Point.me is a powerful tool for finding airline frequent flyer award space. They search across airlines, come back and show you what’s available, and even walk you through transferring points if you need to and making the booking yourself. It’s a premium service, but anyone who joins Bilt can use it free through the Bilt app, limited to availability with the airlines that Bilt partners with. Bilt’s transfer partners are:

• Star Alliance: Air Canada Aeroplan, Turkish Miles & Smiles, United Airlines MileagePlus
  
• oneworld: American AAdvantage, Cathay Pacific Asia Miles
  
• SkyTeam: Air France KLM Flying Blue
  
• Non-alliance: Emirates Skywards, Virgin Atlantic Flying Club, Hawaiian Airlines HawaiianMiles
  
• Hotels: Hyatt, IHG Rewards

You can use Bilt points at 1.25 cents apiece towards travel through their (Expedia-powered) portal, or transfer to partners. Point.me has you covered on the airline side.

Now Bilt has a new partnership to show you what you can do transferring points to their hotel partners. They’ve built Awayz into their app, another access to a free service that usually sells for a premium. And joining Bilt Rewards is free, you do not even have to have their co-brand credit card to use this.

• The Awayz tool is in the Hotels portion of the Bilt app’s travel tab.

• It allows you to search for hotel award availability by location or specific hotel. There’s a nice mapping feature laying out points options in the city you select, for the programs you ask it to search.

• Awayz Premium ($11.99 per month) is available free for up to 50 hotel award searches per month. Use above that cap would require a paid subscription.

You can flip back and forth between their travel portal and Awayz to see whether it’s a better deal to redeem points directly at 1.25 cents apiece or to transfer points. Remember that if you redeem points directly through the Expedia portal you aren’t entitled to earn points, elite stay credit, or to elite benefits. I suspect you’ll find you will often do better transferring to Hyatt, and redeeming directly with any other partner, just based on how much each hotel program’s points are worth.

I like that Awayz updates data at least daily, and they tell me that for some properties (especially Hyatt) they update 5 times per day. They’ve basically got a Hyatt availability calendar, something that Hyatt itself is unable to produce (Hyatt should buy them…).

The only thing I feel is missing is premium room searches, which MaxMyPoint has, though Awayz says this is coming.

Ultimately this is a great tool, that’s normally premium priced, but available free at no cost through the Bilt app – a way to help make the most of Bilt points or any points, the way that they’ve done with airlines and point.me.