New Inventory: Capital One, Chase, and Citibank!
Exciting things are afoot at the MileWise office.
In addition to American Express and Starwood, we now show results for Chase, Citi, and Capital One credit cards.
A lot of little details depend on the specific card you have, so if you’ve already added one of these accounts it’s important to update your Card Type.
We’ve tried to make it as easy as possible:
- From your Rewards Dashboard select a Chase or CapitalOne account
- Click Edit Program
- Select your credit card from the dropdown
It’ll look something like this:
We’ll also now shoot you an email if any of your points are about to expire, and suggest cheap and easy ways to keep them fresh.
As always, we love hearing from you. Check out the Forum, or stop into our Live Help for a quick chat!
Until next time.
MileWise
Search: now with flexible date support!
posted by @nickmeyer
Exciting news ladies and gents.
After much sweat and toil flexible date search is live!
Check the “my dates are flexible” box and MileWise will grab a whole week’s worth of both depart and return cash and award fares. We then lovingly assemble the best prices across each date combination and put ‘em on a pretty chart.
The interface should feel pretty similar to what you’ve seen on airline sites. But in a few cases we’ve been able to make some big improvements.
For one - and this may sound a wee bit silly - we actually show award prices.
Some airlines, when faced with serving flex-date award results, will present you with a color coded calendar, like so:
Great start! Unfortunately, there are no prices.
Vexed?
Converting these cryptic yellow, green, and blue boxes into real prices requires deciphering this extensive chart:
And that’s just for the US and Canada!
Contemplating an international departure? Refer to one of fourteen regional award travel charts.
But it’s cool. We got this. We took these spreadsheets and cleaned them up, bought them some new clothes, and after a dab or two of cologne they came out all respectable.
What I’m saying is: we show actual prices. Not empty boxes.
Anyway. I’ll leave the rest for you all to explore.
NICK OUT
How we used Node.js to build real-time award flight search
Phew! Long title.
We built MileWise’s real-time search engine from the ground up using Node.js and MongoDB.
Flight prices change really quickly, so we can’t cache results for very long. After 15 minutes or so, it’s highly unlikely the rock-bottom price you were eyeing is still available.
This presents a technology challenge: every time you do a search, we have to run out and scrape a bunch of sites to get the data we need to generate your results.
And we need to do it fast.
Traditionally you’d do this with multiple threads, worker processes and a message queue.
But Node’s asynchronous design lets us run real-time web scrapes mid-request without the architectural overhead of something like Django+Beanstalk. If we need to query 8 different APIs to source the data we need…no problem! We just fire off the requests, and handle the responses as we get them. Meanwhile, some Socket.IO magic streams results to the browser as we get them.
Initially, we tried doing all of this using Tornado, but writing asynchronous code in Python is like using your keys to open a beer bottle.
All this results in a more responsive user experience, and a lot of headache saved during development and administration.
Couple of other perks:
Sometimes scraped HTML has weird JavaScript you need to handle. If your server is running on V8 this becomes easier to deal with. It’s still annoying - just easier.
Being able to share code between browser and server comes in really handy. Frameworks like Browserify are fascinating, but we haven’t played with them much.
MileWise on GitHub
The disadvantage of the bleeding edge is that sometimes modules you take for granted in other languages just aren’t available yet (or don’t support your use-case).
Hopefully you’ll find some of this code helpful:
mongode - Thin wrapper around node-mongodb-native that provides a simpler alternative calling style and provides collection binding.
node-soap - Asynchronous SOAP client and server for Node.
Check us out at milewise.com! Or, email us at jobs[at]milewise.com if you want to help us make award search even better.
Edit: Follow the discussion on HackerNews here.
(You should follow us on Twitter)
Beta Update: more programs, more airlines, and… more?
To everyone who’s been participating in the MileWise Beta… Thanks!
We really appreciate all the feature suggestions, bug reports, and your patience in dealing with pre-launch hiccups.
Before we go public, we wanted to give you a sneak peak of some of the new stuff we’ve been working on:
Track your balances in over 300 reward programs
If there’s one thing we hear over and over, it’s add more programs. Figured we better do it.
Search award inventory on more airlines!
We’ve expanded our real-time award inventory to include Continental, Alaska, and Virgin America in addition to American, Delta, United, US Airways, JetBlue, American Express and Starwood.
Expanded international fare inventory
International fare inventory should be pretty great now. Try it out, let us know.
Add multiple accounts from the same reward program
Now you can manage your whole family’s reward portfolio in one place.
Expiration Alerts
We tell you if your miles or points are about to expire! In your email!
Recent Searches
Your most recent searches are now displayed in a list on your homepage. Just click to redo the search.
Lots of UI tweaks
Things are cleaned up and more consistent. Should also be a _lot_ easier to tell the difference between cash, mile and point flights.
Thanks again for your support. We’d love to hear from you.
Introducing MileWise!
Travel planning is already a huge pain, and reward programs make things even more complicated. Deciding whether to use cash, miles, or points is a frustrating, painful process that soaks up hours of time.
At MileWise we’re trying to fix this.
We recommend the best way to pay for flights (whether in cash, miles or points) so you save money and earn more rewards.
Try us out on milewise.com.
Learn how to use MileWise in 90 seconds!
