How to Maximize Your Points and Miles on Flights!

If you’re like me, and most people I know, you have at least one credit card like the Chase Sapphire or the Capital One VentureX that rewards you with points when you spend money on them that you can use to redeem things like flights or hotels. Between Tim and I we actually have 9 travel specific credit cards - the Chase Sapphire Reserve (both), American Express Platinum (both), Capital One VentureX (me), United Explorer (both), Marriott Bonvoy (Tim) and the Southwest Card (Tim) if you’re curious - and accrue thousands of points every year that we can use on travel. Obviously, this year, this strategy has been an important one for us, and these points have allowed us to save thousands of dollars on flights to travel around the world just by spending on our credit cards like we would normally. I’ve written another blog post about what strategies we use to book cheap or free flights that is more general, but this time I wanted to share the tactic that I use most often - transferring points from these portals to specific airlines - and my absolute favorite tool to make it extremely simple and easy (not sponsored, but not opposed!).

As a baseline, there are different ways to redeem the points in your travel portals. The most common are to either book directly through the specific travel portal, like Chase for example, or to transfer those points to an airline or hotel group to use on their specific websites. Generally what I’ve found by doing hundreds of these searches, and what the Points Guy and other points hackers back up, is that redeeming through the airline specifically vs booking through the portal is a better deal. This is because the portals base the points value on the actual dollar amount of the flight whereas airlines set their own rules for how many miles they charge for a given flight, which aren’t based solely on price. One airline might charge 45,000 miles for a roundtrip to New York, while another airline program charges 25,000 miles for the exact same flights that are the exact same price. So it’s valuable to try and find those cheaper redemptions.

The challenge that I’ve historically run into with transferring points to airlines is that doing the searching for redemption flights (flights booked on miles) is extremely tedious and time consuming. I would literally have to first do the search on Google Flights to see what airlines operate the flight path I’m looking for, then go to their specific websites, sign up for their loyalty programs, sign in and then try to do that same search booking with points to see how many points that same flight would be - and some airlines wouldn’t show it unless I had a mileage balance with them. When you compare that to booking in the Chase portal, where you can search just one place for all flights, it was almost not worth the effort when I was doing this for dozens of airlines. Then my life changed, literally changed, when I was introduced to Point.Me by Chris Hutchinson from All the Hacks.

Point.Me is a website that aggregates all the points redemptions on every single airline so you can search in one singular place to see where you should transfer your points from your travel credit cards or airlines without doing anything that I mentioned above. Once you find a great redemption, it gives you step by step instructions on how to transfer your points and book the rewards flight. They operate two different models - one where you can use their search engine to look up flights on your own called Point.Me Self Service which is what I use. They also have Concierge services where, for a fee, a consultant will do all the searching and booking for you.

Right when I started using Point.Me I found an amazing redemption flying to Melbourne from Los Angeles through Qatar on Qatar Airlines for just 50,000 points in Business Class. This same flight on the Chase portal was upwards of 150,000 points because it was basing it on the cost of the ticket which was over $1,500. It’s been a bucket list item for me to fly Business Class Internationally (bonus points for a Middle Eastern or Asian airline which are always better in service and quality) so I quickly snagged the flight and I am so looking forward to it!

Just to take a quick example on how to use Point.Me: I am looking for flights from Muscat, Oman to Doha, Qatar in early October.

The search engine is simple and you can input those details as seen above.

Here is the output. The flight when booked on Qatar Airways with points (as shown by Point.Me) is 6,000 points plus $71 in taxes. If you were to do that same search in the Chase Portal, here is the output:

Where booking direct with the airline is 6,000 points for this flight, booking through the Chase Portal is 33,576 points for the exact same flight. That's 5.5x the number of points you'd need to use to book the same flight.

If you were to look at booking this in cash, here is the output:

That same flight when searching on Qatar Airlines is 183 OMR which is $476 USD. Even when you subtract out the taxes of $71 which you would pay for the points flight, that brings the cost of the flight to $405 USD. That means that booking this flight with points gives you a points value of 6.7 points per cent. The Point Calculator puts Qatar Avios Points value at 1.2 points per cent so this is over a 6x value for a rewards flight.

Now that you know it’s worth booking this flight with points, Point.Me will give you step by step instructions on how to transfer your points and book the flight!

Voila! As I said - I have no stake in this company, but it has saved me so much time and so much money so I wanted to share it with you all! I hope it helps book some amazing travel in the near future!! Bon voyage!