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I think Point.me is the most useful award search tool for most members of frequent flyer programs. They are comprehensive, showing you availability of different award options across programs while also showing you what your points can do, which the best points to use are, and even walking you through transferring points from a credit card program to airline program and walking you through booking the award itself.
If there’s been a limitation to Point.me, I guess I’d say:
- they haven’t let you search across multiple dates at once (though you could open more than one browser window to open at the same time)
- they take a few seconds longer than some other search sites, because they aren’t just caching old availability and they’re verifying the results to improve the likelihood that availability is real (airline sites sometimes return results that aren’t bookable)
- they don’t keep monitoring for availability and email you when it opens up
Singapore Airlines Suites
All of a sudden, though, they’ve improved what they’re offering to let you search more than one date and even more than one destination at once using their new ‘Explore’ feature.
- Choose your starting airport
- And a date range
- And let point.me find places you can go with your points across multiple destinations
By the way you can even choose ‘anywhere’ as your destination and they’ll find awards anywhere in the world from your starting airport, and you can search by month even if your plans are flexible and you’re looking for the best deal.
Availability isn’t live, they are running a ton of searches all the time, and they can show you the availability that they are finding in searches for other members contemporaneously. When you find the itinerary you want you can then search live availability to check it.
Etihad First Apartment
Emirates Business Class Bar
This is really useful if you want to search multiple destinations – you can fly into one of several different airports (for instance, maybe you’re going to Lugano and are happy taking the train from Zurich rather than flying into Milan), great when award space is scarce at peak times.
Point.me isn’t free, but it’s extremely reasonable for what you get – $5 for 24 hours; $12 per month; or $129 per year. After more than I decade I folded my award booking service into point.me and their concierge booking services can handle everything for you as well, but honestly their self-serve tools are really good.
Wake me up when they have a proper expert mode – seats.aero is the gold standard
Another nail in the coffin of the “free” upgraded travel with miles. Most credit card customers may find that the dream vacations are unattainable with miles in any class except steerage.
“…they take a few seconds longer than some other search sites…” That’s the biggest understatement ever when speaking of point.me. It’s annoyingly slow and isn’t getting any better. There are so many better players in this space. They took Juicy Miles and destroyed it.
Sorry if this is an old issue: I took a look at point.me just now. All fine, but what I really want is to see how to use my United “pluspoints” … that is, which flights have green-dot availability for cash flights. I don’ t think that’s there, right?
I just used seats.aero to book an itinerary to/from US to DEL and had tremendous results with seats on many airlines and using a number of point programs. I was finally able to book flights on a combination of AA, BA & AY using a several programs, but ended up using AA miles in all cases. I believe I saved far more than the annual cost ($69.99) and found combinations that I could not have even thought to consider.
If you have the Bilt card, the app allows points.me for free.
Does there exist a similar service for hotel awards or pricing?