Toolkit:
United.com – Searching award travel flights for Star Alliance
BritishAirways.com – Searching award travel flights for One World
Delta.com – Searching award travel flights for Sky Team
Mint.com – Tracking all your credit card accounts
AwardWallet.com – Tracking all your miles and hotel points
AwardMapper.com – Searching hotel point prices around the world
TripIt.com – Tracking your vacation plans by consolidating itineraries
AwardAce.com– An airlines award chart search engine
Gcmap.com – Calculating the distance between airports
Recommendations:
- Get a Schwab.com checking account. It’s free, you get 0.1% interest and best of all there are no ATM fees anywhere in the world. I use this when traveling since I get close to the bank rate when taking out money. I also just take out small sums of money since carrying a lot of currency is risky.
- Get Google Project Fi phone service. They charge $20/month for the service and $10/Gb of data used. Best of all they connect to the fastest network available and can be used internationally at no additional cost. Stay connected!
- My referral link gets you $20 started with a $20 credit: https://g.co/fi/r/A5A1WD
- If you don’t want to figure out what the best value for your miles/points are, there are many “Award Booking Services” that will do all the research for you. Typical cost is $100-200.
- If you need to understand why credit cards (when used responsibly) can be incredibly beneficial to you, NerdWallet has a great article here: https://www.nerdwallet.com/blog/credit-card-data/travel-credit-cards-study/
Favorite Sites: