My Point has an extra perk: It lets you sort results by cash value, quantifying the exchange rate of your hard-earned points.
Best for tracking mileage fare drops
Many airlines allow free changes or cancellations on award redemptions. On PointsYeah you can set an alert for price drops on routes you’ve already booked. That’s how this reporter saved 150,000 mileage points on American AAdvantage business class tickets to Europe.
Best for ferreting out credit card deals
Several apps can track your credit card spending and make tailored suggestions to maximize your rewards; among them, the TPG app is the cheapest (it’s free) and has the most user-friendly interface. It can tell you which card to use at a restaurant—maybe your Chase Freedom card is offering a 5x points promotion this quarter that you didn’t know about. TPG’s Award Explorer feature lets you enter your departure airport, number of travelers and preferred cabin class to discover all the places your miles can take you with clearly laid out costs and availability.
Best for finding better seats and even upgrades
When you select seats on a flight, chances are the airline isn’t showing you real availability. These seat maps tend to block out certain seats, like bulkhead rows or those with handicapped-accessible armrests, so gate agents can assign them at the last minute to those who need them. Expert Flyer, which costs $100 a year, shows you what’s actually open, including those secretly available seats, so when they’re made available to assign right before departure, you know what to ask for or grab on the airline’s app. Expert Flyer also lets you set alerts when such seats become available, so you’re first in line to reserve them.