Which hotel award search tool is best?

For those with hotel points and free night certificates across multiple hotel programs, finding the best places to use your points and free nights can be a pain. It can be especially hard when your heart is set on a booking a popular hotel or resort which is rarely available for award stays. Luckily there are plenty of tools that can help. In this post I compared 5 hotel award search tools to identify which is best. As you’ll see below, which is best depends upon what exactly you’re trying to achieve, and so I’ve identified the best tools for different scenarios. For general trip planning, which I expect is top scenario for most people, there’s really only one good option: Awayz. For most of the other scenarios I identified, MaxMyPoint performed very well.

Tool Overview

Disclosure: Frequent Miler has a business relationship with each of the tools listed above. If you sign up for a paid membership through the above links (or by using code FrequentMiler with MaxMyPoint) we will receive a commission.

Best tool for each scenario

Scenario Descriptions…

• Trip Planning: For a specific trip with a fixed destination and dates, does the tool help to identify the best hotels to spend your points? Awayz is the only tool in this roundup built exactly for that purpose. Awayz shows point and cash prices and recommends whether points or cash is the best option.
• Award Calendar: All of the hotels in this roundup offer some form of award availability calendar. In some cases, the available dates are shown only as a list, but several tools can also display the results in calendar form (and Awayz can only do the latter).
• Fixed Date Award Alerts: Suppose the hotel you’re interested in isn’t currently available to book with points for the dates you’ll be in the area. In that case, a great option is to set an alert to email you when a room does become available to book with points. All of the tools here can do this, but most have a limited selection of hotels to choose from. Awayz is the most comprehensive, followed by MaxMyPoint. Unfortunately, Awayz doesn’t offer the option to alert you only when the point price is below a specified amount. That’s particularly a problem with Hilton which makes all rooms available for points, but often at outrageously high point prices. For this reason, I decided that MaxMyPoint was best for this scenario.
• Price Drop Alerts: The idea here is that you’ve booked a hotel with points and want to get an alert if the point price drops so that you can rebook at the lower rate. This is especially common with IHG hotels where the point prices change regularly. I like MaxMyPoint best for this scenario since it supports the feature and has the best coverage of IHG hotels after Awayz.
• IHG Anytime <= 40K Alerts: This is a very specific scenario. Those of us who still have the old $49/year IHG Select card get a free night certificate each year that can be used at hotels costing up to 40,000 points. But unlike the certs issued with the IHG Premier cards, you cannot add points to book a more expensive hotel. So, the scenario here is that you want to get alerted anytime the hotel you’re interested in drops in price to 40,000 points or lower. With MaxMyPoint you can do this by setting up a “Daily Change” alert with max 40,000 points per night. You can also do this with Rooms.aero, by setting an alert to “Any date” and max 40,000 points per night. Unfortunately, though, there are many IHG hotels that are not available through Rooms.aero.
• Hyatt Mattress Runs: Off peak category 1 Hyatt hotels cost only 3,500 points per night. For those seeking Hyatt elite status, it can sometimes be worth booking those stays as “mattress runs” (where you check in solely to earn the elite credits and any bonus points that might be available through promotions). I checked each tool to see if it could be used first to find nearby category 1 hotels and then to identify which dates were available for 3,500 points per night. Awayz was the best here because you can search your local area with a 100 mile distance band (or, less if you don’t want to travel that far), filter results to Hyatt hotels, and sort lowest to highest points. This will quickly identify hotels in your area that cost 6,500 points or less (category 1 hotels cost 3,500 off-peak, 5,000 standard, and 6,500 peak). Then you can click into each one and view the award availability calendar to find dates where the hotel costs 3,500 points.
• Find Best Use of Certs: Suppose you have high-end free night certificates like those from Hilton which are uncapped, or Hyatt category 1-7, or Marriott 85K. And further suppose that you’re willing to travel almost anywhere to use them as long as you can find a great use for them. Both AwardTool and MaxMyPoint are good starting points for this. Both let you start by filtering to the hotel program you want (e.g. Hilton, Hyatt, Marriott, etc.) and then you can sort by rating high to low. You can then scan down the results to see which hotels look promising. I like how AwardTool shows the range of point prices and point values in the initial search results so that you can pick out high value options at a glance. MaxMyPoint, meanwhile, has better filtering options (for example, you can filter to Hyatt category 7 hotels) and/or to median nightly points range. Overall, MaxMyPoint wins this category, but just barely over AwardTool.
• Find Multi-Day Awards: It’s not common, but some hotels won’t show any award availability if you search 1 day at a time. For example, The Inn at Bay Harbor usually doesn’t show any award availability in the peak summer months if you search for a single day at a time. However, if you search for 2 days at a time or more, you can sometimes find availability. So, the question here is which tools can be used to find award availability at hotels like these when you’re open to a wide range of dates? In other words, suppose I just want to be alerted any time a hotel like the Inn at Bay Harbor is available for points-bookings in the summer for 3 days or more. Rooms.aero can do this, but Marriott isn’t yet supported. Awayz can show multi-day awards on their calendar with some programs like Hyatt, but not yet with Marriott, and you cannot setup an alert to do this for you. The only tool that I’m aware of that can do this effectively right now is StayWithPoints. With StayWithPoints, you can set up a flexible alert that will let you know if a multi day award stay becomes available anytime during an entire month. Unfortunately, they only offer 2 flexible alerts to each premium member so at best you can set these up for June and July or July and August if you want summer coverage. Still, this has been very effective for alerting me when the Inn at Bay Harbor has become available during prime summer months.

Caching: All the tools are wrong

All of the tools in this roundup are able to quickly show a full year of hotel award availability for supported hotels, but they can do so because they pre-run the searches and cache the results. The problem with this is that the availability calendars are often wrong. Award availability changes by the minute at popular hotels, so these tools are at best a guide for where to look closer. In some cases you can force new results by setting up an alert. Unfortunately, only MaxMyPoint and Rooms.Aero prominently display when the results for a specific hotel or hotel/date combo were last refreshed. This is something that I think all of the tools should make very clear.

More about each tool…

AwardTool

• AwardTool is first and foremost a flight award search tool, but it also includes a hotel search feature. If you’re using AwardTool for flight search anyway, you might as well see if this tool can do what you need with hotels too. Since AwardTool overall is very new, I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see the hotel search become more and more capable over time.
• For more about AwardTool, see: AwardTool — a powerful new award search tool
• Also see: Which flight award search tool is best? and A new breed of award discovery tools

Awayz

• This is the only tool in the roundup that does what you’d expect from hotel search tools: it lets you enter a location and date range and it shows you all of the hotels available, point prices, and a recommendation of whether to book with points or cash.
• I’ve been told that once the flight award search feature is out of beta, they’re going to raise the Awayz subscription fee, but that you can lock in current rates by subscribing before that happens. Unfortunately I don’t know that will happen.
• A free version of Awayz is available through Bilt Rewards. This is limited to Bilt’s hotel transfer partners, and doesn’t seem to have all of the same filtering capabilities, but it’s otherwise pretty useful. Plus, you can join Bilt Rewards for free (you don’t need their credit card to get this functionality). You can access this feature from the web by logging into your Bilt account and browsing here: www.biltrewards.com/rewards/transfer
• I like too that Awayz has a $4.99 Trip Pass option. You get to do up to 50 searches in 72 hours. This seems like a great choice for someone who only occasionally plans big trips and/or wants to try out the full version of Awayz without committing to a full month (and without having to remember to cancel).

MaxMyPoint

• After Awayz, MaxMyPoint seems to have the widest hotel coverage of the tools in this roundup.
• I love that MaxMyPoint shows the number of rooms available when viewing the availability calendar in list view. This can tell you, for example, whether you need to grab that last room right away or if you have time to keep searching.
• The free version of this tool is pretty capable by itself, but of course the paid versions offer more capabilities
• Read more here: Tools for finding impossible hotel awards (MaxMyPoint vs StayWithPoints)

rooms.aero

• This tool is from the people that brought us seats.aero and the tools are linked: signing up for the pro version of either one gives you pro capabilities for both.
• Like seats.aero, this is designed more as a nerdy explore tool than a consumer hotel search tool.
• For more about Seats.aero, see: Seats.aero – a wonderfully nerdy tool for finding Unicorn flight awards
• Also see: Which flight award search tool is best?

StayWithPoints

• Like MaxMyPoint, the free version of StayWithPoints is pretty capable on its own, but you need the most expensive version of this tool to do multi-day award alerts.
• StayWithPoints has a much cleaner, customer friendly interface than MaxMyPoint
• Unfortunately, StayWithPoints doesn’t yet cover IHG and seems to have far fewer hotels available than MaxMyPoint.
• Read more here: Tools for finding impossible hotel awards (MaxMyPoint vs StayWithPoints)

Bottom Line

For most people who could use some help with hotel award searches, I believe that Awayz is the answer. It’s not perfect (I ran into a few bugs and limitations when testing it), but it’s very powerful and it’s the only tool around that does what you probably would expect a hotel search tool to do: it helps you find the best available hotels for a given location and date range. The other tools are more focused on showing a year’s worth of award availability at specific hotels. In other words, the other tools are primarily for when you know which hotel you want but you need help finding award availability. Awayz can do that too, but other tools can do it better. The best of these, in my opinion, is MaxMyPoint.

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