Pointsyeah: Free flight award searches and alerts (now possible to search for child award seats)

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Pointsyeah may just be a game changer…  Like some other tools, it offers a Kayak-like interface for finding award flights.  And, like point.me and roame, it allows searching for business and first class in one shot.  And, like AwardLogic it offers 4 day search windows.  And, also like AwardLogic, it offers flexible alerts so that you’ll be notified when award flights that meet your specifications become available.  Unlike any other tool, Pointsyeah offers all of those capabilities for free.

Since this post was first published, PointsYeah has become my favorite point-to-point award search tool, bar none.  They’ve added more airlines to their searches, expanded the amount of free search alerts, somehow kept United award searches working during a period when other tools could not, and now have the ability to search for awards for both adults and children. Additionally, they added a new paid tier that offers even more capabilities without taking away any of the great capabilities at the free tier!

a screenshot of a flight information

Overview

PointsYeah is one of several “point to point” award search tools on the market.  These are tools that let you enter your desired origin airport, destination airport, date of travel, and desired class of service and then will search for available award flights across many different programs.  You can find a comparison of award search tools here: Which award search tool is best?

PointsYeah stands out from other similar tools because its free tier offers most of the best features of each competing product while also delivering search results quickly.  The paid tier of PointsYeah offers features that go beyond anything available through competing products with longer search windows and many more alerts.

PointsYeah Free

PointsYeah offers an amazing amount of functionality for free.  All you have to do is sign up with your email address and a password and you’re good to go with all of the following:

  • Intuitive search functionality (input your “from” and “to” airports, number of passengers, your preference for economy vs business/first class, and date of travel).
  • Able to perform multi-city and open jaw searches
  • 4 day search window: optionally search across up to 4 days at a time.
  • Fast results
  • Can search for both adults and children
  • Excellent filtering options in the search results, including:
    • Airline programs
    • Bank programs
    • Number of stops
    • Airlines
    • Max Points
    • Max Taxes (this is great for filtering out results with huge fees)
    • Mixed cabin percentage (e.g. remove first class results where only a small percentage of the trip would be in first class)
    • Departure Time
    • Arrival Time
  • Support for 20 airline loyalty programs:
    1. AeroMexico Club Premier
    2. Air Canada Aeroplan
    3. Air France / KLM Flying Blue
    4. Alaska Airlines Mileage Plan
    5. American Airlines AAdvantage
    6. Avianca Lifemiles
    7. Delta SkyMiles
    8. Emirates Skywards
    9. Etihad Guest
    10. Frontier Airlines Miles
    11. Iberia Plus Avios
    12. Jetblue TrueBlue
    13. Qantas Points
    14. Spirit Airlines Miles
    15. SAS EuroBonus
    16. Tap Miles & Go
    17. Turkish Airlines Miles & Smiles
    18. United Airlines MileagePlus
    19. Virgin Australia Velocity
    20. Virgin Atlantic Flying Club
  • Ability to set up to 4 alerts for free:
    • Multi day alerts count as multiple alerts (e.g. a 4 day alert counts as 4 alerts)
    • Can limit alert to max number of stops, optionally to specific airlines or programs, number of points per passenger, and “mixed cabin percentage” (for example, you can use this to avoid getting business class results where half of the flight time is in economy)

PointsYeah Premium

PointsYeah’s paid tier has all of the capabilities of the free tier plus the following:

  • 8 day one-way search window (vs. 4 day window with the free tier)
  • Round-trip search window offers 4 days in each direction
  • 24 active alerts (vs. 4 with the free tier)

PointsYeah Premium is available for the following price:

  • Yearly plan: $89.99

Direct Sign-Up Link

Note: Frequent Miler has an affiliate relationship with PointsYeah. We will earn a commission if you click through from our link and sign up with the paid version of the tool

Is the Premium plan worth paying for?

This is an interesting situation.  Compared to other paid tools like Point.me and AwardLogic, PointsYeah Premium is a bargain.  At $89.99 per year, it is significantly cheaper than the competition (at the time of this writing, Point.me costs $129 per year and AwardLogic costs $199.99).  On the other hand, the free version of PointsYeah is so good that many people will find that the free tool is all they need.

I’d recommend starting with the free version.  If you find that you need more alerts and/or wider search ranges, then pay for Premium.

Bottom Line

In my opinion, PointsYeah offers best-in-class award search capabilities, even with the free tier.  The paid tier goes beyond what is available elsewhere.  There are, however, a few reasons you may be interested in looking at other tools as well:

  1. A tool like Seats.aero is much better at finding awards when you’re less concerned about flying during specific dates or from/to specific airports.  For example, Seats.aero can be used to find all business class awards between North America and Asia, whereas with tools like PointsYeah you have to search from and to specific airports.  See: Seats.aero: a wonderfully nerdy tool for finding Unicorn flight awards.
  2. Some other tools search more programs (but PointsYeah has been closing the gap quickly)
  3. 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.
  4. Specialty tools like Points.Aero, ExpertFlyer, and SeatSpy offer different capabilities that you may find useful.  Find more here: Which award search tool is best?
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130 Comments
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Dave

Main weakness of Pointsyeah is the lack of coverage on many sites that requires login. These include British Airways, Air France and Singapore Airlines.

pointsyeahsucks

What PointsYeah does to the competitors seem at least unrespectful. They even threatened and DDOS attack college student project to protect themself. Just Google “PointsYeah CEO”, and it’s unacceptable.

L 3

Wow, check out these prices!
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IT expert

User error

L 3

Yes you are!

MilesTravis

I’m a PY subscriber, but seems that they have lost support to Aeroplan for a long time. Very disappointed TBH.

Johnson Z

Same here. It sucks that they only have yearly subscription. I’m stuck.

Marie

Think Roame still has Aeroplan

Mary

Seem both Roame and Awardtool have.

MarkFlyer

Seems that they also lost support for Frontier and Copa for a long time. Not sure why they claimed to support 25+ programs while there are fewer than 20 available from my experience.

Gianna

I can never find 25+ program neither. Wondering if they ever provide the list? Suspicious and dishonest.

Last edited 8 months ago by Gianna
Russell

Which one is better? AwardTool, Pointsyeah or Roame?

Last edited 9 months ago by Russell
Jackson

I prefer Awardtool, which is more powerful with more features and better UI.

Andrew

I like the interface of PointsYeah better than Roame, they had some similar capabilities but PointsYeah is more Kayak like for searching (which I prefer). Enough so that I was willing to pay for PoinstYeah’s premium version.

Roame has a nice free award alert newsletter I’d sign up for to help get ideas of potential award flight availability you may want to look into more.

AwardTool seems newer on the scene – hadn’t heard of it until Greg’s recent post on it. I don’t love the drama in the comment thread on that one. Since I’ve already paid for PointsYeah I don’t see a point in getting both anyway.

What’s up FM?

Recent interesting sequence of events:
-The comments with the bickering between Awardtool and Pointsyeah have been removed
-there is this Pointsyeah post that
——appears to be a repost with no new major info (child seats mentioned in title but not the body)
——no mention of Awardtool when comparing to other products in this post
——timing of this post is almost like an oops!/backpedalling after making the Awardtool post, seemingly to make amends with Pointsyeah
——Award tool is not mentioned in the link to “Which award tool is best?”

Given all of that, with FM having affiliate links for both, would appreciate more explanation from FM on this. I’ve always appreciated FM for their integrity which in large part is due to their transparency, compared to other blogs. This recent series of events leaves me confused , rethinking that.

What's up FM?

Greg (or whichever team member is covering for Greg), I listened to the update on the podcast this AM, and the cautions regarding buying the Awardtool pro product are noted; it might be good if you could update your post on Awardtool, with respect to holding off on paying the fee for the pro version, to match your sound reasoning from the podcast?

globetrotter

No East Asian or African airlines?

rich

For best seats, is seatsguru obsolete? I thought a while ago I read it wasn’t being updated but I have not kept up with this topic.
Thanks.

Richard

I’m wondering what the best site to use is now. Rumors of some companies stealing code, am I being recommended something just for affiliate link clicks…

Lukas

I wonder how badly point.me is hurting!

Andrew

Their tool is the most thorough but it’s just so slow to finish all its searches. And I don’t like their model of limiting new user testing to 3 searches – I prefer a first month trial like Expert Flyer or limited free tier feature set like PoinstYeah and Seats.aero.

Speed of results for me matters more than thoroughness, especially since they still can miss awards even after taking all that time to run.

L 3

Too bugridden.

[…] new flight award search tool with both a free and paid (Pro) version. This tool is very similar to PointsYeah. Both offer powerful search features for free; both allow searching for flight awards across a […]

AJ Meininger

Im new to this but how exactly do I get these fares using points? When I go look on the airline booking site the fare is 3x what points yeah says.

Ferdinand Magellan

I think that this is an excellent tool. The problem, of course, is that most of the results that it generates are DL/UA “free” tickets that are worth only one cent a mile. In fact, it makes the gutting of US frequent flyer program all the more obvious. But, on the other hand, it does show a number of the almost always better foreign programs.

james

Does not search United (nothing pops up on pointsyeah whereas United has daily availability), don’t know what else they are hiding.

Enrico

Like what? Maybe you see the Chase card member flights on united.com?

Giovanni

I signed up for the Black Friday special on PointsYeah and not only did i not get the special pricing but you at PointsYeah charged my credit card account TWICE!

Great Article once again, Greg

Giovanni

My bad, please disregard or delete this message.
i was impressed with how fast customer service got back to me.

Andrew

I think they had a sale at New Year’s as well (unless I’m confusing it with a different tool!), I signed up as well during a discount period. No double charges for my end though thankfully.

viv

Pointsyeah is giving me phantom award space on IB and AA. The search results are not available for booking.