lessons-learned

lessons-learned is a skill for Claude Code from borski/travel-hacking-toolkit. It costs 45 tokens per session (1,957 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A pre-search checklist containing lessons about award flights, travel sources, Southwest, Companion Passes, smaller airports, and Duffel's limits. Award flights are seats bought with airline miles or points instead of ordinary cash fares.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it before searching award availability to check all programs, trace transfer and airline-partner routes, verify results directly, and present reachable and unreachable options.
Why use it?
It helps avoid incomplete searches, missed transfer routes, and misleading conclusions caused by filtering or source limitations.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin.

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

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.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/borski/travel-hacking-toolkit/lessons-learned
Any agent
npx skills add borski/travel-hacking-toolkit --skill lessons-learned
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 lessons-learned

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/borski/travel-hacking-toolkit/lessons-learned.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/borski/travel-hacking-toolkit/lessons-learned)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/borski/travel-hacking-toolkit/lessons-learned"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/borski/travel-hacking-toolkit/lessons-learned.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 45 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,957 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
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 $0.00045 $0.01957
Opus 5 $0.00023 $0.00979
Sonnet 5 $0.00009 $0.00391
Haiku 4.5 $0.00005 $0.00196

Measured 6d ago against content hash 250634657d0a, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-06, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

lessons-learned 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 6d 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/lessons-learned/SKILL.md · 106 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 106 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Lessons Learned

Hard-won knowledge from actual searches. Reference these before making the same mistakes.

Seats.aero: Search ALL Sources, Show ALL Results

When searching Seats.aero, NEVER filter by source on the initial search. Always pull ALL programs first.

The Mandatory Workflow

For any route:

  1. Search Seats.aero with NO source filter. Pull ALL programs. Show full results sorted by cheapest.
  2. For EVERY program in results, trace the full reachability chain: a. Direct balance? (Check AwardWallet if connected) b. Transfer path? (Check data/transfer-partners.json for EVERY currency: Amex MR, Chase UR, Bilt, Capital One) c. Alliance chain? Identify the operating airline's alliance (data/alliances.json), then find ALL programs in that alliance or with bilateral partnerships (data/partner-awards.json), then check which of THOSE programs are reachable via transfer. d. Cross-alliance? Check data/partner-awards.json cross_alliance_highlights and bilateral partners.
  3. For reachable programs with NO cached Seats.aero data, check the program's website directly (airfrance.com, united.com, etc.)
  4. Present the COMPLETE picture: every option, reachable or not, with the transfer chain spelled out.
  5. Only THEN compare award vs cash.

Common Failure Mode

Seeing an airline in results, checking one or two obvious programs, declaring awards "unreachable" or "bad value," and recommending cash. You MUST trace every possible chain through alliances and bilateral partnerships. If the operating airline is in an alliance, EVERY program that books that alliance is a potential path.

"No Cached Availability" Is Not the Final Word

It means Seats.aero hasn't scraped it recently. When a reachable program shows no cached results, search the airline's website directly before declaring awards dead.

Never Trust Data Files Over Reality

Data files are reference material, not gospel. Airline partnerships change constantly. When a user says a booking path works that your data doesn't show, verify on the actual booking website FIRST before pushing back. The website is the source of truth. Your files are a cache. If the data file disagrees with reality, update the data file.

Read the full file on GitHub · 106 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. 6d ago First seen · 106 lines · 45 tokens per session scan A 250634657d0a

Subscribe to this mod's changes

lessons-learned is a skill published in the GitHub repository borski/travel-hacking-toolkit (650 stars, last pushed 5d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 45 tokens to every session and 1,957 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.