Free online travel tools I use: My FTU SEA presentation


a close-up of a passport

At the Frequent Traveler University event in Seattle a couple weeks ago I gave two presentations. One of them (which I think was more popular based on attendance) was about the various free online tools I use in my travel planning and how I get the most out of them. Yes, there are some paid tools which also can help, but I like to focus on the free options as I generally find they are darn close in terms of replicating the data/features in many cases and even exceeding the paid ones in some cases. And I also said I’d share the slides I used during the presentation so that people didn’t have to take cell phone photos and try to figure them out later. The good news is that I’m sharing the slides here. The bad news is that if you weren’t in the presentation they might not mean too much. I use them as an outline but I really talked a lot about things which weren’t necessarily shown in the slides, doing demos of searches and otherwise trying to make the session as informative as possible. So, given that background, here are the slides.

image

And if you have questions about what I mean in any of the slides feel free to ask in the comments. I’m happy to answer as best I can.

Even without the actual presentation I can offer up a few bits of insight on the slides which I hope are helpful.

Like I said, I don’t expect that this is going to be the same as having been there, but hopefully the slides help provide some context and background which are useful to you.

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Seth Miller

I'm Seth, also known as the Wandering Aramean. I was bit by the travel bug 30 years ago and there's no sign of a cure. I fly ~200,000 miles annually; these are my stories. You can connect with me on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

8 Comments

  1. According to your last slide, you don’t use Award Wallet – is that a typo? Everyone uses Award Wallet.

    1. No, that’s not a typo. I don’t use it. I have few enough accounts that I can easily track them all directly.

      And I don’t really believe in chasing 50 points here and 10 points there across tons of programs as the RoI on my time never gets to a happy place so I don’t need the infrastructure to monitor scores of accounts.

  2. So, the blog post kind of just…ends. Was there supposed to be more content there?

    “Like I said, I don’t expect that this is going to be the same as”…?

  3. thanks. very interesting.
    -can you please explain why kayak is “worse” that hipmunk?
    -how do you use flight stats to find award seats for each cabin class please?

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