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As someone who do the whole mileage actual thing for many years (millions of Chase and Amex points) but also a family and a full time job - IE 3 seats vs 1 and can’t leave for a trip at the drop of a hat - I’m always astonished by how worthless my miles seem to be.
I’m not convinced it’s all one big scam but a teensie bit hopeful your solution can help. Looking forward to trying. Thank you.
Calling it a scam is lazy. The terms are public, devaluation is disclosed, award space is limited by design. Plenty of people fly business to Tokyo for 60k points. It's just not optimized for families booking 90 days out.
"Replaced" is doing a lot of work there. Roame has actual users, a maintained data pipeline, and a polished UI. Most people who'd pay for roame won't self-host anything. Open source toolkits and consumer products aren't really competing for the same people.
Three seats is a different problem. Award inventory for a single traveler is bad enough; for three seats on the same flight it drops to near zero. No tool fixes that - it's an airline problem.
While Trivago covers major hotel sites, I sometimes find “shady” small sites often times offer better prices for hotels. I’ve been using super.com and vio.com and they seems great.
Another complication is credit card companies’ own portal. E.g. we need to take into account Amex’s FHR or Capital One’s premier collection. They offer credits and sometimes special “stay two nights, one night free” stuff. If we are in the credit card game, then there’s also “I have X credits in the first half of the year so it’s free” situation (e.g. Hilton resort credit).
In my personal instance I actually have added the list of Chase The Edit as well as AmEx’s FHR/HC hotels. The problem is there’s no easy way to to search AmEx/Chase for those.
I’ve never booked on super.com usually because I’m not into the “any room, run of the house” that usually requires, but please lmk if I’m missing something!
And please, I am very open to PRs that improve it. :)
The FHR credits are easy to miss when comparing rates but often close the gap with OTAs entirely, especially on premium properties. Capital One's Premier Collection has gotten genuinely good since Venture X launched - would be a useful addition here.
Nope. I just booked biz class flights to Scandinavia in August for 140k pts.
Cash was about $7k for the same flights.
In part, the reason I built this wasn't exactly to optimize 1.5cpp vs 2cpp, although that can be useful too... but rather to help me make the choice between using points vs. cash. (which, yes, is based on the cpp value).
But if you don’t find it useful, I’d love that feedback too!
Minor nitpick: "points" and "miles" aren't really interchangeable. Points are transferable credit card currencies (UR, MR, etc.), miles are tied to specific airline programs. The distinction matters when you're talking about search tools. But I get why the tool uses "points" as a catch-all.
I’m not convinced it’s all one big scam but a teensie bit hopeful your solution can help. Looking forward to trying. Thank you.