Bon Value

A flights search engine for redeeming reward points.

April 2025

I have a friend with a knack for redeeming airline points. For his honeymoon, he managed to combine deals, points, and promotions to book a multi-stop, first-class trip around the world for a fraction of the cost. He taught me the most important thing about these credit card rewards program: you can game the exchange rate by transferring points to an airline rather than booking through your credit card’s travel portal.

He asked me for my help putting together a website to make the process of finding flights to book with points easier for everyone. Using the seats.aero API I helped him create a tool that lets you search for flights priced with your rewards programs in mind.

Features

The homepage is designed to be simple and direct. Users can see what rewards programs they have (once they manually enter it). Users can then enter their origin, destination, and flight date to see what’s available.

Bon Value's homepage is a familiar flight search UI

Rewards Details

A user would be prompted to enter their reward balances into the system so that the search feature can take those into consideration when displaying the adjusted “price.”

Users can enter their balances into the rewards modal

The eventual goal of this project would be for users to link their accounts so reward balances would be updated automatically. But banks usually don’t have public APIs.

Users come to expect certain filters when they search for flights. Bon Value had to also have features like: specific departure and arrival time or number of stops.

Search results can be filtered

Clear Results

The search results display all relevant information at a glance, including the airline, flight number, departure time, and the number of points required for redemption.

Clicking into a result shows you details about when type of seats are available

For each flight, users can see if their reward balance covers the cost of the flight. Once they click into the result, they are presented with instructions on how to get this flight for this “price.”

"Checkout" modal with a few steps to take to buy the flight

Again, an eventual goal of this project would be to have more integrations, so that buying a flight can be done with one click.

The Tech Stack

Working on this project was a great way to explore building a search results page. It also encouraged me to get an airline rewards card.