The Needle in the Haystack: Searching for Award Travel
I’m pretty sure we’ve all dealt with the horrors of booking travel — from the glitchy websites to a few “customer service agents” that seemed to have forgotten the “customer service” part of their job. Now enter into the world of reward travel — one of the most lucrative programs for airlines around the world, but one of the hardest to navigate and certainly most frustrating things you can do in life other than going to the dentist or God forbid moving.
For those less inclined to spend hours on a Sunday searching for that elusive point redemption and happy to settle with booking through the AMEX/Chase/etc portal (it pains me when I see whom I consider friends do this) — let me give you a little points 101 lesson. Chase/AMEX/CapitalOne/etc all have booking platforms with fixed rates (ie. cents per points) that you can use to book flights or hotels at the market rate — this all sounds hunky dory until you realize there is a whole world (more like a tangled web that not even the spider has a map to) of interconnected points programs where you can maximize the value of your points (sometimes by 10x+) by spending just but a few years researching exactly how to get the redemption (I’m only slightly exaggerating). You see by simply transferring your points from say AMEX to for example Cathay Pacific Asia Miles, you can score the same flight (possibly) for a fraction of the points.
Now if I were explaining this to my dad (or frankly anyone who doesn’t have the time to read copious amounts of articles from @ThePointsGuy), they would understandably look at me a little funny and ask when the next time I think they’re going to fly to Hong Kong is (which by the way — if you are, Asia Miles is a great option!).
Here’s where the rubber meets the road though and where the tangled spider web I described is now our north star — all of these airlines belong to alliances where you can usually book awards on other airlines in that same alliance or airlines they have partnerships with. For example, you could book a one-way business flight from JFK to Doha on September 14th on Qatar Airways for ~802k AMEX points OR transfer them to Asia Miles and pay 75k points plus $500 in taxes and fees.
The only problem with this is that there’s actually a better way to book this
(through American Airlines for 70k points and $7.65 in taxes and fees) — the other problem is it took me 20 minutes to get the Asia Miles website to load correctly (yes, I’m using Chrome) to even come up with this example. Who on earth other than me and a few people scattered around the globe with more time on their hands than sense would take the time to not only search for these awards, but memorize how the airline alliances work, which cards can transfer to what program, the best airline search engines to use, etc.
This all brings me to a recent technological innovation that I wanted to write about today — one savvy travel blogger, Adam Morvitz recently launched a website called point.me which bills itself as the “Google Flights” of award travel booking. Point.me works similar to other travel sites out there by searching for your route on a selected date — but instead of cash prices, displays prices in points across all of the ways you could book the flight (they would show Asia Miles and American Airlines for the example earlier) as well as what credit cards you can transfer those points from!
Backed with $2 million of venture funding led by PAR Capital Ventures (and a number of other investors including the co-founders of ITA software — which is now Google flights), point.me promises to streamline this whole process and give me back my Sunday afternoons. This also looks to be the beginning for point.me as well — with the new funding they are hiring front and back-end engineers to not only improve the core product but become the “go-to loyalty management site.” They are heavily investing in data to improve the experience for their customers and enterprise partners — including AI-based algorithms to highlight redemptions that clients are most likely to book and using predictive technology to recommend which awards have the best chance of becoming available.
This is a pretty awesome innovation in an industry that prides itself on having the worst technology out there (after all, the harder it is to maximize the value of your points, the better it is for the airlines and credit card companies). While I’m not being paid to write this article (@Adam Morvitz — hit me up if you wanna change that!) — I do believe strongly in the value of this service, although candidly it would be nice if they kept the antiquated systems around so my extremely niche knowledge of airlines alliances and partnerships (yes — you can redeem Virgin Atlantic miles on Delta!) don’t completely go to waste… Next up maybe they’ll tackle the slow WiFi on planes — the airlines should really team up with Amtrak to see how they did it (jk… I know that’s a sick joke for all you Amtrak travelers out there).
