Why I Built BidMiles (I Kept Missing Great Auctions)
BidMiles didn't start as a product idea. It started because I was annoyed at myself.
The auctions I missed
I'd been sitting on a decent balance of Wyndham Rewards points for a while — mostly accumulated through stays I'd have done anyway. One day, out of curiosity, I poked around their experience auction page and noticed something interesting: a few recently closed auctions had ended at what worked out to 3-4 cents per point.
For context, standard Wyndham redemptions typically land around 0.8-1.2 cpp depending on the property. Getting 3-4x that value on an experience is genuinely great. And I'd completely missed them because I wasn't checking regularly.
That happened a second time. And a third. Different programs, same problem: by the time I noticed the good listings, they were already closed or the bidding had already spiked past the point where the value made sense.
The music festival that made it click
A few weeks later, I caught a Wyndham listing for VIP tickets to a music festival. This time I actually paid attention to the timing, watched the bid history, and placed my bid strategically.
I won. The math worked out to roughly 1.75 cents per point — not the 3-4 cpp I'd been kicking myself about missing, but still significantly better than a standard hotel redemption. And the experience itself was worth way more than what I would have paid in cash.
That's when it clicked: the value is there, but only if you're actually paying attention. And paying attention across multiple programs is a part-time job.
"I need a better way to track this"
That thought kept coming back. I'd check United one day, forget about Delta for a week, completely miss a Hilton listing that would have been perfect. The information was all public — it was just scattered across nine different websites with nine different interfaces and no way to see everything at once.
So I built BidMiles. The initial version was rough — basically a script that scraped a few programs and dumped the results into a spreadsheet. But even that was immediately useful. I could see all active auctions in one place, sort by end date, and actually catch the good ones before they closed.
From spreadsheet to site
The spreadsheet turned into a database. The database got a frontend. The frontend got filters, categories, bid tracking, and AI-powered location tagging. Nine programs are now scraped hourly.
It's still fundamentally the same tool I built for myself: a way to not miss good auctions. The difference is now anyone can use it.
What I've learned
A few things that have become clear since I started tracking this stuff systematically:
Most auctions close at mediocre value — the "exciting" ones that everyone bids on often end up at 0.5-0.8 cpp. Not terrible, but not special.
The deals are in the middle — less flashy experiences that don't attract a bidding war routinely close at 1.5-3+ cpp. That's where the real value is.
Timing matters more than the program — a great auction on any platform can be a better deal than a mediocre auction on your "best" program.
Buy It Now listings are underrated — fixed-price experiences often offer solid cpp if you grab them quickly.
If you're sitting on points and wondering whether experience auctions are worth exploring, the answer is yes — as long as you're paying attention. That's what BidMiles is for.