Travel Hacking Toolkit
Points search and trip planning with AI
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I use points and miles for most of my travel. Every booking comes down to the same decision: use points or pay cash? To answer that, you need award availability across multiple programs, cash prices, your current balances, transfer partner ratios, and the math to compare them. I got tired of doing it manually across a dozen tabs.This toolkit teaches Claude Code and OpenCode how to do it. 7 skills (markdown files with API docs and curl examples) and 6 MCP servers (real-time tools the AI calls directly).It searches award flights across 25+ mileage programs (Seats.aero), compares cash prices (Google Flights, Skiplagged, Kiwi.com, Duffel), pulls your loyalty balances (AwardWallet), searches hotels (Trivago, LiteAPI, Airbnb, Booking.com), finds ferry routes across 33 countries, and looks up weird hidden gems near your destination (Atlas Obscura).Reference data is included: transfer partner ratios for Chase UR, Amex MR, Bilt, Capital One, and Citi TY. Point valuations sourced from TPG, Upgraded Points, OMAAT, and View From The Wing. Alliance membership, sweet spot redemptions, booking windows, hotel chain brand lookups.5 of the 6 MCP servers need zero API keys. Clone, run setup.sh, start searching.Skills are, as usual, plain markdown. They work in OpenCode and Claude Code automatically (I added a tiny setup script), and they'll work in anything else that supports skills.PRs welcome! Help me expand the toolkit! :)https://github.com/borski/travel-hacking-toolkit
HN · launched Apr 4, 2026 · 95 upvotes (top 11%) · 0 views
Niche: trip and travel planning apps · 335 launches, 43 in the last 7 days ▲ +10% · Explore this niche →
Category and tags
- Travel & hospitality
- Search & retrieval
- B2C
- AI feature
- Commercial product
Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗
More like this: all 335 launches in trip and travel planning apps →
Could you build this?
Partial A web dashboard calculating points conversions is easy to vibe-code, but scraping and monitoring real-time airline/hotel award seat availability requires dealing with heavy anti-bot protections and private APIs.
What it would actually take: The stack would feature a modern web framework (Next.js), a database for loyalty program transfer ratios, and a distributed scraping cluster (Playwright/Puppeteer with proxy rotation) or partnerships with GDS/award data providers (like Seats.aero or ExpertFlyer). The critical bottleneck is reliably extracting award inventory from dozens of airline reservation systems that aggressively block scrapers. Success requires dedicated infrastructure for proxy management, reverse-engineering mobile app APIs, and continuous maintenance against airline site changes.
Discussion
20 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: Seats.aero, Roame.travel, CardPointers
Concerns raised: Loyalty programs use misdirection and gamification similar to MLMs/timeshares, Award availability varies significantly by airline (Delta vs United/Alaska), Redemption fees and taxes reduce effective point value, Point valuations often misrepresented compared to cash equivalents, System limitations prevent flexible ticket purchasing (e.g., paying for family members separately)
Feature requests: Integrate multiple award search APIs beyond just Seats.aero, Compare point redemptions across different airlines side-by-side, Add Amex FHR/THC hotel options integration
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one : 238 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #23 of 239 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 136 days after the earliest competitor.
- One click flight booking in Claude · hn · 2026-10-20 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.50
- PointsGPT · ph · 2026-10-29 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.48
- PointsFly Reward Points Calculator · ph · 2026-09-16 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.46
- HorizonsAI · ph · 2026-09-23 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.45
- SkyHopp · ph · 2026-09-17 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.44
- AwardClaw · ph · 2026-11-03 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.44
- Travel Buddy · ph · 2026-09-13 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.43
- SPOTIQ · ph · 2026-10-12 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.43
The niche, labels, vibe code rating and competitor comparison on this page are analysis by Nicheloom. If you use them, please credit nicheloom.com. How you may use our data.