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
But there are some limitations with those search engines. In particular, you're only going to see search results that apply directly to your credit card issuers transfer partners. So let's say Bilt and Amex both use point.me. They'll return different results because their transfer partners are different.
And if you have points with multiple credit card programs, it won't search through all of your available transfer partners. So let's say you've got a Chase credit card as well in addition to your Bilt card. When you use Bilt, you'll only see the results for transfer partners with Bilt. You won't actually see any of the other ones from Amex or Chase or any other non-partner airlines.
So of course, cost is one, but you also need to know whether the tool is going to do what you need it to do, right? So does it offer a search of the airlines that you want to use? Search speed is another. Some of these tools query from huge databases, cached databases that can take a really long time to get results. We're talking like 20 or 30 minutes for results for some of them.
But there are some tools that operate really quickly and kind of cut out that lag time. Additionally, to me, the biggest thing with these tools is alerts. So I don't want to have to go to the airline or hotel website every day and hope that I find availability. These tools allow you to set up alerts with your search criteria. So whatever your travel plans are,
They'll send you an email whenever the availability shows up. And sometimes they'll even send you emails letting you know that the availability isn't showing up just to kind of remind you that you might need to look for different options for whatever your travel plans may be.
So seat.arrow is one of my favorite tools because I can search for a very specific set of criteria. And I should start and caveat this by saying that it's probably not for beginners. For example, I use this tool to search for particular planes or particular seats that I've never flown before. So say I want to fly in a very specific seat, like we were talking about Japan Airlines earlier.
So you can filter specifically for Japan Airlines first class on a very specific plane, say their 777 that offers the first class. Or if you want to look for Singapore Suites or Etihad Apartments or Qatar Q Suites, these really aspirational business class or first class products, you can filter just for those and it's pretty valuable for that.
I also use seats.aero to filter only for flights where those seats are available and no other tool offers that so easily. In addition, seats.aero has a free and a pro version. Both offer alerts. Like we talked about, alerts are super important, but seats.aero does have this one quirky thing
where if they send you an alert and it triggers, then it removes the alert and you have to sign back up for it. So if it isn't perfect, if it isn't exactly what the travel plans you're looking for, then you have to go back into the website and set it back up again. So not totally ideal. It's not super, super user-friendly.
It takes a little bit of time to learn the nuances of it, but still a very, very powerful tool.
It doesn't, no. And I should mention that PointEI is my favorite tool. It's the one I recommend the most often, and it's the one that I use the most often. It doesn't do the sort of nitty gritty level of detail that seats.arrow has, but it has a super easy to use interface and lets you customize results in a variety of useful ways, depending on what miles or points you're trying to use.
So one of my favorite features is that it integrates current credit card transfer bonuses into the search results as well. And that's one of my favorite ways to save on my points and miles redemptions. So SayBuilt is offering a transfer bonus to Alaska Airlines. You can actually filter the results to include only Alaska Airlines or its partner airlines that will be part of that transfer bonus.
One of the other things I love about Points.ya is that the live search tool covers an eight-day range. So you get real-time results for award availability over that period on a combination of up to two departure and two arrival airports.
You got it. Yeah. So you can search for like Monday through the following Tuesday. So if you know what your departure dates are, you can search for award travel over an eight-day period from up to two departure airports and two arrival airports. So it's super powerful. It would be great if you could search for broader periods. Say you just know you want to travel sometime in June.
It would be nice if you could search for the entire month, but we'll take what we can get, right?
Points, yeah, offers a monthly and an annual premium subscription, but you'll need to determine how frequently you use the tool, determine if it's worth that $100 annual fee. I think the last I looked, the monthly fee was like $12 a month.
So if you're only going to use it once, then maybe it's better to use the monthly fee, find what you need, and then go back to the tool later and sign up for a premium membership later whenever you want to use it again. One other downside is the inability to search for airline-specific stopover or multi-city benefits.
So this is a big deal to me, and it's one of my favorite things about award travel. Just for example, I just used Alaska Air Miles on Finnair to get a free stopover on my way to Europe. So I was flying from the US to Amsterdam. And because Finnair's hub is in Helsinki, you could actually get a free stopover there.
So I went and visited Finland for a handful of days before I continued on to Amsterdam. So Pointsea kind of struggles with that a little bit. Another example is the United Excursionist perk, which offers a free one-way flight on a multi-city award ticket.
So for these itineraries that sort of have complex routing, you'll have to search directly with the airline website or call in to confirm award availability. But overall, I think a relatively few number of users will be impacted by these limitations. And again, Pointsea is a super powerful and easy to use tool.
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