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
Yeah, so point.me has a standalone app and website. It's not really a tool that I use much. The search features are relatively limited relative to what you get with a service like PointsYah or seats.arrow. And most of all, it doesn't offer alerts.
You know, for beginners, Point.me could be good because it offers straightforward and step by step booking instructions for how to actually transfer your points and book an award flight with a specific airline after you find award availability. So if you really need some handholding to get through the process, it could be good.
That said, there are tons of resources out there already on how to transfer your points and how to make award bookings. So it's really only valuable if you want those step by step instructions in the same app you're using to search for award availability.
I love PointsPath, and I'm glad you brought it up. I think it's a great tool. You know, if I'm not sure whether to use miles or pay cash for a flight, my first step is to use Google Flights to see what options there are. And the PointsPath extension seamlessly integrates with the Google Flight search results.
So it actually shows you the cash and the points or miles cost of a specific flight right there in the same place. And it makes it really easy to determine the value of your miles and whether you should book in cash or points.
Yeah, there's another tool I use all the time. It's called Aerolopa. And I use that to find the layout of the seating chart for whatever plane that I'll be flying on.
And this helps me avoid inadvertently selecting a seat that might have limited recline or a partially obscured window or that annoying computer box with the in-flight entertainment that's under the seat in front of you that takes up foot space. I hate that.
It's a great way to see what the plane is going to look like before you get onto it, so you know exactly what you're walking into. Another tool that I use is called Great Circle Mapper, which allows you to see your flight path between two airports. I am always a window flyer. I want the window seat. I want to be able to look out and daydream as I'm looking at the ground 30,000 feet above.
I use Aerolopa to pick the window seat that I want, and then I'll log on to Great Circle Mapper, and it'll show me the flight path between two airports. Like that flight to Finland that I had mentioned earlier, I logged on to Great Circle Mapper and I saw that I was actually flying over Greenland and just north of Iceland. So basically in the Arctic Circle. And I was flying at night.
So to me, this meant that I had a chance to see the northern lights if I was on the left side of the plane. So I knew I wanted to pick a window seat on the left side of the plane so that at some point in the middle of the night, I could open my shade and hopefully see the northern lights, which unfortunately I didn't.
There are probably two more that I use pretty regularly. Award Wallet's a great tool for tracking all of your points balances in one place. It's been around forever. It's easy to use. It's especially useful as well because they'll remind you when your points may be reaching an expiration date so you can avoid losing them, which is a big deal.
And if you're renting a car, I always recommend using Auto Slash. And that's been my go-to for comparing prices and saving money on car rentals for quite some time.
It really depends on what I'm looking for. Google Flights and PointPath are my first step when I'm flying domestically or if I'm paying cash for a flight. But if I know, for example, I'm looking for an international business class flight that I'd never pay cash for, there's no reason to go through that step. So I forego Google Flights and almost always head to PointsYeah.
Then once I find availability on PointsYeah, I go directly to the individual airline website to confirm the availability is real. And then I transfer my points and book my flight. And I think that's another really, really good point that listeners should understand is that some of these award search tools will show what's known as phantom award availability.
So the award search tool thinks that there's a seat that's available that may not be available. So you always want to check with the airline before you transfer your points.
Yeah, a lot of these tools actually have hotel integration. So Points Yeah has a hotel search feature. Seats.Aero has a counterpart called Rooms.Aero that does the same thing as the flights only for hotel rooms. So there's multiple options if you're also looking for hotel award availability.
Oh, I've so many hot takes. The one for today would probably be that Bilt Rewards is the best travel currency that I personally am starting to value more than Chase Ultimate Rewards or American Express Membership Rewards.
So I was team Chase, and I still am. Don't get me wrong. I love Chase Ultimate Rewards. But for the last 10 years or so, that's been my program of choice. But they've really kind of failed to innovate. There are no new transfer partners. It's sort of the same old what you got five years ago is sort of what you get today.
Whereas BILT gives you multiple ways to earn their reward points and bonuses within their rewards program and gives you access to award partners that you don't have access to otherwise. So one primary example is Alaska Airlines. Nobody partners with Alaska Airlines. And there are some indirect ways that you can transfer miles from other programs like American Express to get Alaska miles.
But Alaska is a one-to-one partner with BILT. And I find it super, super valuable. Beyond that, they have transfer bonuses at the first of every month called Rent Day. You can get some really, really sweet deals transferring your built rewards to certain airline or other transfer partners.
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