Free Travel Hacking Tools You’ll Need

Before we dive in, it’s a good idea to get familiar with a few of the sites and tools we’ll be using to learn about how to use Avios miles. These are basic and free tools you can use to help plan your trip.

You can start by adding the sites below to a new bookmark folder.

I like to use my Bookmarks Toolbar in Google Chrome for this.

British Airways Executive Club Account

You’ll need a British Airways Executive Club account to manage your points, book flights, check Avios prices and more.

Don’t have an account? Sign up for a British Airways Executive Club account here.

Book With Avios Online Tool

The Book With Avios tool within your British Airways Executive Club account will allow you to book flights online using your Avios miles.

We’ll also be using this tool throughout the guide to check reward availability, gain information on how many Avios miles our flight will cost, as well as the associated taxes, fees, and carrier charges.

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The “Book With Avios” tool won’t show availability for Alaska Airlines. You’ll need to consult the Alaska Airlines website to search for availability (more on this later) or phone the British Airways Executive Club to confirm. The phone number is: 1-800-452-1201.
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FlightConnections.com

Flight Distance

This website is going to give us the distance of our flight routes and help us in the equation to figure out how many Avios miles we’ll need. Just type in your “From” and “To” airports to get your flight distance, which we’ll use later on in this guide.

Flight Routes

Flight Connections is also incredibly useful for seeing what airlines fly what routes. You can use the filters to find routes for your desired airline.

For example, to see all direct routes you can fly departing from Vancouver, BC, just type the city name (Vancouver) or the airport code (YVR) in the “From” field.

Routes by Airline

You’ll probably get a lot of results on the map, so we can use the filters to only show specific airlines.

If you wanted to see what routes Alaska Airlines flies direct from Vancouver, just select “Alaska Airlines” from the “Airlines” field. You can search more than one airline at once, but that’s a premium feature which costs $0.99 per month for personal use.

Google Flights

We’ll rely on Google Flights to get flight itineraries, and retail prices so we can determine the value of our travel reward points.

Google Flights has an easy to use interface and will help us plan our trip.

Google Sheets

I like to use Google Sheets to keep my travel planning efforts in order and be able to do simple, but repetitive calculations with a few formulas to help determine how many points are required, compare the retail costs, breakdown taxes and fees, and keep track of itineraries.

I’d strongly recommend taking good notes for your next trip! It makes such a big difference, and you’ll feel great keeping organized.

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Add this nifty bookmark to your bookmark toolbar to automatically create a new blank spreadsheet if you’re logged into Google.

The sheet will automatically be saved to your Google Drive account: https://sheet.new

You can also do the same for a new Google Doc: https://doc.new
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Here’s a good walk through from YouTuber, Kchoi, on how to plan your travels using a spreadsheet:

Trello

Trello is a project management tool, but is also a great tool for collecting recipes, creating a vision board, a checklist of to-do items, saving bookmarks, adding things to procrastinate on, and oh – even trip planning! It’s a real powerhouse of an organization tool.

Think of it as your visual, and dynamic to-do list.

Here’s a sample Trello board of a New York City weekend trip.

Cards can be added to a list, and can change between states that you specify (ie. to do, doing, complete). Cards can also contain links, checklists, attachments, comments from other users you want to share your Trello board with, deadlines, and even more with power ups that tie into other cloud-based apps. Here’s a quick tutorial for beginners on Trello basics.

You can pretty much power your entire life with Google Sheets, Docs, and Trello. Sign up for Trello. It’s free.