Travel tools

I generally recommend home-grown tools such as Excel or Word or anything basic enough to manage your travel points. Honestly, even your notebook should suffice if you plan your trip well and want to keep it simple. There are a lot of online and offline programs which offer you free templates. It is easy to build one yourself as all you really need to enter in an online excel which is in the cloud is details about the program such as program name, expiration date and possibly a list of zip codes around which your travel is planned. Just plug-in the zip codes and check which hotels and airlines offer the best deals.

Most of the times, you would find the best deals online. Many major chains simply put them online and have the same info access to both you as well as their employees. I know that sounds counter intuitive as one may guess that employees or travel agents have the best deal. But really, these guys get the margin offers. As in, they get the deals based on volumes and hence work best if you are doing bulk bookings of corporate bookings. At which point, it makes sense to pick up the phone. For a normal traveler, single or with family, it hardly makes sense to try that hard. Though, certainly I am not discouraging you from pick up that phone and call to check about any ongoing specials in air or hotel.

Awardwallet.com is pretty good and so are a bunch of other sites. I like Reward programs sites that list down your points as well as earn you points on activities such as dining or using local business. I usually prefer going directly to the airline websites though. Most offer a multitude of tools that could be used to manage your travel.

To round-up, as indicated at the start, build your own, home-grown tools. It need not be something fancy but anything that is a combination of computer docs - online or offline that only you can access without the hassles of login/password OR simple index cards based tracker are really all that is needed. For scheduling, there are free calendars - again both online and offline.

The best tool that you have is planning ahead. Pick up two airlines and hotels and stick with them and accumulate crazy number of points and spend them during an off-season. Nothing really could beat it!