Looking for award space can be a pain but several free tools make it easier. My favorite award space booking tool is PointsYeah.com.
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PointsYeah.com Award Search
There are a handful of award search tools out in the last 6-12 months. I stumbled onto PointsYeah.com – a URL that I’m not sure I would choose but they have been successful so what do I know? It’s challenging to switch back and forth between various carriers searching across a variety of options to find the right transfer partners, frequent flyer programs to use, and run the many permutations to deliver a result.
For example, my family returns to Manchester, England every year for the Christmas Markets. We crossed it off the list for this year but are having second thoughts. To minimize our costs, we often fly somewhere else in Europe, see another city along the way, and lower our tax obligation (APD.)
Searching American Airlines shows a flood of award tickets but it’s difficult to find award options that exclude British Airways and its onerous fuel surcharges. I can go through all of the different partners for American Express, Capital One, Chase, etc. by choosing key airlines that show other airline availability. Still, it’s time-consuming and makes me want to use Matthew’s reward booking service (Award Expert) instead.
The service doesn’t act as an award booking service, and some awards still require you to call to complete the booking process but it does save time by helping you find which carrier has space.
Favorite Features
I have tried a few others, but PointsYeah was the stickiest for me because of a few key reasons:
- The free account serves me just fine, I haven’t needed the extra benefits of a paid membership yet but in fairness, I’d probably pay something small to retain these benefits
- The ability to search for up to three days at once
- Sorting by lowest taxes and fees instead of just by low-to-high points and miles
- Coverage includes the five big transferable points currencies
- Select by the percentage of flight in a preferred class. (If you don’t mind flying coach Manchester-London but want the long haul business class flight experience from London to Newark, it will include flights with the short leg in coach and the long flight in business class.)
Once logged in (if you forget to login the search always starts in fictitious airports regardless of what you enter), you can deselect currencies you don’t hold, and add in airline currencies that are not transfer partners like Alaska Airlines.
Organizing by low taxes returns better results for our example. There were other options for my trip but I’m trying to show the differentiation in the below example.
Saved Me Hours
Like many of our readers, I am incredibly busy and really don’t know how I lived without services like this before. To find the right combination of points I have (and am willing to spend) vs cash, route, and additional options is now so much easier. I can quickly search for alternative cities with easy availability to my destination like Dublin, Paris, Frankfurt, etc.
I’ve saved hours and hours shopping around and dealing with individual airlines that might show wide availability but don’t have great search protocols.
Conclusion
After spending so much time shopping flights every year, services like PointsYeah are a godsend. For complex, multi-segment bookings, I’d still recommend reaching out to a reward booking service like Award Expert to book your flights, but for simple bookings, I love this product.
What do you think? Do you use a similar product?
This is quite helpful. I generally use seats.aero and notice that the “Pro” option of excluding flights with fees/taxes over $400 does not actually work. I’m routinely given results for AA using Advantage miles but on BA metal, which incur the ridiculous $600+ APD. The workaround is to use the *other* “Pro” option of excluding certain carriers, so I exclude BA. That works but seats.aero needs some to review their code then QA/opcheck it a few times as even the “exclude BA” option doesn’t always work. Caveat emptor, I guess.
Hey DCAWABN, I created Seats.aero. I just fixed a couple bugs in that feature, hopefully that fixes what you are seeing! I am at ian@seats if you are still experiencing issues.
Love this service, I wonder how big of a hit point.me took after PointsYeah came into existence.
Thanks for sharing!
Hello, Kyle, This is Troy from PointsYeah, Thanks for covering us! Just want to clarify, our search run all programs for both transferable and non transferable by default, unless you pre select individual program or bank, so there is no need to add non transferable program after the search(you can always filter anyway you like on search result page too)
There is a small bug on result filter, sometimes it will return as unchecked, will fix that soon
Sorry for the confusion
Is there a way to check ONLY for business class awards? I have just registered and tried it out, but I cannot find that option. Thank you
disregard me message, I have just figured it out.
Thanks for sharing Kyle! This is an awesome website. I’m still looking for search functionality where you may check several departure cities (like SFO/LAX) at same time.
Hi, Wes
Some day, it will be there
Hello, Guys
PointsYeah is running a blackfriday sale, 40% off of first year membership, just use coupon code: Thanks