One of the more common questions I get asked is whether I know of any services that will help people use their points for hard to find flights without you having to do the hard work.
These are ideal for people who know how they want to use their rewards points – in terms of their travel goals, destinations and dates – but who don’t have the time or inclination to get into searching for the best ways to use them.
I haven’t tried any of these services out – so there’s no endorsement implied of one over another. None have paid for inclusion in this list. But I have tried to pick the most mainstream and trustworthy services I’ve heard work well and provide good service.
If you’re interested in using one, pick a few and do your own research to see which might meet your needs.
iflyflat
If you’ve been into points for a while and live in Australia, then you may have seen Steve around the place on TV and in the media – he does a great job of promoting his services.
iflyflat also handle points earn strategy for SMEs but also run a pure award booking service alongside their points strategy and consulting packages. Their pricing model is charging 20% of the equivalent retail price of the fare they find for which you end up using your points for.
Steve and his team know the Australian market and frequent flyer programs of interest very well, as it’s their primary region in which they operate.
Points Pros
Points Pros is run by the well-known team behind One Mile at a Time, handling a range of points related services – but with a focus on award redemptions, and especially for the US market.
They charge a minimum of $200 USD per trip, along with an extra $100 USD per additional passenger on the same itinerary.
FlightFox
Flightfox is positioning themselves as a ‘travel concierge’ service to help individuals and small businesses save money by using good value paid fares along with looking for points redemptions.
The award flight search component of their service offers variable pricing depending on the number of destinations, travellers and class of travel. Here’s an example:
Book your Award
Book your Award is a service promoted by AwardWallet and is run by Gary Leff, who runs the popular View from the Wing blog.
Book your Award charges a simple fee of $150 USD per passenger.
If you run your own award booking service or think another should be included, let me know and I’ll check it out and see if we can get it in the list!
Some people pay the 20% fee on say a $10000 airfare without realising it may not be a complex booking or that US based services so exactly the same thing for a much lower fixed fee. Again Kevin and Todd miss the point. There’s a number of dissatisfied customers here their main complaint is price. Steve says he is responsive to criticism yet he doesn’t reduce his charges to reasonable prices.
If you know what the fee is before hand, 20%, and you still go through with it then that’s also your decision.
If you like to spend time here to vent, that’s also tour decision.
I don’t like going over the details, and I spend my time better building up my business that gives me value. Looking at points doesn’t give me value.
And lastly… We’ve all purchased something thinking it’ll elevate our status. And then realised “you know what I probably shouldn’t have made that purchase… I really couldn’t afford it.” at the time you wanted the service… And now you have buyers remorse. Nothing new.
To Steve I think you’re better off sticking to the corporates as you mentioned you were…. They have better things to do with their time so they’ll value what you provide.
You live and learn.
I consider myself a points nerd. Like many people here, I spend hours digging through award charts, keeping up with what’s on offer, and managing my business and life to maximise the benefits for the sake of hacking. But I’m a hacker by nature, it’s a fulfilling pastime. I like feeling smarter than everyone else because I worked something out for myself.
If I was to get out of my shiny new shoes, unlearn everything I now know, and step back into my past life of both an executive and manic small business owner, there is no way I would have prioritised learning this stuff (and I didn’t until the last few years). For those people who just don’t have the energy or focus to care about learning the optimisation process, they desperately need a service to do it for them. We can’t deny them that.
With respect to pricing, I know many past colleagues who buy fully-flex fares and never (not once) have ever cancelled them. This is a huge waste of money, but they don’t care — they are paying for the flexibility. I see these services as somewhat the same. They will cost, but they are designed to serve a need that is worth more than the price they charge.
I aim no disrespect to the opinions of anyone else here, however I feel the conversation hasn’t been in the spirit of those who would be thrilled to have some support along the way.
His claims as an expert/specialist in the field though don’t float with me. From what I’ve heard, his ‘strategies’ run along the lines of: concentrating business spend through AMEX, taking advantage of discounted award redemptions (QF/Air France, Malaysian etc) and transferring points when bonus transfer offers are going around – very basic stuff. If it’s simply the countless hours of searching for a redemption that people are seeking to avoid (i.e. booking flights on points) – could not heap anything less than praise for the work done by Gary Leff, Ben Schlappig + team at Points Pros and SFO777 – especially at their far more reasonable pricing. Those guys have been in the game a lot longer (I recall Steve boasting 4 years since an international economy flight…hardly a seasoned veteran) and offer advanced strategies for redeeming (e.g. organising an alliance liason in difficult award redemption situations).
Hope that helps anyone looking into these options!
I could do my own company tax return every year too, but I leave it to the experts who know what they’re doing and how to get all the best deals to maximize the opportunities.
Unless you’re broke or really really enjoy spending hours and hours every day trying to find a needle in a haystack – I can’t see why you wouldn’t engage iflyflat to do the heavy lifting for you
I’m always open to feedback, so thank you for providing it.
I want to set my side of the story because this is an open forum.
The key answer to the question on our fees based on your own personal valuation on the opportunity cost of time.
You would know it takes significantly more than 1 hour to find the seats on the flights that you want, and I would guess you spend a lot of time keeping up-to-date on the multiple & ongoing changes to cards and airlines.
Perhaps you enjoy it, that’s cool – It is my passion too, and I’ve built a business on it to help select clients.
Our clients run successful businesses and they know what they are good at. None want to spend 10/20/30/40+ hours or weeks searching for seats which may not be there. They know they can better apply those hours running their business, on personal development, or with family & friends.
We specialise in helping small, medium & larger businesses who spend over $200k/yr on non-wage operating costs, some of our clients spend up to $55m/year on cards. Helping them to optimise those points and providing the flight booking service can deliver big savings. Typically, our clients save $28,000+/year – AFTER our fees.
They are pretty happy with our 20% fee share, as they save 80% on tickets prices before taxes on every flight we book – at no risk to them.
I’ve only ever had a handful of complaints and each time I’ve resolved the issue and used the feedback to improve our service.
Sometimes It seems really easy if you get lucky. We have booked 149+ million points, our team books more award seats per week than most people have tried in a lifetime.
If you have any issues, I’m happy to resolve them.
You know how to contact me directly.
Steve
CEO of iFLYflat
This would be a handy service, as it would take the risk out of buying points when they’re on special and also cut down on the research prior.
Whilst they are responsive, you really don’t get a lot of value out of iflyflat that you could easily find in 1 hour of searching options yourself. to be honest, I was quite disappointed
I often wonder how much of this paid ‘insider knowledge’ comes from sites such as pointhacks & AFF anyway. Pretty hard to have a fresh edge these days, especially charging for the privilege.
the guy that writes alot of TR’s on flyertalk – SFO777 runs a similar service to pointspros and bookyouraward