Award Flight Search Tools Compared: AwardTool, Point.me, PointsYeah, Roame, Seats.aero

The award search tool space is becoming increasingly saturated as of late, for good reason. Airline-provided search engines are of abysmal quality. They are not designed with award booking in mind, offering award search almost as an afterthought.  

While competition is good and should keep prices down and features competitive, the number of tools available makes it hard to choose which one is right for you. So in this article, we offer a comparison of some of the major award search tools across features for both their free and premium offerings, where applicable.   

Of note, we only cover general-purpose award tools in this article, not highly specific award tools such as ExpertFlyer or Award Nexus. 

We also make a distinction between two different search purposes. Specific award searches are done with an exact departure and destination airport in mind, as well as dates of travel. In this type of search, real-time availability is essential. On the other hand, “discovery” searches are done with less specific destinations, dates, or products, hoping to find award availability you may not have thought to look for previously (credit to Frequent Miler for this term). Award tools typically handle both types of searches, but will implement and market them differently, using cached (not real-time) results to handle bulky discovery searches. 

Without further ado, let’s get into the different tools.

Overview of Tools

AwardTool

AwardTool, aptly named, is a brand-new award search tool with powerful features offered in both its free and pro versions. AwardTool distinguishes itself from other free tools by allowing you to search both multiple airports and multiple dates. 

Free users get a combination of 4 simultaneous searches, which can range from 1 destination and departure airport on four different days, to 2 destination and 2 departure airports on one day. Pro users on the other hand get 16 simultaneous searches. 

AwardTool also has two additional search types:

• Panorama: Allows you to search by regions or entire countries, up to 30 days (free) or 90-day ranges (pro). Results are not real-time.
• Mega: Allows you to do a massive search including 24 simultaneous searches, either a 24-day range, 24 different destination airports, or any other combination. Mega search is real-time, and free users are limited to three Mega searches per day. 

Overall, AwardTool is a powerful new tool I am excited to explore more in my award trip planning.

Point.me

Point.me is one of the original search tools, and has a long history. It is a rebranding and amalgamation from JuicyMiles.com and PointPros.com (a points consulting service owned by One Mile At a Time). As such, Point.me operates as both a search engine and a concierge/consulting service.

Point.me is primarily a paid search tool, but recently launched a free version called Explore. While the subscription offers real-time results, Explore uses cached data and is more of a discovery tool. 

I personally have never found the Point.me tool overly useful. The Explore functionality gives a paucity of actual data on the awards found. It is seemingly just an upsell tactic to the paid subscription. Meanwhile, the pro version of the tool allegedly has a strong bias towards programs that are transfer partners with American Express.

PointsYeah

PointsYeah is another relative newcomer to the world of search tools, and offers a comprehensive real-time search functionality for a 4-day window up to 365 days out.

In addition to real-time search, it has a discovery tool called DayDream Explorer. Results are displayed in picture/card format, unlike AwardTool or Seats.aero.  

Additionally, PointsYeah has alert setting capabilities, and a hotel award search feature newly added.

Roame

Roame is perhaps the most polished tool from a user interface perspective, offering a similar but improved feel to Points.me. They also have a useful newsletter that distributes the best points deals that have been discovered through their tool.

Roame’s award discovery tool is called SkyView. Though in its beta phase, SkyView aggregates airfare deals found in the prior 48 hours and offers a ‘bird’s eye view’ of award availability.

SkyView has a ‘Lite’ (free) and Pro version. The Lite version only allows a 7-day search window and searching for flights departing in the next 60 days, making it a bit limited as a discovery tool.

Seats.aero

Seats.aero is a very powerful tool with some distinct advantages and disadvantages compared to other tools. Seats.aero is seemingly designed for more advanced users, and does not have a polished user interface like other tools. Its results show up in a simple table format.

The tool is fast and flexible. However, a drawback is that it does not search real-time availability. Instead, it caches award space every few hours and then makes it available for instant searching, sorting, and filtering. The tool is also useful when you want to fly a specific product like ANA first class, Qatar QSuites, and more. 

We have a dedicated review of Seats.aero. Check it out if you want to completely understand the tool and its functionality.

Feature Comparison

The following table gives an overview of the features available for each award search tool, including free and pro versions.

Program Coverage

All of the award flight search tools have decent coverage of major airline hotel loyalty programs. All have at least one program from each of the big three airline alliances, Oneworld, Star Alliance, and SkyTeam. 

However, the tools all have varying numbers of included programs, with Seat.aero and Roame having around 15, while AwardTool and PointsYeah have around 20. At the forefront is Point.me with 30+ programs included in its search engine and many programs that are uniquely only covered by them.

See the chart below for a listing of which major programs are included in each search engine.

Airport Flexibility

A feature I value immensely when using an award search tool is the ability to enter multiple airports for departure and arrival. Whether it be the option to choose multiple individual airports, countries, or entire regions (eg. Europe). 

Diving deeper into search capabilities, the following table summarizes the tools. 

AwardTool uniquely offers multiple airport selection even for real-time search. This is reminiscent of the decreased CowTool, which we Aeroplan users loved. You can enter multiple airports to a maximum number of total route searches (4 in the free version, 16 in pro). On the other hand, free and pro users can use the Panorama search (not real-time) to search an unlimited number of airports, regions, countries, continents, and combinations thereof.  

Point.me has limited search functionality. In its Explore tool (free), regions and countries are available, but only available for the destination. The departure must be an airport. In the real-time search (paid), you must select one airport for departure and destination.

PointYeah functions similarly to AwardTool, but in the free version, real-time search is only allowed with one airport selection.  In the paid version, you get a maximum of 8 route searches. 

Meanwhile, in the DayDream Explorer (not real-time) you can select any combination of airports, countries, and continents/regions. 

Roame does allow one to search regions, states, countries, and continents in both departure and destination for SkyView (not real-time). However, you can only make one selection at a time which is quite limited. 

Seats.aero functions similarly to PointsYeah DayDream Exploer with the ability to enter multiple airports or regions. The Seats.aero interface is very straightforward in this regard. The ability to enter a combination like ‘Canada – Large Airports’, ‘US West Coast’, and Edmonton Airport is seamless. 

Putting all this together, in my view only AwardTool, PointsYeah, and Seats.aero have the necessary search functionality for me to consider them as my favorite award tool. For discovery or non-real-time searches, they are all pretty on par. However, AwardTool does stand out here for its ability to search multiple airports with real-time search, including its free version.

Search Timeline

The search duration and timespan over which you can make award searches are paramount to how useful a search tool can be. With most tools, the search capabilities are significantly restricted in the free version of the tool, as shown in the table below. 

AwardTool has real-time search available in both free and pro versions, including multi-date search with a window of 4 days in the free version and 16 days in the pro version. With AwardTool’s Discover, you can search a 30-day range, but only up to 90-days out in the free version. The Pro version extends this to a 90-day range over one full year of data.

Point.me only has real-time search available for paying subscribers, and it’s limited to searching 1 day, with no multi-day search functionality. This puts it at a significant disadvantage as opposed to the other search tools. Similarly, Roame also only allows a single-day search window in its real-time search, and its discovery tool SkyView is limited to a 60-day search period, requiring a subscription to look 365 days out. 

PointsYeah has a full-featured real-time search with a 4-day search window for 365 days, extending to 8 days with the Pro version. The free version of PointsYeah also generously includes a full-featured discovery tool in Daydream Explorer, offering a 60-day search window over the full 365 days.   This undisputable makes it the best discovery tool for free users, as even Seats.aero only offers a 60-day search period in the free version. 

Filtering Capabilities

One of the biggest headaches in searching for award flights happens when you’re inundated with too many results, particularly irrelevant results. This is why advanced filtering capabilities are a staple of a high-quality award search tool. 

The most basic filter required for many miles and points enthusiasts will be cabin class. Most of the tools have this capability in both free and pro versions. AwardTool and PointsYeah allow selecting only results that have any combination (or multiple combinations) of Economy, Premium Economy, Business, and First Class. Although Roame groups Economy & Premium Economy and Business & First in its real-time search, it allows individual or multi-selection of each individual class in its SkyView search.

On the other hand, Point.me and Seats.aero are a little bit lacking comparatively. While Point.me does allow filtering by cabin class, it only allows two groupings: Economy & Premium Economy and Business & First. 

Meanwhile, Seats.aero allows you to individually select one cabin type only in the PRO version of the tool. Fortunately, in the free version you can at least sort results by lowest price in business class which helps narrow down your results.

Still, when all the other tools offer this feature in the free versions, it does seem like a bit of a restriction.

All tools, except Point.me, have a plethora of additional filters that can be applied, typically after the results are loaded. These include filters like the number of seats available, premium cabin percentage,  maximum taxes/fees, duration, stops, and so on. 

Notably, Seats.aero only offers some of these filters as PRO features, including taxes/fees, and number of seats. 

On the other hand, AwardTool and Seats.aero have a filter for the aircraft, which is rather impressive.

Alerts

AwardTool offers multiple types of alerts, including real-time, Panama (discovery), and hotel alerts. The ability to set multiple airports for a real-time alert is a big plus, however, you won’t get very far with only 3 alerts offered in the free version. 

PointsYeah alerts are called Points Price Alerts, and track both price changes and newly released seats that match your given price point. 

PointsYeah alerts offer a little to be desired compared to AwardTool, as they can only be set for two specific cities, and there are no discovery alerts. 

Point.me has no alert functionality, and Roame only has 5 alerts in the pro version, which only query via SkyView, making it limited and rather inferior compared to AwardTool, PointsYeah, and even Seats.aero.

Seats.aero has a few distinctions in how its alerts operate. Noting that it is only a discovery tool, and so by the time you receive an alert the space may already be filled, Seats.aero does have unlimited alerts. In the free version of the tool, you can only set the alerts, but a screen to manage them is not available. Instead, they sort of go into a void after you set them. After an alert fires, it is automatically deleted. There is no option to keep an alert active until you manually disable it, unlike other tools. 

In the pro version of the Seats.aero, you can configure the alert to be sent via SMS. This would be a nice-to-have feature in the other tools, particularly for real-time alerts.

Pricing

Pricing between the pro versions of all of the tools is similar, in the ballpark of $10 monthly or $100 annually (USD). Roame has the cheapest monthly cost, whereas AwardTool has the cheapest annual cost. Point.me has the highest price point at $12/mo or $129/yr.  

Of note, PointsYeah can only be billed annually, which makes it a bit more of a commitment. With the other tools, you could try pro for a few months and then decide you only need the free version. Or even strategically time your subscription with your travel planning if you only book trips a few times a year. 

Bonus: Hotel Award Search

Although not the focus of this article, it’s worth mentioning that several of the award search tools are starting to introduce hotel searching functionality. While we won’t get into the nitty-gritty of what these hotel searches offer, its worth knowing that the option is at least there.

Currently, AwardTool, PointsYeah, and Seats.aero have hotel search capabilities. It appears that PointsYeah has the most advanced hotel search development thus far, as it has 10 programs implemented to the four in AwardTool and PointsYeah (IHG, Hilton, Marriott, Hyatt).

The Verdict

The best award search tool is always going to be a personal decision, highly dependent on the type of flights you search for, how far out and how flexible you need your search to be, and other factors. 

In my view,  AwardTool, PointsYeah, and Seats.aero stand out amongst the five tools. 

Best Free Tool

AwardTool and PointsYeah offer the most comprehensive real-time search functionality for their free users, including 4-day real-time search windows for the entire calendar. If you value award discovery search, PointsYeah offers its complete discovery tool to free users over 365 days, while AwardTool is disabled to a 90-day search period in the free version. On the other hand, AwardTool has better and more flexible alert functionality in the free version than PointsYeah does. 

Ultimately the choice between these two comes down to personal preference.

Best Paid Tool

Once you are paying for the premium version, the distinguishing features between the different award tools become less pronounced. Although disputable, the best-paid award search tool is currently AwardTool, in my opinion. It offers the most flexible and comprehensive real-time search,  displays the results in an easily digestible format format, and has two different discovery tools. 

AwardTool also edges PointsYeah out slightly with its alert functionality, offering alerts for both real-time and discovery searches, and alerts can span multiple airports.  

Conclusion

Hopefully, this article has made you more familiar with the available award search tools and made it easier to decide which tool might be right for you. Ultimately you will need to try each tool yourself to find what is the best fit. I will say that the tools are all pay-to-play, and if you’re not willing to commit to a paid version, it’s likely that you will eventually end up outgrowing the free functionality and yearning for more.

As the award tool space is rapidly changing, we will keep this content updated as new tools are released or features of existing tools are updated. If you have any questions or experiences to share concerning any of these tools, don’t hesitate to leave a comment below.