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Comment by callumprentice | Hacker News Reader

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.

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The big win I usually hear from family who use a lot of miles is on upgrading seats for free, which is really great because they have joint issues and fly fair number of international flights. But I think they also maintain a spreadsheet with a rotating schedule of like 10 credit card companies that are cycled (or maybe shifted between based on who has the best deal for a given good or store in any given month?) for maximum points.

Having accumulated points on various platforms, in my experience, United and Alaska had much better availability for close-in flights than Delta. Dunno if there's a difference between redeeming on the Chase site versus transferring to United and then redeeming, but might be worth playing with.

Transferring is almost always the more fruitful option, but it depends on the award deals.

Oh man, do I hear that. I suspect you’ll like this; let me know what you think! Feedback greatly appreciated

Spoiler alert, it’s basically a scam

Agreed. Anyone interested should check out a report out of Vanderbilt, "The Loyalty Trap: How Loyalty Programs Hook Us with Deals, Hack our Brains, and Hike Our Prices."

https://consumerlaw.berkeley.edu/news/price-loyalty-how-rewa... https://cdn.vanderbilt.edu/vu-URL/wp-content/uploads/sites/4...

Small counterpoint: Working in a spot where I had visibility to various loyalty programs, several of them definitely rewarded loyalty. Big spenders would get better conversion rates than the regular consumer.

The difference here is that I’m already earning points. I’m not doing anything new to earn them; I mostly remember “restaurants on this card, online shopping on that one” and apps like CardPointers can assist if needed.

But this isn’t about selecting new loyalty programs or even being loyal; this is focused on more transferable credit card points, and airline miles you’re already earning.

It’s about using them at maximum benefit, not earning them maximally.

It most definitely isn't, but it takes significantly more effort than the bloggers want to make it seem like.

Yes it’s not technically a scam because it’s legal.

But it has scam smells: layering, misdirection, lock-in, very fine print, gamification, adjacent complex social media apparatuses.

I’d place it near MLMs, loot boxes, timeshares, robux, liquidity mining.

Yeah, flying my family of 5 to Hawaii using skymiles accrued on my Amex. Totally a scam.

They’re basically interchangeable with cash. I don’t get the issue. The main frustration I have is that I cant buy myself a ticket with cash and then pay skymiles for my child. If they weren’t of an age that they must be on the same reservation it wouldn’t matter. Feels more like a limitation of Delta’s abacus that sits behind their mobile app.

It’s not nearly as complicated as you make it out to be, and the literal point of what I posted is to try and simplify it.

An MLM or timeshare it is not.

Yes, it has gotten harder than it was a decade ago. But it is far from a “scam”

What about businesses like roame.travel (YC company)? I think this toolkit just replaced services like that entirely

It uses Seats.aero under the hood, which is a Roame competitor, but I’d love to integrate it with others. Seats.aero is the only one with an API, though, which I believe is a mistake on Roame and others’ part.

The actual searching for actively available award flights is the part this relies on Seats.aero for

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