booking-guidance

booking-guidance is a skill for Claude Code from borski/travel-hacking-toolkit. It costs 32 tokens per session (2,163 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A step-by-step reference for booking flights with airline miles or points. It covers checking award seats before transferring points, programme phone numbers, partner rules, and possible extra fees.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to turn an award-flight recommendation into a booking plan, choose the right programme, and understand fees and partner-booking steps.
Why use it?
It reduces the risk of transferring points before a seat is confirmed and helps account for booking charges that can change the true cost.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin. Also seen: positional $N argument.

Part of the travel-hacker plugin — 48 skills, 1 agent, 6 MCP servers shipped together

Good fit Use it to turn an award-flight recommendation into a booking plan, choose the right programme, and understand fees and partner-booking steps.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/borski/travel-hacking-toolkit/booking-guidance
Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add borski/travel-hacking-toolkit --skill booking-guidance
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/borski/travel-hacking-toolkit

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install travel-hacker, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 48 skills, 1 agent, 6 MCP servers.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for booking-guidance

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/borski/travel-hacking-toolkit/booking-guidance/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/borski/travel-hacking-toolkit/booking-guidance)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/borski/travel-hacking-toolkit/booking-guidance"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/borski/travel-hacking-toolkit/booking-guidance/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for booking-guidance

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/borski/travel-hacking-toolkit/booking-guidance"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/borski/travel-hacking-toolkit/booking-guidance.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 32 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,163 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe. Third-party audits
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector pass 7 Sept 2026
How audits are shown
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00032 $0.02163
Opus 5 $0.00016 $0.01081
Sonnet 5 $0.00006 $0.00433
Haiku 4.5 $0.00003 $0.00216

Measured 11d ago against content hash 6b453f4273f5, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-10, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

booking-guidance scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 11d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

plugins/travel-hacking-toolkit/skills/booking-guidance/SKILL.md · 102 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 102 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Booking Guidance

Finding the deal is half the battle. Telling the user how to actually book it is the other half. Every recommendation should include a booking path.

Reference data: data/alliances.json has booking details for major programs in key_booking_relationships.

Program Fee Profiles

Check this before recommending a transfer or locking in a departure city. Fees vary dramatically by program and origin airport and can add $100-700+ per person on top of the miles cost. Two things to keep in mind reading the table: (1) several programs are surcharge-free on their own metal and most partners but pass heavy surcharges on specific partners (notably British Airways metal) — the YQ column calls those out; (2) dollar figures are per direction and scale with cabin — economy surcharges are materially lower than the business-class figures shown for surcharge-heavy metal. Rows marked ⚠️ are high-surcharge programs that often lose to cash.

Program YQ Surcharge? Typical fees/pp Notes
Aeroplan (Air Canada) No $50-100 No YQ pass-through on Star Alliance partners. Low fees. Best for LH/LX/UA awards.
Flying Blue (AF/KLM) Yes ~$250-400/way economy, ~$489-600/way business, ex-CDG AF passes full fuel surcharge; France adds heavy departure tax. Worst from Paris.
United MileagePlus No $50-100 No YQ on most partners.
Virgin Atlantic Yes (on VS metal) Cabin-dependent: ~$150-300/way economy, ~$500-700/way Upper Class; low on Delta metal Surcharges scale with cabin. Delta metal carries surcharges US↔UK specifically.
Turkish Miles & Smiles No on UA/Turkish metal; YES on Lufthansa Group (LH/LX/OS/SN) $20-50 (own/UA metal) Extremely low on own/UA metal. Book by phone (online unreliable). Dec 2025 devaluation.
British Airways Avios Yes ~$200-400/way economy, ~$400-700/way business, BA long-haul metal Notorious surcharges on BA metal. Use short-haul, or partner metal (AA/Alaska/Qatar), instead.
American AAdvantage No on own metal + most partners; YES on British Airways & Iberia $50-75 base; on BA/IB metal ~$200-400/way economy to $400-700+/way business Surcharge-free on JAL/Cathay/Qatar. Route partner awards away from BA/Iberia metal.
Alaska / Atmos Rewards No on own metal + most partners; YES on British Airways, Icelandair, Hainan $25-75 base; on BA metal ~$150-400/way economy up to ~$1,000/way premium Renamed from Mileage Plan (Aug 2025). Surcharge-free on Cathay/JAL/Qantas/Condor/Fiji.
Avianca LifeMiles No ~$25/ticket No-YQ Star Alliance program. Predictable total even on ANA/Lufthansa/Swiss metal.
Iberia Plus (Avios) Low (far less than BA) ~$150-200 RT transatlantic business The transatlantic Avios sweet spot: MAD-US business ~40.5K-59K Avios/way with modest surcharges.
JAL Mileage Bank No on JAL metal from ~$20 Cheap distance-based partner chart. Partner metal (e.g. BA) may add YQ.
Qatar Privilege Club (Avios) No fuel surcharge on Qatar metal ~$30-100 per-segment fee Excellent Qsuites value. Per-segment cash fee returned in 2025.
Delta SkyMiles No No award fees Dynamic award pricing is the real cost, not fees.
⚠️ ANA Mileage Club Yes — heavy ~$95-185/way US-Japan YQ Round-trip booking only; no awards within 96h of departure.
⚠️ Cathay / Asia Miles Yes High on long-haul; hiked again in 2026 Passes full carrier-imposed surcharges.
⚠️ Emirates Skywards Yes — heavy Among the highest YQ of any program Surcharges often kill the redemption vs cash.

Read the full file on GitHub · 102 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 11d ago First seen · 102 lines · 32 tokens per session scan A 6b453f4273f5

Subscribe to this mod's changes

booking-guidance is a skill published in the GitHub repository borski/travel-hacking-toolkit (659 stars, last pushed 3d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 32 tokens to every session and 2,163 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.