Flight procedure
Make every penny spent, meaningful and goal driven.
Most tools rank cards by headline earn rate. Travel Upgrade works out how close you are to your next goal, cabin upgrade, companion voucher, tier upgrade or free stay, and ensures your spend is targetted toward it.
- 01
Board your wallet
Cards, holders, annual fees, card-year dates, thresholds and the programmes each card feeds. Business entities sit alongside personal cards, with eligibility rules kept separate.
- 02
Declare your destination
Rank the trips and benefits that matter, then put your own price on each perk. Travel Upgrade values nothing you have not valued yourself.
- 03
File the forecast
Only the spend you already plan to make, split by category, currency, member and entity. Nothing here is an invitation to spend more.
- 04
Fly the plan
A rolling sequence of allocations: the amount to place, the card to place it on, the threshold it progresses, and the moment to switch.
The cliff problem
Reward value is a staircase, not a slope.
A card with a lower headline rate can be the right answer when the next slice of spend unlocks a companion voucher, a free-night certificate or a status tier. Travel Upgrade models those cliffs piecewise: it walks your forecast in chunks, revalues every card after each chunk, and stops as soon as another card overtakes it.
- Marginal utility per unit of spend, at your own valuations.
- Threshold benefits valued only when your forecast actually reaches them.
- Household-aware and time-aware: card years, promotions and expiries.
Worked example
Travel Upgrade| Next £3,800 UK spendBA Amex Premium Plus | VOUCHERBoarding |
|---|---|
| Then general UK spendBest overflow card | SWITCHOn time |
What you get back
Every line shows its arithmetic.
Each recommendation opens into the base earn rate, the threshold contribution, any FX drag, and what changes once the threshold is met. If a number looks wrong you can see precisely which assumption produced it, and edit it.