Craig Joseph
speaker
277 appearances
3 recordings
2 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard 19 Aug
Craig Joseph’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Smart Travel: Upgrade Your Getaways · Bilt to Last? Grading Bilt Rewards Six Months On · 19 Aug 2026
podcast
It's one of those things where you can't unsee some of the things I've seen.
No, not at all.
again.
It was my pleasure.
Everybody go earn those built rewards and be sure to fill your water bottle before you get on the plane.
Hey, Megan. Thanks for having me.
Well, I got into miles and points about 15 years ago with the primary goal of saving money. I think it's safe to say that that's why we're all here, right? It's to stretch our travel dollars. The more money you save on travel, getting to your destination and the hotel once you get there, the more money you have for cool experiences once you're on the ground.
So anyway, I was a poor grad student and loved to travel and tried to stretch my point balances by booking the cheapest flights and hotels possible. And that all changed around 2015 when I used American Airline Miles to book an international business class flight for the first time. And that flight was on Japan Airlines in the U.S. to Tokyo.
And I remember sitting in the spacious business class suite looking around with this ornery grin on my face thinking I didn't have to pay for this.
And talk about imposter syndrome too, like surrounded by people that probably paid thousands of dollars for their seat. And I'm just like, do I belong here?
I compulsively track everything in all aspects of my life, but I have a spreadsheet that tracks all of my redemptions. And over those 15 years, I've saved something like $250,000 off the retail costs of travel.
That's thousands of nights on the road, hundreds and hundreds of flights. I've been all over the place, and it's kind of neat to track how far this hobby has taken me.
So back in the day, you had to spend quite a bit of time. There weren't tools out there that made the process easier. But today, the process doesn't really have to be that complicated. A lot of people have this misconception that there are all these nitty-gritty and nuanced riddled terms and conditions for
all these different airline and hotel loyalty programs that you need to know in order to book a nice vacation. But when it comes to actually redeeming your points, there are so many award search tools out there now that streamline the steps in the points redemption process that used to be super labor intensive, like finding award availability.
I remember that first business class flight I talked about going to Japan. I spent hours, probably days, combing the American Airlines website, just waiting for availability to pop up and other tools that will do that instantly for you.
So think of these tools sort of like Kayak or Google Flights for miles and points redemptions. The tools let you select what miles or credit card points you have. And once you input details like your travel dates and departure and arrival airport, they show you all the available options for using your miles.
So that long list of airlines that partner with your credit card points, these tools search all those airlines simultaneously and show you where there's availability so you don't have to search them one by one.
Definitely, there are different tools for different use cases. For the most part, these tools are best for people looking for airline partner award space or that have transferable points from their credit cards and access a wide range of airlines and hotel transfer partners through those credit cards. If you only have rewards with one loyalty program,
Say a certain airline, United Airlines, for example, you'd probably be better off using the airline website or the hotel website directly to search for that award availability. Otherwise, try out these tools and figure out where your next adventure can take you.
Well, I guess it would just be like any service, right? Worth it will depend on the value you get from the service. So if you pay $100 annually for an award search tool and it saves you more than that, even if you only use it once a year, that's a win, right? That said, many of these tools offer services with monthly rates so you can renew and cancel at will depending on your travel schedule.
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