Which award search tool is best?

It’s possible to fly economy class to Hawaii for 10,000 miles, or fly business class to Europe for as few as 34,000 miles, or fly business class to South Africa for 75,000 miles. It’s easy to dream about enjoying flights like these, but it’s often very difficult to find award availability. That’s where tools can help. Instead of searching day by day and from one airport to another, over and over, you can save a ton of time by letting award search tools do the work…

Modern award search tools let you search for award flights across a wide range of loyalty programs. The best tools allow live searching a range of dates and multiple airports at once. They also offer a way to discover awards across entire regions and across time. By using pre-cached information, they can (for example) show business class awards available for a family of 4 to travel to Europe over summer break. The downside of this approach is that some of that pre-cached information will be out-of-date by the time you see it and so the best of these tools make it easy to refresh results. For more about this type of functionality, see: A new breed of award discovery tools.

Finally, since award space comes and goes and comes again over time, the best tools let you create alerts so that you’ll be notified when awards of interest become available. I can’t stress this enough. Without an alerts feature, an award search tool is half-baked, at best. I’ve booked many great awards thanks to emailed alerts.

The following sections display information about tools which search across a number of award programs after you to specify an origin airport, destination airport, date of travel, and number of travelers. Tools that operate differently can be found later in this post under the heading “Specialty Award Search Tools”.

Tool comparison table

Live search comparison table

Here you’ll find more information about each tool’s live award search capabilities:

Cached discovery comparison table

Here you’ll find more information about each tool’s cached discovery capabilities. This is where tools allow the user to search broadly across cached data. For example, some of these tools allow you to show business class flight awards over the next two months departing from the United States and arriving in Europe.

Which is best?

Best overall: PointsYeah

PointsYeah offers the best combination of features, overall. I’m especially impressed with its Flight Deals capabilities. I recently re-created an experiment that I first ran in March 2024 (A new breed of award discovery tools) and PointsYeah, thanks to its Flight Deals cached-search feature, once again proved to be the best tool for finding business class flights to Europe for four people over summer break. If you can’t find the right Flight Deal at the moment, you can set an alert so that you’ll be notified when something good becomes available. PointsYeah’s live search is also very good with its 8 day range and the ability to specify up to 2 departure airports and 2 arrival airports at once. It’s worth noting that I prefer AwardTool’s live search capability because it’s much more flexible, but PointsYeah comes in at a close second. PointsYeah also offers very good hotel award search capabilities (see: Which hotel award search tool is best?).

Pro Pricing:

• $11.99 per month; or $99.99 per year
• Link to sign up
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Best overall (runner-up): AwardTool

My favorite feature of AwardTool is its flexibility in allowing the user to specify how they want to use up to 32 simultaneous searches (or up to 35 searches with the “Mega” feature). With the Pro version you can do a 32 day date range; or list up to 32 airports with a single date; or search across 2 origin airports, 4 destination airports, and 4 dates; or any combination thereof. That’s awesome.

Additionally, both the free and Pro versions have access to the “Mega” feature which allows date ranges of up to 35 days when searching individual programs (up to 2 loyalty programs at once with the free version and up to 6 with the Pro version). The catch for free users is that you are limited to running these no more than 3 times per day.

On the other hand, AwardTool is buggy. I’ve encountered page freezes and multiple odd error messages while using it. And while AwardTool’s cached searches are theoretically extremely powerful, I haven’t had as much luck with them as with PointsYeah’s Flight Deals.

Pro Pricing:

• $10.99 per month; or $84.99 per year
• Link to sign up
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• Get $20 off your first year by using code FREQUENTMILER20

Best for beginners: point.me

Point.me isn’t my personal favorite tool. It doesn’t offer alerts, nor does it offer true multi-date or multi-airport simultaneous searches. That said, I think it’s the best tool for beginners, by a long shot. One great feature is that point.me attempts to weed out “phantom” awards from its results (sometimes awards appear to be available, but they’re not really — so point.me hides these results if it detects them). Even more importantly, point.me offers great step-by-step booking instructions from transferring points to actually booking the flight.

Pricing:

•  $12 per month; or $129 per year
• Link to sign up
  (Disclosure: Frequent Miler will earn a commission if you sign up through this link)

Note that there are two ways to access limited free versions of Bilt:

• Bilt Rewards: This is a rewards program intended for people who pay rent, but anyone can join for free. Once you’ve joined and installed the Bilt app on your phone, you can use the limited complimentary version of point.me to search for flight awards (go to Travel… Flights… Transfer Partners). This version of point.me is limited to Bilt’s transfer partners (found here) and it does not include step by step booking tips (but the Amex version, below, does). If you’d prefer to use this version of point.me on the web, you can log into your Bilt account here: www.biltrewards.com/rewards/travel.
• American Express: American Express and point.me have teamed up to offer a limited complimentary version of point.me for American Express customers. This version of point.me includes only transfer partners that are available through Amex Membership Rewards. Use this link to log-in: point.me/amex

Best for experts: Seats.aero

Seats.Aero is a awesome nerdy tool that was originally designed as a cached discovery tool, but later added live searches and many other advanced functions. Seats.aero is extremely powerful for advanced users. It makes it super easy to find some of the toughest-to-find awards such as Qatar QSuites, Emirates first class, and more. If I want to quickly find award availability for a specific airline across the whole year, this is my go-to tool.

Advanced functions:

• • Award search functions: ANA First Class Finder, Delta One Finder, JAL First Class Finder, Lufthansa First Class Finder, Qatar QSuites Finder
  • Miscellaneous functions: Fare Class Viewer, Seat Map Viewer, Air Canada eUpgrade Finder, United PlusPoints Finder

Pro Pricing:

• $9.99/month or $99.99 per year
• Link to sign up
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• Use code FREQUENTMILER to save 20% off your first payment.

Best add-on: Points Path

Points Path is different from the other tools in this round-up in that it’s a Chrome plug-in that works automatically with Google Flights. Points Path adds point prices right next to the cash prices in your Google Flight search results. The Pro version adds alerts, 7-day award calendar views, and support for select foreign airline programs. Regardless of which other award search tools you use, if you’re a Google Flights user, it makes sense to install at least the free version of Points Path.

Pro Pricing:

• $7.99/month or $79.99 per year
• Link to sign up
  (Disclosure: Frequent Miler will earn a commission if you sign up through this link)
• Use code FM3 to get 3 months for the price of 2.

And the rest…

pointhound (great for beginners)

pointhound isn’t as capable as some of the other tools in this list, but it’s an excellent choice for beginners. It’s fast and easy to use, plus it offers good step-by-step booking instructions. One feature that I love is that you don’t have to sign up to use this free tool. Simply go to the web page (pointhound.com) and start searching.

Roame (excellent choice despite not making the “best of” list)

Roame is a very capable award search tool, but it doesn’t offer much that isn’t also available through PointsYeah or AwardTool. I’d rank Roame as the 3rd best overall award tool on the market after those two.

The free version offers 3 day date range and the paid version offers 7. SkyView (roame’s discovery feature) is well integrated with its search capability such that you can easily switch back and forth while looking for awards. This goes a long way towards making up for the fact that the live search feature doesn’t allow choosing multiple airports at once. SkyView searches “the top 6,500 popular routes” every 24 hours and caches the results (note: I have no way to verify that number). Paid users can add routes to SkyView by setting SkyView alerts when searching from one specific airport to another specific airport. For example, if you’re interested in traveling from Detroit to Lyon, SkyView probably doesn’t already include that route. However, if you search for that specific route in SkyView and then set an alert, that route will be added to the “6,500” routes that the tool searches and caches every day.

Standout features include filtering by aircraft type, SkyView “super alerts” refreshed every 2 to 8 hours, ability for users to add to SkyView routes, and good support for Singapore Krisflyer awards.

Pro Pricing:

• $12.99 per month; or $109.99 per year
• Save 10% off your first payment with code “FM”
• Link to sign up
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AwardLogic (not recommended)

There was a time when AwardLogic was a good choice but that was mainly due to the lack of competition. This one is less capable and more expensive than other tools.

Pro Pricing:

• $4.99/day; $19.99/mo.; $199.99/yr
• Link to sign up
  (Disclosure: Frequent Miler will earn a commission if you sign up through this link)

Which tool has the best loyalty program support?

In the tool comparison table near the top of this post, I’ve listed the loyalty programs supported by each tool. As you’ll see, all of the tools in this round-up support searching a lot of programs (one exception is Points Path which I consider more of an add-on tool rather than a primary search tool). Any of these are likely to meet your needs.

That said, at any given time some tools may be better for you due to support for specific programs. For example, as I write this, only Roame and point.me directly support Qatar Privilege Club. This means that if there are awards bookable through Qatar Privilege Club which are not available to book through other loyalty programs, only those two tools will show them.

Further, it’s worth noting that support for various programs changes regularly with each tool. Due to technical issues, it’s common for support for a particular program to be lost either temporarily or permanently. And, thanks to the diligent work of the tool-makers, additional programs are regularly added on. I do my best to update this post whenever these changes happen.

So, when you want to find specific awards that you know are only available through specific loyalty programs, I recommend checking the table at the top of this post to see which ones offer that support. For example, Singapore First Class is only bookable through Singapore’s own loyalty program. If you wanted to find one of these awards, you’ll want to start with a tool that can search Singapore’s own award space.

Conclusion

If you’re looking for a free general purpose tool, PointsYeah and AwardTool offer similar capabilities. Both offer date range searches, award alerts, and capable discovery functions. PointsYeah has an edge because its discovery function is very good and it isn’t limited for free users. On the other hand, if you want to search multiple airports at once, you’ll need AwardTool. Of course, since the tools are free, you might as well use both! And, while you’re at it, if you regularly use Google Flights, you should consider installing Points Path so that you’ll automatically get award prices within your Google Flights search results.

For the paid tools, again my favorites are PointsYeah and AwardTool. As a power user I prefer AwardTool thanks to the fact that its possible to search up to 32 airports at once, but I’m not a fan of its bugginess.

Among the other tools, Seats.Aero is my go-to. I love that I can do things like find available Qatar QSuites awards or Emirates first class awards, anywhere in the world, in seconds.

Interested in hotel awards? See: Which hotel award search tool is best?

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