At long last, point.me is here. Regular readers likely remember us writing about award search tool JuicyMiles over the past few years. If, like me, you came to really enjoy that tool, you have probably been in withdrawal for months since it closed down. Thankfully, point.me has arrived on the scene. I’ve had a chance to play with the tool and frankly I love it. Pricing is quite reasonable. Searches can feel a bit slow at first, but given the information returned it seems like a fair enough trade. This is certainly a cool tool that can make your life a lot easier when searching for award tickets by searching 33 programs with a single click.
The Deal
- point.me has launched for full public use.
Readers can enjoy a free 24hr pass with coupon code FREQUENTMILER. The free trial has promo has expired. - Direct link to Point.me
(This is our affiliate link. That means that Frequent Miler will earn a small commission if you click through and sign up… thank you!)
Quick Thoughts
We’ll have a full analysis and review of point.me coming very soon (including comparison to other similar tools), but in the meantime I wanted to alert readers to the fact that the tool is available and you can play with it yourself for a day for free with our coupon code FREQUENTMILER. Just choose the “I have a code” box.
Redemption of the code is limited, so you may get a message saying to come back and try again later. I imagine that any bottleneck there will likely smooth out in a few hours.
Speaking of pricing, one of my major hang-ups with Juicy Miles had been that the price point for a monthly membership only made sense for bloggers or award bookers. That’s one area where I feel like point.me has hit the nail on the head: the price is reasonable given the functionality. A day pass is $5, which can totally be worth it for anyone looking to just make a booking without investing the time to search each site separately. A monthly membership costs either $12 per month or $129 billed annually ($10.75 per month).
I think that’s pretty awesome. I’d probably sooner pay for a month than a day and give myself some time to scout out a great award, but like I said I could see the $5 cost of a single day membership beating out the cost of an hour or two spent searching, so I think there is a use case either way.
I could also certainly see this tool being worth $129 a year for a digital nomad or retiree who is going to search awards often. I wasn’t initially a believer in a tool that costs money to do what I can do for free until I got used to how much time it saved me. Going back to searching each award one site at a time for the last few months of 2021 made it clear just how much I missed having a Kayak-like tool to quickly see and compare availability and pricing for award flights.
Even in my trial run with the tool recently, I’ve run into situations where results flat-out surprised me and taught me of a new sweet spot or showed me availability I wouldn’t have otherwise considered. I recently wrote about the expanded award availability on Delta when booking through partner Aeromexico and that’s the type of thing that I never would have found without a tool like this. If I were looking to book the routes I wrote about, point.me would have saved me a nice chunk of miles for the flights for my family of four. I love that point.me even recognized that Membership Rewards had a transfer bonus to Aeromexico at the time calculated the necessary points accurately. I also recently booked three seats in American Airlines nonstop first class from New York to London thanks to the tool finding seats and prices that wouldn’t have even been on my radar otherwise. That’s the value to me in searching 33 programs with one click.
Note that it does take some time to search all 33 programs, so you need a little patience. Still, searching that many programs in under 2 minutes will be a remarkable time-savings over searching them separately. And results load while search is happening, so you do see information pretty soon after clicking.
One enhancement I really like is the ability to sort results one of three ways: by lowest point price, by quickest flights, or by “point.me picks”, which factor in both the price in points and award taxes & fees along with overall experience / ease of options.
That definitely isn’t the only enhancement. You can now integrate your AwardWallet account to see pricing according to the programs where you have points and tutorials show you how to do everything from create a frequent flyer account to book the flight for yourself. This really makes it easy even for someone who isn’t very familiar with the process of booking via partner airlines.
It is also worth highlighting a few Frequently Asked Questions and answers that were shared with us in advance. You can find the full FAQs here.
Again, we’ll have a full analysis of the tool and comparisons to other options to come very soon, but for now I wanted to share that it is finally here and give readers codes to access the tool right away to try it out. The bottom line is that I’m excited to have a tool like this again to save time and possibly points.
Want to learn more about miles and points? Subscribe to email updates or check out our podcast on your favorite podcast platform.
Fairly glaring error today on point.me, with them showing me one-way Iberia awards through AsiaMiles. CX can only book round-trip Iberia awards.
I don’t see monthly plan ($12 per month) on their pricing page. It looks like there are only daily or yearly rates left. Is that correct?
The standard plan will show the monthly option if you un-toggle “annual billing.”
Code doesn’t work. They say it’s all used up, so don’t bother trying to use it. Seems like a bait and switch.
I had a similar experience to the reader below. Nobody available on chat. No reply to email. In fact I paid $5 for a one day pass and found better deals on United that did not reflect on point.me. Synced with my awardwallet account too. Point.me replied “that was not possible” but even after showing them examples they simply did not reply. Have emailed them a couple of times for updates with no reply. I think the service is a great idea but right now seems to be lacking in customer service and other searches directly on airlines web sites like I have done for years has yielded more options at less points than point.me.
I would like to see the more in depth review that Nick Reyes said he was going to do. Perhaps he might have some luck finding out was is going on with their customer support. I still have not heard anything
Based on multiple positive reviews on this site, and many other reputable sites, I was excited to try Point.me. I have a lot of points, and really want to get back to traveling now.
I am in Canada so I was pleased to see that Point.me included my Aeroplan points. I also have a lot of British Airways Avios points.
After checking out a test search, all was good so I signed up for a year.
Then I discovered that my RBC Avion points are “bank card” points and not airline points. It was not immediately obvious to me that Aeroplan points associated with my CIBC Visa card were included and Avion points associated with my RBC Visa card were not included. My fault for not researching a bit more before purchasing a year long plan, but Point.me could do a better job of making sure other Canadians don’t find themselves in a similar situation.
I have over a million Avion points that will not be searched on Point.me so it is not a very useful service for me.
So then I tried to contact Point.me to see if they might consider a refund. There are no support options readily apparent on the website. There is chat support: “Have questions? Happy to help.”…not so much. For the past 2 weeks, the only response to this is “Hello! There are no Customer Success Associates available right now, but I can help you with anything self-service, along with basic questions, and escalating to our team if needed.”
My repeated questions never got “escalated” to the team. I re-worded my question to something more general that would be more likely to get a response than a request for a refund. Still no response.
I finally discovered an email in the site: concierge@point.me and on March 27 sent a general request for help. Nothing as yet.
I see that “Tiffany” appears to be from Point.me and has responded to some previous posts. I would be interested to see what they have to say about this level of customer support. And my chance of a refund!
I would also like to know if there is any likelihood of Point.me expanding to Canada and including RBC Avion points.
It found the web special pricing for an American Airlines award. Only 25,000 miles for a business class ticket from Colombia to Washington DC with a change of planes in Miami. I was surprised that it didn’t show JetBlue in any of the results since they also fly from Colombia to Washington DC with a change of planes in Fort Lauderdale. It also did not show the possibility of redeeming British Airways Avios points for the trip. But once I knew which flights were available on American Airlines I put in the same dates on the British Airways website and it did show those flights were available using Avios. AA had the best deal, points-wise
Points.me showed availability on Turkish (business), however I could not find these flights on either united nor on ANA. Is it phantom availability? Who is right?
Abicus is cheap and requires no battery.
When I try to sign up, it said “This code is currently oversubscribed. Please try again in an hour or add your name to the waitlist to be notified.”
I got the oversubscribed message too when trying to use the FREQUENTMILER code. Have tried repeatedly over the past several hours, still get the message. If the code is now dead, would appreciated Frequent Miler posting that info.
Sadly, never got past the “oversubsubscribed” message. Total turnoff.
Wow.
Did a search and found my booking for SIGNIFICANTLY less.
I couldn’t find award flights before, and they found one for 25k points. This has saved me over $1300.
Seems like it would be helpful to both sides to filter our search criteria BEFORE the search instead of after, would lessen the search time.
@ BS123 — It does seem like that would be helpful, I agree. But in practice, we have to search everything in order to normalize the data and layer in results and pricing.
So there are other things we can (and are, and will continue to) do to improve search speeds, but unfortunately that isn’t one that has a big impact.
@ Tiffany, your answer applies to the initial search results (or complete results). After the first few searches for a routing, I already have a mental note that only saver availability is with 1 airline program, say AA because I need 4 seats. I would much prefer to filter to OneWorld alliance only BEFORE the search AND eliminate all British Airways flights due to high surcharges. Wouldn’t that be less load on the server and get me faster results? For each of the next 10s of searches.
Note: I continue to do further searches over several days to refine my flights and departure times because there are tons of routing combinations SFO->JFK, despite only 1 option for JFK->DOH segment. Also my hotel dates are not locked so I come back to search 1 day before or after (which I have also searched initially)
@ Tahoe Trekker — Yep, I totally understand your thought process. So without giving away too much of our IP here, I’ll just say that knowing those parameters wouldn’t have any impact on the data we need to cull through.
If we were doing what the sites that just scrape-and-repost flights do, then yes, this would work. Our systems are much more involved.
If … only… it … wasn’t… SOOOO… SLOW….
I spent nearly 5 hours searching several routes, each search took about 4 min to load – I nearly lost my mind… Please tell us they’re going to fix this – so annoying !
@ Rachel — Yep, we hear you, and we will get faster! Remember that even Google was very slow at searching years ago; it’s one of the challenges of a metasearch engine.
Rob Pegoraro went into the technicalities a bit for PC Mag, if the mechanics are something you’re interested in.
Too slow and too confusing unfortunately. Sticking with award logic
Point.me alerted me to award availability on Qatar Airways direct flight SFO->DOH at outlandish price of 130K AS miles one way in economy. It checks out on alaksa.com and at the same time AA.com does not show any saver availability on Qatar Airways (normally 30K AA miles). I’m not able to check availability using QMiles due to zero balance.
What does this mean? Alaska has non-saver level award seats on Qatar Airways? More importantly, is there saver level award inventory or not?
This is unrelated to high server load due to this post. My searches were days/weeks ago.
@ Tahoe Trekker — It is not saver availability! Alaska has non-saver awards on several airlines, where you are basically returning your points to Alaska and they are buying you a ticket with their corporate card.
It’s a terrible deal, please don’t book it.
Wait just a minute Trigger. I have used the program at Juicy Miles, and then a beta version I paid $129 annually. Today their lead programmer tells me to quit using the program so much or they will terminate my account. I did nothing wrong. I would do several searches, go back to work. Mainly because you have to wait 5 minutes to get a search result. Been sitting here doing Autocad work between the searches. Now I don’t even know what will happen. It is a very useful tool, but geeze Louise on this one.
Hi Byron, I’m not sure if you’ve received our subsequent emails, or seen any of the responses I’ve left to your comments on other sites, but just in case:
Yes, you are absolutely right, we do have fair use limits in place (which are disclosed on our pricing and terms pages), and notifications that go out when someone is doing a certain % more searches than usual.
It’s unfortunate we have to do this, but as I’m sure you can imagine even in the beta version we’ve had problems with competitors setting up “commercial” accounts and abusing our systems with automated scripts and such.
So again, we really appreciate you responding so quickly, and confirming that you are just excitedly planning a trip for yourself! We’re all good on our end, and if you need help narrowing down dates or searching more efficiently, the support team is standing by!”
Just checked it out for a trip back home from CDG in May. I came up with some results I wasn’t expecting and others I know are available didn’t show up. Having said that, it is a great tool that will hopefully improve soon, especially the ability to search +/- 3 days of your dates.
Separating Economy results from Premium Economy would be nice. Rather irritating to have to scroll through a long list looking for PE.
@ Ed. C — Thanks for giving it a look! People were…very excited to use the tool today, so that probably (hopefully!) accounts for the discrepancies you saw.
If you’re feeling inspired, please click on the aqua comment button in the bottom-right of point.me to submit a bug. We’d love to troubleshoot and ensure it isn’t anything more than the server stickiness we got caught in today.
How is this different than ExpertFlyer?
I think what you’re asking is what can this do that ExpertFlyer can’t do because if you’ve used both tools you can obviously see the huge differences in interfaces.
If you’re proficient with ExpertFlyer and like what it does, great. I think point.me is about a million and a half times more user-friendly. It’s a tool that I can send friends to when they want help figuring out how to use their miles that will show them how to not get ripped off by transferring to the wrong program and also show them how to open a loyalty account, transfer the points, and book the ticket.
It is also far different in that the last I used Expert Flyer you had to specify one airline to search at a time and know which fare bucket you need, etc. This tool is searching a bunch of programs at once.
Again, I think the differences are pretty clear. If ExpertFlyer works for you, great. I have used ExpertFlyer some, but I’ve never loved it. I’ve never discovered a booking options with it that saved me points. That’s happened to me several times both with Juicy Miles and now with point.me because even as someone who spends a lot of time studying programs, I sometimes forget that you can book Copa flights with Air France miles, etc.
Thanks, Nick. I have used ExpertFlyer a handful of times to set up award alerts for flights, where I knew airline X few from Y to Z on certain days, but wasn’t yet showing saver business availability. You’re right, I needed to do more work on the front end to figure out the airline I’d want to fly then search/set up alert for that particular airline.
I’ve only poked around Point.me without an account. While it doesn’t seem to have an alert feature that I saw, it looks like a pretty powerful and user-friendly tool to know “What awards are available on this route right now”. Thanks as always.
I just subscribed (non amex plan) and ran six searches for international award tickets i already have on the books (AA, UA, QR, KLM). Before i searched, i confirmed those awards were still available. point.me was not able to find any of the six award routes i already have. I also noticed the number of points required for various tickets was outlandish. It seems the only real benefit of point.me is to quickly see which programs you can use to get from A to B but the TPG app does a better job of that and it is free. Am i missing something??
I had a similar experience searching on there this morning. The flying blue itinerary I know is available was not found, and only higher priced awards were found.
In point.me’s defense, Flying Blue is a bit weird in how they show award pricing most of the time. On their site you will indeed see the route you found on google flights or elsewhere but the price will be different than if you call in. I spoke with them about this and the explanation to me was that direct routes will show the correct number of points on their site but for connecting flights, the only way to reliably know the true number of points is to call in. For example, i have been booking SFO-AMS-SVO and LAX-AMS-SVO for 55k – 72k points. Sometimes i will see the low-priced award tix online on one day then the next day they are gone but when i call in, they are available. I have had other similar Flying Blue experiences on other routes so i just always call them. This does not get point.me off the hook for seemingly showing a fraction of what is truly available nor excuse their outlandish points pricing across the board.
@ Todd @ Paul — Flying Blue is weird (we are working diligently on a better solution for that quirk), but what you saw today is absolutely outside of what we’d expect, even from them.
People were…very excited to use the tool today, so that probably (hopefully!) accounts for the discrepancies you saw.
We’d like to be certain though, so if you’re feeling inspired, please click on the aqua comment button in the bottom-right of point.me to submit a bug. That will give us a starting point to troubleshoot and ensure it isn’t anything more than the server stickiness we got caught in today.
Did you not wait long enough? I’d like to take a look. Can you send me the routes? You could email mailbag at frequentmiler.com. I’d like to see what it shows vs what you’re seeing elsewhere. I haven’t yet used the TPG app, but now I’m going to have to download it and check it out :-).
Gave me invalid code error when trying to use FREQUENTMILER at checkout.
Maybe it’s the traffic – will try again later
I have been subscribed to the annual membership for several months and love it. I am surprised that I use it as much as I do. Saves a lot of time. My only complaint is that it doesn’t seem to show Iberia flights which are a great sweet spot for Business class to Spain.
Did you subscribe using chase cards? If Yes, was as triggered as travel?
So Nick … Honest question and I’m not trying to offend. Do you get compensated on the referral? One of my (many) favorite things about this site is the full disclosure aspect. (Talking to you, TPG!)
Not to my knowledge. I don’t handle the money end of the blog, but I wouldn’t expect that anybody is paying a commission for uses of a free 24hr pass. Any time there is an affiliate relationship that I know about or a referral link, I certainly disclose that. I think we had an affiliate relationship with Juicy Miles, so perhaps that’s in the works here also for the future, but I don’t handle that.
Regardless, we don’t write posts about affiliate products for the sake of affiliate commissions. I think that’s pretty clear if you just scroll the home page on our site and look at the topics. I have had access to point.me for a while and I’ve been using it more and more and happy with it, so when we got word that they were going to launch I was excited to write about it because I’ve been happy with it. I was further glad that they were willing to give readers a free chance to try it out as we do focus on opportunities that benefit readers and this seemed like a good benefit for many readers between time saved and a free chance to try it.
FWIW, Gary Leff specifically stated he receives no compensation if you use his trial code. He didn’t exactly say there’s no compensation if someone who started with a trial code later pays the fee but that was the impression that was left.
FWIW, I am happy to provide assurances that I am not paying anyone a commission on a $0 coupon code 🙂
We do have the possibility of affiliate relationships on future transactions, but not only do we require disclosure, I know the FM team would insist on it!
I would love to see comparison with other services like SeatSpy if we could combine them both to get better and fantastic results
SeatSpy is very different. I’ve been using that more often lately also, but for very different use cases.
The awesome thing about SeatSpy is that you can see a year of availability with a single search. That can be really handy.
On the flip side, SeatSpy only looks for nonstop availability and only with a limited set of airlines and doesn’t give you award prices when booking via partners.
point.me gives you results for a single day across 33 different programs — so if there is an option with 3 stops and there are 20 ways to book that itinerary through partner programs, you’ll see those 20 different ways.
Do they have an app?
I don’t believe they do, but the site does work on mobile.
On mobile there site sucks. There is no going back to the list of the results once clicked on one if the results options.
It’s on the list!
Also why doesn’t it display untied transfer option at all ?
I don’t understand? I see United MileagePlus award prices.
Nyc-tlv. Neither me and my friend saw any results from UNITED. although there is availability on united.com
@ Dav — We absolutely support MileagePlus, but today was an overwhelming day for our systems.
If you’re feeling inspired, please click on the aqua comment button in the bottom-right of point.me to submit a bug. We’d love to troubleshoot and ensure it isn’t anything more than the server stickiness we got caught in today.
Otherwise, maybe give it a spin again over the weekend when there isn’t such an influx, and see what you think!
Would love to check again. Although I checked very early morning where the site was running smooth. However I wouldn’t pay for it to try again. So if you would like to issue me a free day pass again that would be great
@ Dav — Fair enough, and totally open to that. Send us a note!
If it helps, with how our systems distribute load, it’s probably not as visibly apparent when things are not running smoothly. The site itself will stay fairly snappy even at high volumes, it’s the search results that get thin/time out.
So if you were searching after about 8:50 Eastern yesterday, you had less than about a 60% chance of seeing results via MileagePlus, and that went down to roughly 0% fairly quickly.
Bit of a day, ultimately.
Sure. Let me know how I can send you a note .
Sure. Let me know how I can send you a note .
Tiffany, it seems like this product has not been adequately tested before release. That’s a pity. I have used Juicy Miles quite a while ago and found it useful, but from the comments here I think I will wait a while before I even try this.
You should offer a better free trial if we are expected to find the bugs for you.
But if it’s as slow as people here are saying then it’s a non-starter for me.
@ Frank — It’s not a matter of insufficient testing as much as it’s that we tested our infrastructure up to n searches/second (with n being many many many orders of magnitude higher than even the most ambitious projections) and have been getting orders of magnitude more interest than even that.
I want to say it’s a good problem for a startup to have (people tell me that, anyway), but personally I mostly find it massively frustrating.
I have been using it for a bit and like it. Not quite as good as juicy miles but better than anything else out there. One improvement I would like to see is more availability displayed for programs that make more availability to their own members. It looks like it does Turkish but not sure of some of the others like Singapore. Maybe I am just not doing the right dates.
It definitely reports prices via Singapore Krisflyer. I did several searches this morning and it returned Singapore prices.
What did you like better about JuicyMiles? I was an avid JuicyMiles user and honestly this seems better in every way except for one small thing I’ve found so far (more on that tomorrow).
I liked the interface much better and I also found it easier to start reviewing interim results while the search was pending. For whatever reason — and maybe it’s just the routes I’ve been searching — I find it a waste of time to start reviewing results before it has finished doing its thing. With juicy miles, I often found the results I was most interested in while it was still processing. Also, the three day availability was huge. It sounds like point.me wants that capability eventually. That would be big.
Interesting. I’ve found the interface the complete opposite — I found the reviewing results as they populated with JuicyMiles to be a pain, but I like it with point.me. I do sort it to lowest point price first rather than point.me picks.
It’s funny — I actually thought my view was so obvious and so likely to be universal that I was genuinely surprised when you asked me to defend it. And you feel the same — exactly 180 degrees in the other direction! Just goes to show, you can’t please all the people all the time.
Sorry for jumping here from no where. Did you subscribe using chase cards? If Yes, does that trigger as travel?
First time user here.
I just tried searching but the problem is that when it comes to surcharges a lot of time it says “unknown “.
Which routes have you found that on? I’ve found that occasionally on routes where surcharges can vary pretty significantly (I think they are displaying “unknown” rather than potentially display an inaccurate amount), but I see accurate surcharges on the vast majority of my searches.
I’ll add that occasionally inaccurate surcharges was one of my gripes with JuicyMiles that I’ve found mostly alleviated with point.me.
I’ve been using point.me for the last month before this blog post was published. It frequently returned $0 taxes and fees (not unknown) on routings with British Airways flights.
Is this different than the free version that Point.me has been offering for those with an Amex card?
Yes. That version only searched Amex transfer partners. I don’t know whether the Amex version has access to Award Wallet integration among other enhancements.
Though I get why AMEX would want to limit to AMEX transfer partners, but not sure why point.me would want to provide a significantly slimmed down version and then ask people to pay full price at the end. Sort of like when Ford and other car companies realized they didn’t want to make crappy versions of their cars for the rental market because renters would then think the car was crap.
Though I guess AMEX required it.