Stressed about booking Travel: It’s easier with Points Path
As you begin to plan your travel, you should include Points Path as a resource to make things easier. I am starting to plan my summer travel and heard about Points Path. Once I added the Points Path extension, I immediately began planning my summer travel to South Carolina, Louisiana, California, and Fort Lauderdale. Typically it can take me about an hour to look up flights and how many miles they each are and compare the times but with this extension my time was cut in half. As someone who relies heavily on the big 4, Delta, JetBlue, United, and American, this extension is a godsend for travel planning.
What is Points Path?
Points Path is an extension that can be downloaded onto your browser, Chrome, and Microsoft Edge, that showcases how many points a flight is, next to its cash price when you search via Google Flights. They want to add Safari as one of the browsers to which the extension can be downloaded.
Currently, it only showcases flights that can be booked on Delta Airlines, JetBlue Airways, American Airlines, and United Airlines and their partners when Google Flights markets them as flights on those airlines. The other airlines not mentioned are not currently showing but the website says they are working on it.
How much does it cost?
There is currently no cost to download and use the Points Path extension. On their website, it states that in the future they may charge for more advanced features but the basic extension will always be free.
How do I use it?
When booking a flight, head to Google Flights. Once there, you can either search round trip or one-way. When you search, next to the cash price, the points amount will show up.
In addition, to showing you the pricing information, cash, and points, it also gives you their opinion on which option you should choose by stating: use either, use cash, good deal, or great deal. This is determined by an algorithm they created that is based on the percentage of how much one is cheaper than the other.
The other airlines still show up in the search including Spirit, Southwest, and Frontier, so you do not have to worry about not being able to compare those as you are looking.
Once you decide on a flight, click on the flight, and above the options at the bottom that show you the tiers, is the option to book via miles. When you click on that it brings you to a screen that tells you about hotels, getting additional miles, and credit cards. On the right side, it has your flight and you need to continue to the airline site.
On the airline site, you watch it assemble your flight by plugging in the correct information to bring up the flight you were looking at. Then everything is up to you to handle the booking.
How does it help?
This saves time and money.
No longer do you have to find your flight on Google and then search the airline site for the amount of miles, which is typically what I did before I had free, but limited, access to point.me.
Point.me is an alternative to this service, however, this is a paid service. You can get limited access to it via a credit card by Bilt Rewards or American Express, but then it only shows the transfer partners that those cards are linked to.
Is it accurate?
Yes, except if you have a Delta American Express Credit Card. Holders of Delta American Express credit cards get 15% off on points booked. So the price you see on Points Path will be higher than what you see on the Delta website. Also, it typically gives you the price for basic economy for Delta, but I noticed when I included bags with searches that included JetBlue it gave the points information for Blue instead of Blue Basic, which is what you would need.
Should you download the extension?
Yes, go here to sign up. They will email you a link to download the extension.
Conclusion
This is a service I wish I had years ago as I started my points journey. Being able to see the points amount as I am searching is so helpful. I only wish there was a similar tool for hotels.
Try out this service and let me know if it makes booking travel easier for you! If you want to learn more about what services I use when traveling check out my travel memberships post.
Save for Later
Clever. My husband and I will have to give it a try. Thanks for the info.
This is an interesting idea, and sounds useful. Do you know if they’ll be adding this to anything other than Google Flights?
I’d never heard of this before and I’ve just downloaded the extension. Thanks so much for the great tip!!
Your welcome! I love this extension! It has helped so much!