PointsYeah: Free award searches and alerts (now with seat maps, hotels & more)

PointsYeah is one of my favorite award search tools. It’s fast and user friendly. It offers both flight and hotel searches, and alerts, across a wide selection of loyalty programs. And it does all of this for free. The paid version adds wider date ranges, multiple airports, and more alerts.

Overview

Finding great value flight and hotel awards can be tough. Luckily there are quite a few award search tools on the market that make it easy. PointsYeah is probably the most well-rounded award search tool available. While it’s not perfect, it does a very good job with live searches, pre-cached searches, and hotel award searches. You can find a comparison of award search tools in the following posts:

• Flight search tools: Which award search tool is best?
• Hotel search tools: Which hotel award search tool is best?

In the following sections I’ll cover three major components of PointsYeah: flight search, flight deals (previously called DayDream Explorer), and hotel search…

Flight Search

Like many other tools, PointsYeah lets you start your flight search simply by entering your origin, destination, and dates. Additionally, you can search for one-way, round-trip, or multi-city; you can specify the number of passengers; and you can limit the search to specific bank (transferable points) programs or airline programs.

When viewing results, a wide range of filters and sorting criteria can be applied. Filters include cabin (economy, business, etc), airlines, number of stops, premium cabin %, aircraft, and more.

Flight results also now include a link to view a live seat map. This is great! At a glance you can see the cabin layout and which seats are available.

If you can’t find a flight that works for you, you can set up email alerts so that PointsYeah will keep checking your criteria every day. You can limit each alert to max number of stops, specific airlines or programs, number of points per passenger, and/or “mixed cabin percentage” (for example, you can use this to avoid getting business class results where half of the flight time is in economy).

Flight Search Free vs. Premium

• Free:
  • 4 day search window: search across up to 4 days at a time
  • Search 1 origin and 1 destination airport at a time
  • Set up to 4 alerts
• Premium:
  • 8 day search window
  • Search 2 origin and 2 destination airports at a time
  • Set up to 32 flight alerts

Flight Deals

PointsYeah caches award search results. Via their Flight Deals interface you can quickly search their entire cache across 60 days at a time with broad criteria like “from North America” and “to Asia.” Additionally, you can create an unlimited number of Deal Alerts. Creating these alerts won’t cause PointsYeah to run additional searches, but what it will do is alert you if they come across a search result (presumably from people running live searches) that matches your criteria.

A while ago I compared a number of Cached Discovery tools to see which one could handle some made-up scenarios the best. At that time, PointsYeah came out ahead of the others. I can’t say for certain that’s still the case, but at least at one time PointsYeah seemed to have one of the best products for this purpose.

Flight Deals Free vs. Premium

I believe that the full Flight Deals functionality is available to free users.

Hotel Search

PointsYeah’s hotel search works the way you’d probably expect. You enter a city and date range to see which hotels are available. Results include point prices and cash rates. You can sort by Points, CPP (cents per point), Price, Most Miles Earned, or by Distance.

• Supports major hotel programs: Marriott, Hilton, Hyatt, IHG, Choice, Wyndham
• Supports finding Preferred Hotels bookable with Choice points
• Supports some programs that let you earn miles when booking hotels: AAdvantage Hotels, United Hotels
• Supports some programs that offer extra perks: Amex Travel (Fine Hotels & Resorts, The Hotel Collection), Virtuoso

With hotel alerts you can set the max point price or cash price for a specific hotel and date range. You can also optionally limit alerts to suites or club rooms.

Hotel Search Free vs. Premium

Nearly all of the hotel search functions are available to free users. The only limitation I’m award of is that free users get 4 hotel alerts while premium users get 15.

Bugs & Missing Flights

I’ve run into miscellaneous bugs when using PointsYeah. The biggest issue, though, is that a number of their supported programs don’t always work and so you won’t see their awards in the search results. I realize that it’s not easy to keep these things working (especially since most loyalty programs don’t like tools like these preventing users from searching directly on their site), but it’s frustrating as a user when I expect to get results but don’t. Or, even worse, there may have been good awards available but I didn’t know because I didn’t realize the tool wasn’t searching some key programs.

To PointsYeah’s credit, they provide a status screen that shows which programs are currently working: pointsyeah.com/systemstatus. At the time of this writing Iberia Plus Avios, Virgin Atlantic Flying Club, Finnair Plus Avios, and Virgin Australia Velocity are all listed as Temporarily Unavailable. PointsYeah tells me that Virgin Atlantic, and Virgin Australia are expected to come back online soon, but that Iberia and Finnair will take longer to fix.

PointsYeah Premium

PointsYeah Premium is available for the following price:

• Monthly plan: $11.99
• Yearly plan: $99.99

Direct Sign-Up Link

• Note: Frequent Miler has an affiliate relationship with PointsYeah. We will earn a commission if you click through our link and sign up for the paid version of the tool.
• Note 2: Don’t use our link when signing up for an annual plan! Instead, click through a shopping portal to earn miles. See details below.

Earn miles

PointsYeah is now available on several portals. You can earn airline miles when buying the annual plan, as follows:

Bottom Line

While its not perfect, PointsYeah is very good at everything it does: flight searches, cached flight discovery, and hotel searches. It’s the most well-rounded of the tools on the market that I’m aware of. That said, there are situations where another tool will be a better fit:

1. Seats.aero is better for finding very specific awards. See: Seats.aero: a wonderfully nerdy tool for finding Unicorn flight awards.
2. For those new to award bookings, Point.me does a better job of stepping you through how to transfer points and how to book the award.
3. While both PointsYeah and AwardTool are capable of running up to 32 searches at once, AwardTool offers more flexible options. With PointsYeah, you can get 32 searches by searching 2 origin airports x 2 destination airports x 8 dates. With AwardTool, you could do the same, but you could also do 1 origin x 1 destination x 32 dates; or you could do 2 origin x 4 destination x 4 dates; or you could do 1 origin x 32 destinations x 1 date; etc.

Note that I’m not currently using PointsYeah for my own flight searches. For domestic flights I primarily turn to Points Path (which is integrated into Google Flights). And for international flights, I prefer the flexibility that AwardTool offers. Additionally, I really hate that PointsYeah isn’t currently showing Virgin Atlantic results. All of that said, I do use PointsYeah every time I do a hotel search.

For a more detailed comparison of tools, see:

• Flight search tools: Which award search tool is best?
• Hotel search tools: Which hotel award search tool is best?

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