There are hundreds of apps, portals, and platforms in the points and miles world, and honestly, most of them aren’t worth your time. I’ve tried a lot of them. Many overpromise, some are clunky, and a few are genuinely great.
What follows are the five tools I actually use on a daily basis. These are the ones that have become so embedded in how I travel and shop that I’d feel genuinely behind without them.
If you’re just getting into the points game, this is your starter kit. If you’ve been at it for a while, there’s a good chance you’re missing at least one of these.
Rakuten: The Foundation of Every Online Purchase
If you only set up one thing from this entire list, make it Rakuten.
Rakuten is a free cashback portal that pays you a percentage back when you shop at thousands of online retailers. We’re talking Nike, Sephora, Expedia, Viator, Dell, Best Buy, Nordstrom… the list is enormous. Rates fluctuate, but it’s common to see 8-15% back at major retailers during promotional events. Even on a normal day, most stores sit in the 2-6% range, which adds up faster than you’d think.
Here’s where it gets interesting for points people: you don’t have to take your Rakuten earnings as cash. You can link your account to earn Amex Membership Rewards points or (my current preference) Bilt Rewards points instead. Same shopping, same stores, same effort, but now you’re earning transferable points that can be worth significantly more than cash when redeemed for premium travel.
One important tip: if you don’t have a Rakuten account yet, sign up through our referral link first. New members earn a bonus after spending a total of $50 on any store in the first 90 days, and that bonus stacks on top of whatever you earn going forward.
Rove Miles: The Hotel Booking Layer Most People Don’t Know About
Rove Miles is the tool I recommend most often to people who are already booking hotels but aren’t stacking their earnings properly.
Here’s the concept: Rove is a booking platform where you earn transferable miles on hotel stays, flights, gift cards, and shopping. Those miles transfer to airline programs for award flights. On hotels, you typically earn 5-20x Rove Miles per dollar, and during promotions it can go much higher (I’ve seen up to 50x on hotels).
The part that makes Rove different from other hotel booking portals is their “Loyalty Eligible” rates. When you book a Loyalty Eligible rate through Rove, the hotel processes your payment directly, not Rove. That means you keep everything you’d normally get from booking direct: your base hotel points, your elite status benefits, your elite night credits, and your credit card rewards. Rove Miles just stack on top as an additional earning layer.
If you only stay with Marriott, Hyatt, Hilton, or IHG and think a booking portal can’t help you, this is the feature that changes the equation. You’re not sacrificing anything. You’re adding.
I use Rove for virtually every paid hotel booking now. On a $500 hotel stay at the base 5x rate, that’s 2,500 Rove Miles earned on top of all my regular hotel and credit card earnings. Those miles transfer to airline partners for award flights, so you’re effectively getting closer to your next business or first class redemption every time you book a paid hotel stay.
Bilt Rewards App: The Free Points Engine
I’ve already mentioned Bilt in the Rakuten section, but the Bilt Rewards app deserves its own spotlight because it does so much more than just connect to Rakuten.
Bilt started as the platform that lets you earn points on rent payments, and that alone makes it unique. But the app has become one of the most useful earning tools in the points ecosystem, even if you never pay rent through it. And best of all, you do not need the Bilt credit card to take advantage of these:
Bilt Dining is the feature I want everyone to know about. You link your credit cards (any Visa, Mastercard, or Amex, including corporate cards) to your Bilt wallet, and you automatically earn 1x-3x Bilt points whenever you dine at one of their 20,000+ participating restaurants. This works on top of whatever your credit card earns. Pay with a Chase Sapphire Reserve that earns 3x on dining? You’re also earning Bilt points on the same transaction. It’s a true double-dip, and it requires zero effort after the initial setup.
The Rakuten integration (covered above) turns all your online shopping into Bilt points at a 1:1 conversion rate.
Rideshare linking is another win. You can link your Bilt account to Lyft and earn 2x Bilt points per dollar on every ride, on top of your credit card rewards. Between dining, Rakuten shopping, and rideshares, you can accumulate a meaningful Bilt balance without ever having a Bilt credit card.
Their transfer partner list reads like a greatest hits of loyalty programs. You can move Bilt points 1:1 to World of Hyatt, Alaska Atmos Rewards, United, Air Canada Aeroplan, Turkish Miles & Smiles, Virgin Atlantic Flying Club, and many more. It’s one of the most versatile transferable currencies in the game.
CardPointers: Never Miss a Credit Card Benefit Again
Here’s a question: do you know every rotating bonus category on every card in your wallet right now? Do you know which Amex Offers you’ve activated? Whether you’ve used your Saks credit this cycle? Which card earns the most at grocery stores this quarter?
If the answer to any of those is “not really,” CardPointers is for you.
CardPointers is an app where you add all your credit cards, and it automatically tracks every bonus category, every rotating activation, every time-sensitive offer, and every card benefit across your entire wallet. When you’re about to make a purchase, you check the app and it tells you the optimal card to use. No more accidentally using your 1x card at a store where another card earns 5x.
The free version handles the basics, but CardPointers+ is what I’d point you toward. It tracks all your card benefits (airline credits, dining credits, streaming credits, hotel credits) and reminds you to use them before they expire. If you carry premium cards with annual fees, forgetting even one quarterly credit essentially costs you money. CardPointers makes sure that doesn’t happen.
This is particularly useful when programs change. When Bilt 2.0 launched with three new card tiers and completely new earning structures, CardPointers had support for every new card within days. Instead of manually trying to remember which version of which card earns what, you update it once in the app and it handles the optimization going forward.
For anyone carrying more than two or three rewards cards, this pays for itself almost immediately through better card usage and benefits you would have otherwise forgotten about.
Cloud9Club Exclusive Tools
I also built a few tools specifically for this community because I couldn’t find what I needed anywhere else.
The Points Stacker Tool identifies opportunities to stack shopping portal bonuses (like Rakuten and Rove Miles) on top of credit card merchant credits for maximum earnings on a single purchase. It’s free for anyone to use.
The Transfer Partner Matrix is a visual, searchable guide to every transfer partnership across all the major credit card programs and airline/hotel loyalty currencies. If you’ve ever wondered “which of my points transfer to this airline?” this answers it instantly. Available exclusively to First Class members.
Pointfolio lets you track all your points and miles balances in one place so you always know exactly what you’re working with. Also exclusive to First Class members.
Seats.aero: The Award Search Tool That Replaced Hours of Frustration
If you’ve ever tried to find award availability by manually checking airline websites date by date, you know the pain. You pick your route, check one date, see nothing, check the next date, see nothing, repeat forty times until you either find something or give up. It’s brutal.
Seats.aero fixed this for me. It’s an award search aggregator that pulls availability across multiple airlines.
The free account gives you a taste of how it works, but the paid subscription is where the real power lives. Extended search windows, better filtering, and the ability to run broad searches (like “JFK to anywhere with business class availability”) make it dramatically more efficient than any airline’s native search tool.
I want to be clear: there are several tools in this space. I’d encourage you to try a few and see which one clicks. Seats.aero is the one I use daily and can personally vouch for, but the most important thing is that you’re using something. Manually searching airline websites in 2026 when these tools exist is like using a paper map when you have GPS.
Once you find the availability you want, seats.aero links you directly to the airline’s website to book. Always confirm that the seat shows available on the airline’s end before transferring any points. Occasionally there’s a small lag between what the aggregator shows and real-time inventory.
The Stack in Action
The real power of these tools isn’t any single one of them. It’s how they layer together.
Say you’re booking a hotel for an upcoming trip. You check Rove Miles for a Loyalty Eligible rate and book through them, earning 5x+ Rove Miles on top of your hotel loyalty points, elite night credits, and credit card rewards. Before the trip, you buy some travel gear through Rakuten, earning Bilt points on purchases you were making anyway. At dinner during the trip, your linked Bilt Dining card earns you bonus points on top of your credit card’s dining multiplier. And when it’s time to book that award flight you’ve been saving for, you pull up seats.aero and find the perfect redemption in minutes instead of hours.
That’s really the whole game: finding the layers that stack, setting them up once, and letting them work in the background while you go about your life.
Happy stacking.
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