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Show HN: Travel Hacking Toolkit – Points search and trip planning with AI (github.com)

95 points by borski ↗ HN
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

18 comments

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hkotcherlakota
Nice work :)

There's such a huge world of agentic automation out there outside of the hype cycle that is OpenClaw. Glad to see you putting this out there

zephyreon
Just sent this to my partner. He’s super into travel hacking and this will be a nice add to his toolkit.
jaeyoungkim
Excellent stuff, excited to try it out for an upcoming trip.
callumprentice
As someone who do the whole mileage actual thing for many years (millions of Chase and Amex points) but also a family and a full time job - IE 3 seats vs 1 and can’t leave for a trip at the drop of a hat - I’m always astonished by how worthless my miles seem to be.

I’m not convinced it’s all one big scam but a teensie bit hopeful your solution can help. Looking forward to trying. Thank you.

nilram
Having accumulated points on various platforms, in my experience, United and Alaska had much better availability for close-in flights than Delta. Dunno if there's a difference between redeeming on the Chase site versus transferring to United and then redeeming, but might be worth playing with.
borski
Transferring is almost always the more fruitful option, but it depends on the award deals.
SFO_SIN
good idea, but would've been useful 10 years ago when points and the churning game were peak.

in 2026, the optimal strategy is now:

- "want first, buy first" (pay cash when you want business class) and,

- "team cash back" for credit cards without playing the coupon book game

not worth the effort to optimize 1.5 vs 2.0 cent redemption unless it's a hobby

yodahuang
This looks very nice and useful!

While Trivago covers major hotel sites, I sometimes find “shady” small sites often times offer better prices for hotels. I’ve been using super.com and vio.com and they seems great.

Another complication is credit card companies’ own portal. E.g. we need to take into account Amex’s FHR or Capital One’s premier collection. They offer credits and sometimes special “stay two nights, one night free” stuff. If we are in the credit card game, then there’s also “I have X credits in the first half of the year so it’s free” situation (e.g. Hilton resort credit).

I like your inclusion of Obscura. I have a blog post of how I pick where to go to: https://blog.yanda.rocks/posts/how-i-plan-my-trips/ and my hope is one day I could automate that.

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