How to Plan Traveling for a Full Year With Your Family (And Find the Best Rewards Deals Using Seats.aero)

When the world feels a little crazy, we plan trips.

That's not avoidance. That's strategy. And right now, with fuel prices swinging and reward travel feeling a little unpredictable, there is no better time to sit down, open a journal, and map out exactly what the next 12 months of travel could look like for your family — entirely on points.

Quick Take: Plan your family’s travel year on points, not cash. With the right strategy, tools like Seats.aero, and a bit of reverse engineering, you can score award flights, maximize credit card rewards, and turn dream trips into reality—all without breaking the bank.

That's exactly what I did in my latest YouTube video, and I want to walk you through the entire process here so you can do it too.

Why Reward Travel Still Makes Sense Right Now

Yes, the points and miles landscape feels wonky right now. I get it. But here's what I need you to hear: the deals are still absolutely there. You just have to know how to find them.

Case in point — I recently booked flights for my family of six from New York to London, economy, one way, for 4,200 points per person. Those exact same seats are now listing at 92,000 points. Same route, same airline, same cabin. The difference is timing, strategy, and knowing which tools to use.

Over the last 18 months alone, I have used credit card rewards to:

• Book flights and hotels for a medical tourism trip and romantic getaway with my husband to Costa Rica
• Fly my family of six to France for the summer
• Fly all six of us to Mexico at the end of summer
• Take a solo birthday trip to Paris

All of it on credit card rewards. And that's just a drop in the bucket of what's possible when you have a real strategy in place.

So let's build yours.

Step 1: Start With a Journal and a Bucket List

I know everyone does everything digitally these days. I am not that girl. I love a journal, I love gel pens, and I love writing things down — so the very first thing I do when planning a reward travel year is open to a clean page and start writing down every destination that is on my radar.

When you're making your list, think beyond just places you want to go. Consider:

• Destinations your kids have been asking about (my 11-year-old is set on Switzerland, my 17-year-old has her sights on Germany, and my other 17-year-old is seriously considering Japan)
• Where you want to celebrate your birthday
• How you want to use your paid time off or summer break
• If you can take smaller family weekend vacations
• Milestone moments — anniversaries, graduations, big birthdays — that deserve a special trip
• Trips that would be meaningful for the people you care about most

Write all of it down. Don't filter yet. This is your dream list and it's the foundation everything else gets built on.

Step 2: Sync Your School Calendar

Once you have your destination wish list, the next step is to get your kids' school calendar into your Google Calendar or Apple Calendar — whichever you use — so you have a crystal clear picture of when you actually have pockets of time to travel.

Look for long weekends, spring break, winter break, and the spots where pulling your kids out of school for one or two days could give you a significantly longer window to work with.

This step sounds simple but it changes everything. You stop guessing and start planning with real dates, which means when you find a great award deal, you already know if it works for your family.

Step 3: Account for Blended Family Schedules

This is the step nobody talks about — and I genuinely don't understand why, because so many families need it.

If you're in a blended family, put your co-parenting schedule into your calendar before you start searching for flights. Know in advance when your kids will be with their other parent, when holidays are split, and when you'll have them versus when you won't.

In our house, we split winter break down the middle. One parent gets Christmas, the other gets New Year's. If you're the parent without your kids for Christmas, that is hard. So here's what we do: we plan a trip. We turn what could be an emotionally difficult stretch of time into something to look forward to — Palm Springs, San Diego, something fun. You take the negative and flip it into a positive.

Plan for those moments now, while you're in strategy mode, and you'll thank yourself later.

Step 4: Find Your Pockets of Time and Start Searching

Now you have your destination list and your calendar synced up. You can see exactly where the openings are — the long weekends, the school breaks, the stretch of summer. Now it's time to start running reward searches to see what's actually available and what it costs.

This is where it gets really fun.

The Tool I Use: Seats.aero

My favorite resource for award flight searching is Seats.aero. I have the pro account, which runs $10 a month, but you can absolutely get started on their free account. Some might ask however; Is Seats.aero worth it? I think so.

Here's why I love it: instead of logging into six different airline portals and checking availability one program at a time, Seats.aero lets you search award space across multiple airlines and programs simultaneously. You can see what's actually available, filter by cabin class, sort by fewest points, and — this is the one I use constantly as a mom of six — filter by minimum number of seats. Because if there are only two seats available on a flight, it doesn't matter how good the deal is for my family.

Here's the basic workflow I use:

Search broad first. I set my home airport (Salt Lake City) to all of Europe, with a 60-day search window starting from my target travel date. This pulls up every available award flight across that entire range — departure dates, destinations, airline programs, and point costs — all on one screen. Blue results have layovers. Green results are direct flights.

Sort by fewest points. I want to see the cheapest options first. Right now I'm finding direct flights from Salt Lake to London and Amsterdam for as low as 15,000 points. Yes, some of those come with higher taxes and fees — I found one Virgin Atlantic flight through Delta for 15,000 points but $319 in taxes and fees, which is significant. Compare that to my last Paris trip where I paid $5.90 in taxes and fees. It's a trade-off, and knowing how to evaluate it matters.

Search in rolling 60-day windows. I search one window, note the best dates and deals, then roll the search forward another 60 days and repeat. This is how you comb through an entire year of availability without missing anything, and find the best day to buy airline tickets.

Use connecting city searches to unlock more destinations. This is one of my favorite strategies. Once I know I can get to London cheaply, I then plug in London Heathrow (LHR) as my departure airport and search onward flights to other European destinations. Right now I'm seeing flights from London to Paris, Copenhagen, and Amsterdam for as low as 4,000 points. You're essentially controlling your own layover and booking two inexpensive award flights instead of one expensive one to your final destination.

Step 5: Use a Reward Calculator to Know If It's Actually a Good Deal

Not every award booking is a good deal, and this is something a lot of beginners don't realize. Points have a value, and some redemptions give you a lot more value per point than others.

I built a simple reward calculator specifically for this purpose. You plug in three things: the retail cash price of the flight, the taxes and fees, and the number of points required. It gives you a color-coded result — excellent deal, good deal, or bad deal — so you know immediately whether to book with points or just pay cash.

Here's a real example from my planning session: I found a flight from London Heathrow to Edinburgh, Scotland for 7,500 points and $53.20 in fees. Before I plugged in the cash price, my calculator flagged it as a potential bad deal. So I went and looked up the cash price — $675 for one adult. Plugged that in and got 8 cents per point, which is an excellent redemption. That's the kind of check that saves you from making a bad trade.

Always verify. Always run the numbers.

Step 6: Document Everything in One Place

As you work through your searches, keep a running Google Doc (or whatever works for you) where you log every promising flight — the dates, the airline program, the points cost, the taxes and fees, and the cash price for comparison. You're going to find more options than you can hold in your head, and having everything in one place lets you compare across your whole year at a glance.

From there you can start making decisions: which trips get funded with points for flights, which trips get covered with hotel points, and where the best overall value is across your whole travel year.

The Mindset Behind All of This: Reverse Engineering

The whole framework I've laid out here is built around one core idea: reverse engineering your travel year.

Most people wait for a deal to appear and then figure out if they can make it work. The travelers who get the most out of their points do it the other way around. They start with their dates, their destinations, and their family's needs — and then they go find the best possible award availability within that framework.

Sometimes that means the flights are covered with points and you pay for hotels. Sometimes it's the opposite. But it always means you're being intentional, comparing every option, and making sure every redemption is actually worth it.

That's the strategy. And it works.

Ready to Start?

If you want to watch me walk through this entire process live — searching Seats.aero in real time, running the reward calculator, and mapping out a full year of award travel — the full video is linked below.

👉 Watch the full video here!

And if you're newer to credit card rewards and want to build your earning strategy from the ground up before you start searching for flights, I have two resources that will help:

📌 Grab my free Reward Travel Guide → the best starting point if you're newer to points and miles

💳 Get the Reward Travel Starter System ($39) → the exact two-card framework I use for my own family of six, including which cards, which transfer partners, and how to maximize every dollar you're already spending, and comes with a credit card points calculator.

Because here's what I know after booking flight after flight after flight for a family of six entirely on points: this is learnable. The deals are real. And the trips are absolutely possible.

Let's go plan yours.

📌 Affiliate & Legal Disclosure: This post contains affiliate links. Her Travel Club may receive compensation if you apply and are approved for a credit card through these links. Card details are believed accurate at time of publication but are subject to change — verify directly with the issuer before applying. Point values and redemption rates fluctuate and are not guaranteed. This content is for educational purposes only and does not constitute financial, legal, or tax advice. Lisa Mecham is an independent travel advisor affiliated with FORA Travel (IATA #33520476).