There are some websites and apps I regularly use when I’m trying to figure out award-flight routes, hotel award availability, where to get the best payout for my online shopping, or other helpful information that makes travel better. Here’s a brief description of each one and how you might also find them useful. Some require a paid subscription that I find worth it, but most are free.

Travel Freely: This app is hugely helpful to keep track of your credit cards, when you applied for them, what your 5/24 status is, when you need to meet your spending requirements, and everything else you need to know to keep a handle on your card strategy. The app even offers details about each card’s benefits and costs, helpful suggestions about card-downgrading options, and links to blog posts so you have everything you need right there in the app. The app is free and doesn’t require you to enter any sensitive information. My personal tip: If you create one account to log in, you can just give your Player 2 that same login information and then they can see the same information you’re seeing without having to create their own account. (The app lets you identify a Player 1, Player 1 business, Player 2, and Player 2 business to keep track of all your cards.) That’s especially helpful if you have a reluctant Player 2 and you’re really the one in charge of keeping track of it all.

Here’s an example of the helpful information you get in the Travel Freely app you each card:

And an example of how the app helps you keep on top of all your cards so you don’t ever find yourself missing deadlines or paying annual fees you don’t need to pay:

Seats.aero: This site offers limited free award-flight searching and extremely robust paid award-flight searching for travel available through these airlines’ programs:

I’m hoping they keep expanding the programs they cover (Singapore and British Airways would be great additions, for example), but for now this is a good start to finding hidden gems that become available either for last-minute travel if you’re using the free version, or for all flights up to a year in advance, if you’re using the paid version. You can also set alerts for specific routes and specific dates and get notifications when a flight you want to book shows up as available. It’s incredibly useful and I love the ability to search for so many dates at once.

I usually only use this site to set alerts for specific flights I need or to just explore and see what patterns I can find in terms of available award seats for specific programs, routes, or destinations. It’s not perfect—I can often find additional flight availability that Seats.aero doesn’t show doing my own searches on each individual airline program’s site—but it’s good as a double-checking mechanism or an exploring/daydreaming/pattern-identification tool.

Here’s an example of what you’d get for search results if you were searching for any flights you could book through the Flying Blue program (Air France & KLM) from SFO to anywhere in Europe any time over the next year, sorted by cheapest business-class fares first. This is the kind of search you might do if you had flexible travel dates but just wanted to see when the best deals were, but you can also do very targeted searches by dates, a span of dates, etc.

An annual subscription is $99, but sometimes there’s a sale, so keep a lookout for those. I got my subscription on sale for St. Patrick’s Day (no idea why that day merited a sale, but why not, I guess) for $69.99. (Disclosure: The link I posted above is a referral link)

Rooms.aero: This is the companion site to Seats.aero and works similarly but for hotel award rooms. If you have a subscription to Seats.aero, that includes Rooms.aero, too. Here’s an example of what you’d get for search results if you were looking for a three-night stay at a Thompson hotel (in the Hyatt program) in Spain, sorted by lowest award price:

Maxmypoint.com: This website’s UI makes my brain hurt, but it’s really useful when you’re trying to search for award-night availability at a particular hotel and want to see a broad calendar view and not have to search each individual night on the hotel’s website. You can also set alerts for specific hotels on specific nights. I don’t have a paid subscription to this; I use it infrequently enough to just get by with the limited number of searches per day they let you do on the free plan.

Here’s an example of an availability calendar you might see doing a search for availability for the Park Hyatt Kyoto—the blue bars indicate award nights using points and how many points they’d take to reserve, and the green bars represent the cash rate.

Maxmypoint.com also has a new companion site, maxfhr.com, where you can search for hotels in the AmEx Fine Hotels & Resorts collection to figure out where you can use your personal AmEx Platinum $200 annual FHR credit if you have that card.

Openhotelalert.com: Whenever there’s a hotel I want to book but I can’t find award availability for the nights I need, I set a free alert on this site and it texts me when availability opens up. I’ve had this work out in 100% of the cases when I’ve used it, but your mileage may vary, and my luck is not a guarantee of your own luck. Also, a pro tip: remember to cancel the alert once you book your room, because otherwise you’ll just keep getting more texts every time another room opens up.

Flight Aware: This site is great for all the technical flight info you might find useful when you’re booking or tracking a flight. I use it to figure out what aircraft are usually being used on a particular flight, whether they’re usually late, whether there are frequent equipment swaps, where exactly the plane’s flight route usually is so I know what side of the plane I want to sit on, etc. Flight Aware is a Houston company and I know a couple of people who work there and they are super-smart and I always like to give them a shout-out when I can. Great site, very useful.

Point.me: I’ve been using this award-flight search engine less since I got a Seats.aero subscription, but it’s still a good tool for searches of specific dates. It performs searches in real time (compared with Seats.aero, which pulls from recent searches to give you results faster and makes you wait to confirm it once you click into the result), so it can take what feels like forever to load your search results, but a good strategy for this is just running a one-way search, opening a new tab, modifying that search to a different date (or whatever you need), running that search, opening a new tab, etc. and just keep repeating in new tabs. Then by the time you get done running all the searches you’re pondering, the first search will likely be done running and you can just click between tabs and not feel like you’re spending your life waiting for the page to load. A one-year subscription is $129 but you can also get a one-day pass for $5 if you just want to do a search for one specific trip or test the service out before subscribing for a whole year. I think this site’s strength is for doing date-specific searches when you’re inflexible on when you’re traveling. It also includes airlines that Seats.aero doesn’t and seems more comprehensive.

Here’s an example of some unthrilling search results for four people in business class from SEA-LHR on a random date I just picked for next spring (85,000 points + $996 in taxes/fees AND I have to connect somewhere? no thank you):

Aerolopa: This is my favorite site to use to pick seats on a specific flight. It shows a great amount of detail so you know exactly where the windows are in relation to each seat, how many rows you are from a restroom, etc. This site is much more accurate than the often stylized seat maps you find on the airlines’ websites themselves.

Cashback Monitor: I usually stick to earning points through shopping portals through Rakuten or sometimes American Airlines, but if I’m ever unsure which portal to use for a specific purchase or want to branch out into another points-earning program, I look up what the portal bonuses are on this site.

Wikipedia or Flight Connections: When I’m trying to piece together a trip, figure out which airlines fly to which destinations, or figure out which destinations might make good connections for a particular airline alliance, I usually head to Wikipedia first (old habits die hard) to look up airports’ pages and scroll down to Airlines and Destinations > Passenger for a table listing each airline that flies there and from where. If routes are seasonal, ending soon, or beginning soon, there’s usually a notation about that. Flight Connections is a site that displays that same kind of information visually via map, which can also be helpful.

Great Circle Mapper: Whenever you’re trying to make an award booking where the cost is based on distance, this is the best tool to figure out the actual flight distance between two airports. I’d use this to try to figure out British Airways Avios pricing or ANA Around-the-World award-ticket pricing, for example. It’s also fun to map out your family trips to get kids interested in geography.

Flighty: I saw the user interface on this app and was immediately in love because it’s so sharp. Then I saw that it’d let me keep track of all the flights I’ve ever taken (once I take the time to input them all) and could not resist that idea. Then I read people raving about how the app alerts you to your upcoming flight’s delays or gate reassignments faster than the airline tells passengers directly at the airport, and I was sold. I bought the app and have had a blast playing around with the flight-history features. And now I can add my own experience to the raves about real-time flight updates—on our flight home from Austin last week, I was notified about our incoming aircraft’s thunderstorm delay before the Alaska desk agents said a word to everyone waiting at the gate. The app also suggests alternative flights in case your flight has serious delay issues or is canceled. If you’re a frequent traveler, this is a must-have app.

I’m pretty sure those are the main apps and websites I use, but I reserve the right to add to this list if I realize I’ve forgotten any!

Let me know in the comments—did I miss any of your favorite flight-related tools?