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How to Find Award Flights with Point.me
Point.me lets you search award availability across airlines and find the cheapest way to fly on points and miles.
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when you click to or take an action on their website, but this does not
influence our evaluations or ratings. Our opinions are our own.
As a digital nomad for nearly five years, JT is a freelance writer that proves through experience that credit card rewards can drastically reduce the cost of travel. After working as a tax accountant for a decade, JT turned his analytical skills to points, miles and credit cards. He published over 2,000 articles as a writer for The Points Guy.
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Figuring out how to use your points and miles can be overwhelming. Mastering one airline's award pricing methods and quirks can be difficult enough. The complexity grows quickly as you consider points transfers from bank programs and booking awards through partner airlines.
Wouldn't it be nice to have just one website that could do it all for you? That's the service Point.me aims to provide — for a cost. In this guide, we'll dive into what Point.me is, how it works, how much it costs and if it's worth the price.
What is Point.me?
Point.me is a paid service that searches for live award availability across dozens of airlines. In addition to providing award availability, Point.me search results show you all of the cheapest ways to book the available award flights using points and miles.
Simply put, using one website to search award availability across dozens of airlines is game-changing. Airlines have continually added new roadblocks to searching award availability on their websites — from requiring travelers to log into their account to search to putting time delays on award search results.
These roadblocks can make searching for awards on airline websites unnecessarily frustrating. Using Point.me lets you avoid this hassle and get a curated list of the best award pricing options for your trip.
Once you have purchased a Point.me subscription, you can start an award search on the Point.me homepage. Choose one way or round trip, the number of passengers, economy/premium economy or business/first class, the origin and destination airport, and the departure date. Then, click "search."
Point.me will take 1-2 minutes to search the 33 programs it's currently checking for live award availability. As it searches, you can browse the search results. Just keep in mind that better options may still be found.
Search results are sorted by flight duration as a default. However, you can switch to sorting by the cheapest options or "point.me picks." In the example search results below, Point.me found 126 award flight options that could be booked with points and miles. The quickest flights are nonstop Delta Air Lines flights costing 28,500 SkyMiles.
Switching to "point.me picks" highlights ever-so-slightly longer nonstop Delta flights costing 22,000 SkyMiles each way.
But the cheapest award flights currently available on this route are one-stop Southwest Airlines award flights costing 18,869 Rapid Rewards points each way.
In addition to the sorting options, you can filter search results by airline, number of stops, and departure and arrival times.
Once you pick the flight option you want, click the "View booking options" link to see a list of the ways you can book that award flight. As you'll see, Point.me looks well beyond the airline's own award program.
Point.me offers several pricing levels depending on the subscription length and level of support. The standard plan allows unlimited self-service award searches for $12 per month or $129 per year. Or, you can use the free version, which allows you to browse deals but doesn't come with real-time search.
If you don't know where to start with your points and miles, Point.me also offers a concierge award booking service for $200 per passenger.
Is Point.me worth the price?
Value is subjective. If you're collecting points and miles to save as much money as possible on travel, it could be hard to justify paying $129 per year for a service to search award availability — searches you can do for free on airline websites. Consider spending $12 per month to test out the standard plan before committing to an annual subscription.
With that said, Point.me can be valuable for travelers who don't have the time to learn transfer partners, airline alliances, the ins and outs of searching for award availability, and all of the other nuances of airline award travel. With Point.me, you have the ability to search the route and date that you want and have all of that work done for you.
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