As travel has become both easier to access and more complex to understand, there’s a seemingly endless number of tools and services available to help navigate those complexities and find the best deal. Here’s a few of my favorite tools that you can check out when planning your next trip.
Autoslash
When booking a rental car, Autoslash.com is always my first stop. You just enter your pickup and drop off location(s), travel dates, and desired car type, provide a bit of information about your loyalty program memberships and credit cards, and sit back while Autoslash does all the work of comparing rates across a wide variety of websites and promotions. In just a few minutes, you’ll receive a link via email that will give you several car options, with a direct link to book that car at that rate either through Autoslash directly or on a major travel website like Priceline.
Their work doesn’t end when you make your reservation, though – their tracking feature allows you to enter details about an existing car rental, and they’ll email you if they find a lower price before your pickup date.
Awardmapper
Awardmapper is the easiest way to get a birds-eye view of the major chain hotels available in a city. Just enter your destination and you’ll see a map of the area with color-coded pins for each hotel chain; click on any pin to see the number of points required to book, and a link to the hotel’s website. You can filter your search by hotel program or number of points required, or scroll through a list of all the hotels visible to quickly compare relative prices. This makes it really easy to see which hotels make sense for your trip and find which one offers the best value.
Flyermiler
When booking award flights, Flyermiler is a great one-stop resource that quickly shows you all the different ways to use your miles to get from Point A to Point B. Just put in your origin and destination cities, and Flyermiler will instantly provide a list of mileage costs for award tickets on those flights in just about every program imaginable.
You can filter the results for class of service (economy, premium economy, business, or first), and then click on your preferred airline program to see details like where you can transfer points from and whether you’ll have to pay fuel surcharges on an award ticket. Once you’ve selected a program, the Routes tab tells you all of the possible routings for your trip with that program (ranging from straightforward to truly bizarre), to give you ideas of where to search for award space.
WhereToCredit
Have you ever booked a flight on a random airline you’ve never heard of before – or just seen a deal alert for a price you can’t refuse – and wondered how you can earn miles for that flight? WhereToCredit is a simple tool designed to answer that question. You’ll need to find the fare class on your receipt or the airline’s booking page, then just enter the airline and fare class on their website to get a list of all their partner airline programs and what percentage of the miles for that trip you’ll earn – it even factors in bonuses if you have elite status with an airline program! They also offer a Chrome extension which will show you mileage earning options in real time when you’re searching for flights on major travel websites.
Wikipedia
If you’re wondering what Wikipedia is doing on a list of travel tools, you may never have read a Wikipedia article about an airport before. On every airport’s Wikipedia page, there’s a section titled “Airlines and Destinations” that lists all of the airlines that provide passenger service to an airport and the cities they fly from. This can be a great way to find unexpected fifth-freedom routes (like Cathay Pacific from New York to Vancouver or Seoul to Taipei), local low-cost carriers, and generally know what to be looking for. (I’ve found this particularly useful in cases where an airline operates a route a few days a week, so I know to be looking for a nonstop even if my first few searches are only showing me connections.) Depending on the airport, this can also be a great way to get information about ground transportation options, and any special features like in-airport museums or art installations.
What are some of your favorite travel tools?
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