Point.me and American Express have launched a new partnership whereby Amex cardholders can now go to point.me/amex and log in with their existing American Express login to access a version of Point.me that is tailored to Amex’s transfer partners. Unfortunately, at the moment, they appear to be experiencing a technical glitch — but when this comes live and fully functional, it will be great news for Amex cardholders.
Amex Membership Rewards points cardholders can now use Point.me (terms apply)
As noted at the top, there is a unique landing page for this partnership at point.me/amex. From there, you’ll be able to log in using your existing Amex card login and access a version of Point.me that returns results only for Amex transfer partners.
The good news there is that Amex has quite a few transfer partners, so this should give you pretty broad coverage in terms of award searches.
As a reminder, Point.me is an award search tool that allows users to search live inventory across many airline loyalty programs at once. There are even instructions to demonstrate how to set up your corresponding airline loyalty program and transfer your Amex points to that program so you can book. Alternatively, you can pay for award booking services through Point.me.
Ordinarily, a Point.me subscription costs $5 for a day pass, $12 per month, or $129 per year. Getting access for free is a great deal — though keep in mind that you’ll be missing access to some of the programs that would be granted by a full-scale subscription since Point.me can search some programs that are not American Express transfer partners.
We’ve written extensively about Point.me and other award search tools over the past couple of years. None of the award search tools we’ve tried has been 100% perfect all the time, but I’ve found Point.me to be fairly reliable in my own personal searches.
That said, my habits have shifted away from Point.me because of the fact that the search results are significantly slower to populate than those of competitor search tools. Point.me explains that this is because of the speed of searching partner programs in real-time — in order to try to focus on accuracy, they give on time. Because of that difference in user experience, I just haven’t had the habit of using it much in the last year or two.
However, Amex cardholders now getting complimentary access, that certainly removes one barrier to entry and this should make it significantly easier for true beginners to both understand their miles and points and to see how much value they can get with them. Keep in mind that Bilt Rewards members also have access to a version of Point.me that searches Bilt’s partners. That search feature is, uh, built in to the Bilt Rewards app (but if you’d prefer to the Bilt version of point.me on the web, you can log into your Bilt account here: www.biltrewards.com/rewards/travel). I would have liked to have seen Amex build this feature into the Amex site or app as well (and perhaps some day we’ll see that).
Unfortunately, the system is down right now
Unfortunately, by the time I tested this out, it seems like the system has likely been overwhelmed by searches. I ran quite a few different searches from Northeast US airports to Europe on dates when there should have been some availability, but I’m only seeing results via Air France / KLM Flying Blue right now.
I’m sure that this will get fixed, but it’s worth noting that this is something to come back to in a day or two if you want to check it out since it isn’t working at full steam at the time of writing (we’ll update if and when that changes).
Want to learn more about miles and points? Subscribe to email updates or check out our podcast on your favorite podcast platform.
While I understand this from the perspective of the card issuers, this is frustrating for an award traveller. If there are great awards for the route I’m looking for in United or AA, this restricted version of their site still won’t show them. I could only hope that they instead ‘reimburse’ the cost of this service similar to Walmart+ so that everyone has access to full-service features, but I’m sure that wouldn’t happen.
Is it going to search Cathay, Hawaiian, ANA, Singapore? I have a hard time seeing AMEX onboard a collaboration that privileges some of its transfer partners over others.
These days, Points Yeah! and Award Tool seem like better choices than point.me.
Point.me does more handholding for beginners, so it has greater appeal, from the perspectives of AmEx and Bilt Rewards.
I can log in, but the functionality is clearly not there. AMEX can transfer to Aeroplan and BA, but even though I confirmed that awards are available through those programs for a particular date, those awards didn’t populate in my search.
Fortunately point/me is so terrible it will actually discourage newbies from getting into the points game… hopefully they’ll redeem their MR for a toaster.