Booking flights and hotels is definitely more complicated than earning credit card points and miles. Luckily, we have so many search engines to help us book award travel for both.  We have talked about some of them in separate posts, but I wanted to put them all down in one post and link to the more detailed posts about them. These are our favorite award search engines (so far)…

 

Favorite Search Engines to Book Hotels on Points

AWAYZ

We have a whole post about the AWAYZ site. I like it and plan to use it more often. Pro tip: If you know the area you want to stay and the dates, this site shows you all your options.

 

 

Max My Point

Max My Point has been around longer and is a favorite of many. It tracks Hyatt, Hilton, Marriott, and IHG. My initial search was for the Grand Hyatt Kauai, and this was my results page. I like that it brings up all the available dates I can book here. Perfect when you have your eye on a certain property.

 

 

 

Favorite Flight Search Engines to  Book Award Flights

When I am looking for flight awards, I like to check the flight search engines, and I usually compare a couple of them.

I’m checking out dates from JFK to Athens, one-way, business class on the following sites for June 18th. Each of them came up with some British Airways options + almost $800 in taxes and fees, so I scrolled down to cheaper alternatives. While these options were more affordable, I am not familiar with EgyptAir.

It is essential to ensure that the flights are not mixed cabin flights as found in the Award Logic search—that wouldn’t interest me. And you would see much better availability by switching to economy class flights.

 

Point.me

Point.me has been used by us many times to search for Award flights. You can read our extensive review of it here. Have flexible dates and not set on a specific destination? Check out the Explore feature to find some of the best deals.

 

 

Award Logic

Award Logic is a service we often use, too. Again, you can read how to use Award Logic here. I like that it will look at more than one day, in case you have a little flexibility.

 

Roame

Roame is a newer search engine, and my favorite part about it is that it is free and searches very rapidly.  I also wrote a blog post about using Roame. I almost always use this search engine and a paid search engine when I am searching.

 

 

Seats.aero

Next up is Seats.aero. I love the Qatar Qsuite finder tool on this site. It helped me find Qsuite for a trip I am taking next Spring. Recently, we covered the Seats.aero service in a blog post. The free version allows you to search 60 days out. With the paid version, you’ll be able to search a whole year out. This tool isn’t as beginner-friendly, but the more you mess around with it, the easier it gets. It’s a pretty powerful tool! If you’re open to taking positioning flights it can be really helpful. I like to search North America to Europe to find the lowest-priced business-class flights.

 

Pointsyeah

The newest search engine of the bunch for flights, pointsyeah, promises to search all major credit card rewards and 18 airline loyalty programs of over 120 airlines quickly (10 seconds average). Even better, it can search with multiple dates. And it is free. I plan to use it more often for that multi-date feature.

 

 

Bottom Line

A search engine can point you in the right direction when booking award travel. None are perfect, so I often pick a couple and compare them when I am trying to book travel. These are just some of our favorite search engines to book award travel.