Top 3 Award Seat Search Platforms
Why do they exist?
As travel has come back with a bang over the last 18-24 months, so has the desire for flight upgrades and award seats. More of us are strategically using credit cards to get the most out of our card spend and banking those MMR’s, CapOne miles, citiThankYou Rewards, and Chase points to get awesome flights on great airlines. As a result of growing demand for award seats, an industry is growing around us to help us find the coveted suites and lay-flats.
I’ve spent a lot of time fiddling with various search tools, and there are three I’ve found to be particularly effective and have pretty clear distinctions. For most of us, you’ll find what you need at a great value between these three tools. These tools all have a range of features and have a user-friendly interface.
There may be other tools I haven’t included that you swear by, but IMO there is no reason to make things complicated and look elsewhere.
Point.me
- ✅ Real-time Search (starts at $129/yr)
- ✅ Sync Reward balances
- ✅ Concierge Options (starts at $200pp)
- ✅ 1-Day Pass ($5)
- ✅ First 3 searches Free
Best For: Step by step booking instructions & Comprehensive concierge services
The free version of point.me allows you to use the full search functionality 3 times before you get locked out. After you’ve exhausted your 3 complimentary searches you’ll need to purchase a monthly plan, or a day pass which will run you $5. This is a great deal for someone who doesn’t care where they go, and has a flexible schedule.
You can integrate your Award Wallet account if you use that service, and can manually add your loyalty programs so you’ll only see results that are meaningful to you.
This is the only one of the three openly advertises and provides pricing for concierge services. If you don’t want to go through the legwork, they will consult with you and provide all of the bookings needed. Three basic concierge services are offered: full service booking, assistance on how to earn elite status with airlines and points strategy consulting. Concierge services start at $200/pp.
Seats.aero
- ✅ Free to search 60-says out
- ✅ Full year search of departure dates ($10/mo)
- ✅ Unlimited Custom Alerts
- ✅ Hotel Award Search
- ✅ Developer Friendly
Best For: Developers, Alerts and Fast Searches
From purely a technical perspective I’m most compelled by seats.aero so far. It has the fastest search service, and no complex pricing structure. It’s free for short notice trips (within 60 days) and $9.99 to search the year.
The platform’s backend does searches with airlines services periodically and caches the data on their own database. For us this means super fast search results that may not 100% up to date. “Periodically” probably means at least once a day (and likely much more frequently), so it should be pretty accurate. Bear in mind that you still need to verify all availability with the airline anyway, so measuring the drawback of potentially out of date availability is tough.
They also offer a pretty comprehensive alert system that is powerful once you get the hang of it.
If you’re a developer, they provide an endpoint that serves up JSON which is totally open and requires no registration to query their cached data. They do provide access to a live search endpoint as well, but that requires a commercial agreement with the company as of now.
My only issue so far has been the number of programs they search. It appeared initially there were some major staples missing from award travel like ANA, JAL, Qatar and Singapore Airlines to name a few. The airlines missing are all partners of others they do search so it may be possible to find, say, a Singapore Airlines flight that appears on their site as a United flight (cannot confirm on deny).
Note: They claim to have a chatGPT plugin on the website, but since GPT plugins seem to be a thing of the past, at least for now, that doesn’t actually seem to be active.
Roame
- ✅ Unlimited real-time search (Free)
- ✅ 60 day search using SkyView (Free)
- ✅ Premium Plan ($110/year)
- ✅ Full year of SkyView search (Premium)
- ✅ Custom Alerts (Premium)
Best For: Free services and those who want to get used to searching for award flights.
Roame seems like middle ground between point.me and seat.aero. They provide a full year of searchable dates at no cost, which is the best deal by far. I don’t know how they’re able to offer this for free, but I wouldn’t be surprised if this doesn’t last forever. Results are in real time which means, for a standard search, the data is probably as up to date as possible.
They also offer 60 day window of dates to search using their new “SkyView” tool. SkyView is a modified search tool that basically allows you to broaden your search. For example you can search all flights from anywhere in North America that depart within a particular window and go anywhere in Europe in any cabin. It feels like the kind of tool that is used for “Travel for the sake of business class, not the sake of the trip” sort of trip.
For someone who doesn’t need a lot of lead planning time, and this is a great feature. A paid subscription will search the entire year with SkyView. SkyView searches may be cached because the search is super fast. Fast usually means potentially out of date, but I could be wrong.
Conclusion
The reality of all of these is that they’re just search tools. Can they make the process of searching for award seats easier? Definitely. Can they be frustrating to use? Also definitely. Searching for award seats is more art than science and requires a lot of patience.
Don’t forget, they can’t book for you, and There is still a lot of legwork that needs to be done on your end. Each of these tools offers some kind of free option, so play around and figure out what works best for you. I don’t think there is a wrong answer here.
