The Best Travel Points Tools on the Web; An Archive.
There are dozens of pages, blog, courses and tools that teach people how to accumulate travel related points and miles. But, THEN WHAT? How do you most efficiently spend them? Most people flock to their credit card’s travel portal because it’s all they know. If you are reading this, you are already way ahead. You know not to use the portal, here is a list of tools to use instead. Keep this one handy.
In no particular order…
Seatspy.com.
What is it? A tool that shows a calendar view of all award space for all cabins, based on the airline and specific route.
What is it used for? This tool is awesome for finding availability on very specific direct routes for certain airlines. It shows an entire year of points availability at a time for both the outbound and inbound flights for the following airlines:
Air France
American Airlines
Austrian Air
British Airways
Brussels Airways
Croatia Airways
Etihad Airlines
KLM
LOT Polish airways
Lufthansa
Swiss Air
United Airlines
Virgin Atlantic
… What do all these have in common? They mostly fly you to Europe. This tool is clutch for European and US travel, but not much else.
What are the downsides? This tool only shows direct routes and only specific airlines. So, if you are looking for Air France award space to Paris for 55,000 points in business, this tool is your bestie. If you need to know the best date to get a family to Asia, it’s not going to help.
What are the sweet spots for this tool? I use it to find United award space to tricky places like Australia or Tahiti.
How much does it cost? Free to search economy availability. To search business availability you need to pay $3.32 a month. Is it worth it? If you are trying to get to Europe, sure! If not… not really.
Also you can imitate this search on seats.aero now that they allow +/- 180 day searches for individual routes. I still sometimes like it because it’s a nice visual representation of both outbound and inbound flights together.
2. Seats.Aero
What is it? This tool has several uses, but my favorite one is finding all routes to a particular continent on a specific range of dates. Think of it like Google Flights Explore, but for points.
What is it used for? You can use seats.aero to search for all flights from North America to Africa, for instance, on a specific program like Air Canada. It searches one program at a time and only supports certain ones, though all alliances are covered in some way.
What are the downsides? Seats.aero only covers certain programs and is missing some heavy hitters like British Airways. It is also riddled with ghost award space, meaning it may show a flight as available that is nowhere to be seen on the airline’s website. Seats.aero at least will tell you the last time it scanned for flights so you know whether or not to get your hopes up. When it scans (or “scrapes”) airline sites it saves the data in what’s called a cache, and that is what you pull from when you do your search. That’s why sometimes it’s outdated. If you understand airline alliances you will find the flights you need on another partner, so them not covering British Airways and Cathay doesn’t bother me much. Maybe as a Christmas gift they can surprise us with Singapore searches!
What are the sweet spots for this tool? Seats.aero has three useful ‘finder’ tools. One is the Qsuite finder, which finds Qatar business flights and tips you off to which ones may have planes equipped with Q suites. The other is a Lufthansa first finder which is great for last minute first class availability. The third is the Delta One finder. These flights to/from Europe are super hard to find but are packed with outsized value. This is probably my favorite sweet spot for this tool.
There is also a ChatGPT Plugin that seems pretty neat and interesting. I haven’t played around with it much, but curious to hear anyone’s comments who has tried it!
What does it cost? Its free to search award availability for the next 90 days, but any further out than that you do need a paid membership for $9.99 a month. This comes with alerts, advanced filters and more. They also have a discord server where you can pick the brains of the people behind the site. I really love that.
Is it worth it? This is a cool tool, and despite the amount of ghost space I think everyone serious about this hobby should invest in one of the “cached scraping tools”. (This one, Roame, AwardTool or Points.yeah) If you have flexible destinations and want ideas, pay for a month and try it out. Their explore feature is one of the most comprehensive of its kind.
3. Flightconnections.com
What is it? The single most important piece of the points redemption puzzle to understand is ‘routes and hubs’, and I will die on this hill. Understanding this piece will unlock the world of points and miles for you, I promise. Airlines move planes between hubs with the exception of what we call “5th freedom routes”, where no hub is involved. If you start looking for award flights between cities that are not connected by hubs you will be put on partner flights at much higher rates to connect. (There are exceptions but this is generally true). Use this site to find the routes and the hubs. It has ads but I don’t find them bothersome enough to pay for the site.
4. Point.me
What is it? A google-esque search engine that searches 33 different airline programs for award space. You have to enter specific dates and a specific destination in order to yield results.
What is it used for? When you have to travel on specific dates and have a specific destination in mind, this is a great tool. When you are more flexible this could be a time consuming search. I love how many partners it searches and how it includes any current transfer bonuses, but it does take a heck of a lot of time.
What are the downsides? It takes for-ev-er to search. In reality it’s two minutes but imagine holding a plank for two minutes. Yeah, it’s like that. One way around this is you can run up to 7 searches in different tabs at a time. That helps a bit.
What are the sweet spots for this tool? You can tailor it to search only for programs you can transfer points to according to your credit card portfolio. I don’t have this feature turned on because I want to see ALL award space, but it’s nifty for the casual traveler. There are a lot of airline programs that don’t take transferable currencies so being able to filter those out is nice. (looking at YOU, Miles and More program!) Filtering out some airlines may yeild a faster search as well. What I like about this tool is seeing the math from transfer bonuses. Point.me does the math for you! Most of us don’t love math, so this is a win/win.
Whats the cost? The standard plan is $12 a month. There is a yearly plan and also a daily one.
Is it worth it? Point.me is one of my most used tools but it is pricey for the average traveler who books one or two award flights a year. If you are in that camp you can just pay for the day pass for $5 and then cancel, or check out the Bilt rewards app or Amex. There you can run searches for free. It only shows airlines that partner with Bilt and Amex respectively but that’s a comprehensive enough list for most travelers.
4.1 Roame.Travel
What is it? I labeled this 4.1 because it is the same tool as point.me but it runs faster. A LOT faster. However, it runs that fast because it searches significantly fewer airline programs and uses a cache method like Seats.aero. I do love the speed and find that enough partners per alliance are covered to make this tool a must for casual travelers with no need to spend the extra funds. I also chatted with the developer and they have many more ideas up their sleeves! This company is still small enough to action on feedback with a desire to help people.
Whats the cost? Free! They also have a newsletter that tips you off to award space, albeit a day later than they found it so beware it may be gone. Ultimately it’s a solid way to learn about award sweet spots. Don’t let the newsletters make you think you will always be able to find rare 1st class seats. There are often caveats like there being only one seat open or transfer bonuses in effect. You aren’t necessarily doing anything wrong if you can’t replicate their deals.
5. Straight to the Points
What is it? Gary Leff from ‘View From the Wing’ introduced Spencer Howard as “Straight to the Points award availability newsletter and generally good guy”, and judging by his Instagram and involvement in the points and miles community, that sounds about right! Spencer has a newsletter/ alert service that tips you off to award availability and he is one of the leaders in this space. The cost is $9.99 a month and yes it’s worth it.
6. Ashley Gets Around
What is it? Ashley has an alert service for cash and points premium cabin deals while smashing the patriarchy by demanding more women have a presence in the points and miles space. Her Instagram is witty and fun, and her service is clutch.
It’s okay to ditch Going (formerly Scotts cheap Flights), follow Ashley and Spencer, and call it a day.
7. Aerolopa
What is it? Find seating charts for planes on popular airlines. Answer the age old question “is this a lie flat seat!?”.
What is it used for? Here you can look up seating charts on a flight you’d like to book and see what the layout is, and what kind of seats you are booking. Seems basic, but I end up using it often. You’d be surprised how many business class flights are only reclining seats, and it’s good to know what you are purchasing.
8. Expert Flyer
I am probably the only person in this hobby who doesn’t regularly use this tool. It has its moments however.
What is it? A tool designed to show what seats are still available on a fight, and set alerts for when seats open up.
What is it used for? If you really want a seat on a specific plane, you can set up alerts to notify you if one becomes available. What I typically use this service for is to tell me how many upgraded seats are empty so I know it’s worth it to pay for main cabin extra, or join that ANA waitlist. (Okay… I’m not booking any waitlisted flights but if you have thicker skin than I, this is the tool for you).
If you have status with AA or United (I’m a Southwest companion pass gal personally) then you can use it to see your likelyhood of an upgrade.
9. Stay with Points
What is it? This tool allows you to search point availability at hotels within 3 popular chains: Hyatt, Marriott and Hilton. IHG and Choice are coming soon. You can set alerts for when point availability shows up within a certain date range or just anytime a room is available. The site covers most of the aspirational properties (ya know, the Insta famous ones) and your run of the mill Hyatt Regencies.
What is the cost? You can search availability for free but need to be a paid member for $4.99 a month in order to create standard alerts (fixed dates). You can pay $12.99 a month in order to get flexible alerts (be alerted anytime a room is available). The flexible alerts are the best part of this service, so if you have a specific property you are dying to visit and don’t have fixed dates, I would recommend paying for this service.
What about Max My point? This is a similar service but riddled with so many ads I can hardly navigate the site. Stay with points is my go to but if they don’t have the property I am looking for I try Max My Point next.
Honorable mention goes out to Awayz.com that shows award space like max my point does, but it’s better for searching what is available on specific dates. Think of it like point.me but for hotels.
10. PointsYeah
In same the vein as Point.me and Roame.travel, we have PointsYeah. It searches most programs and it does have 2 very unique features:
You can search 3 dates a time, and you can set 3 free alerts. This could be a very strong contender if they continue to add programs. Make a free account and set some alerts. Last minute availability is known to open up on airlines like Iberia and Lufthansa.
They also have a daydream explorer feature much like seats.aero’s explore tab. It seems seats.aero, points.yeah, roame and awardtool are racing to be the best cached tool.
11. AwardTool
Oops! This is a top ten list and I made an 11th. Awardtool is the newest of the cached scraping tools. There were rumors about where they got their code from but I’m not in the business of speculating. They do cover airline programs others don’t cover (like British airways) but when Awardtool is able to scrape a site that literally no other tool can scrape, that has me scratching my head. I haven’t sprung for an annual membership yet but may one day.
What makes Awardtool different?
It has the most filters and abilities to manipulate your searches. For many users I would advise that less is more, since this tool is very overwhelming for beginners. For advanced folks, the amount of filters can be beneficial. However the fact that seats.aero can so easily sort results by price point and nonstop-with stops is the sole reason I haven’t switched over permanently. However when I stumped I will use Awardtool to back up my seats.aero searches.
Bottom line: when it comes to caches scraping tools, pick the one with the user interface you connect with the best. If you understand hubs, routes and transfer partners you will find the same data across all tools.
