AwardWallet receives compensation from advertising partners for links on the blog. The opinions expressed here are our own and have not been reviewed, provided, or approved by any bank advertiser. Here's our complete list of Advertisers.
Planning points and miles travel should be fun; after all, you're booking a trip at a fraction of the cash cost. But have you ever found yourself with dozens of tabs open, searching hotel award availability across multiple websites — ready to give up? What if there was one site where you could search multiple hotels and airlines at once? Enter Awayz
Awayz is a platform where you can search award and cash price availability across nine hotel chains. Plus, Awayz is also launching a flight search platform, and you can already search dozens of airlines using Awayz Flights beta. Today, we'll look at the different tiers of Awayz membership and explore how to use its features to help you book travel.
Page Contents
What Is Awayz?
Multiple search engines already compete in the travel booking space. Kayak, Google, and Expedia are popular sites for booking paid travel. Point.me and Roame.travel allow you to search award flight bookings. Soon, Awayz will be the only site that will offer all of the above, plus integrating your personal credit card and award information.
Here are some of the main Awayz selling points:
- Search for cash and award hotel and flight availability across points, miles, and brands.
- Stores your points, miles, and credit card info and integrates it into your searches.
- Lets you set availability alerts and notifies you if something opens up.
There are many other features to discuss, and the best news of all is that you can try Awayz for free before you pay for a membership.
Awayz Membership Options
Awayz offers a free trial — which gives you five searches and five alerts — plus two paid options:
- Trip Pass: For $4.99, get 72-hour access good for 50 hotel and flight searches plus 10 alerts.
- Premium: For $99.99 per year or $11.99 per month, enjoy a premium account offering 350 hotel or flight searches every month plus 20 alerts.
To sign up, click the green “try it out” button in the top right corner of the Awayz homepage. Enter your name and email address, then choose a password for your account. After verifying your email, you'll choose whether you want a free trial, Trip Pass, or Premium Account.
How To Use Awayz
It's easy to search hotel availability using Awayz. Simply fill in the city and dates fields and hit “search.” You'll end up with a city map populated with hotels. The key in the upper right-hand corner indicates which color corresponds with each hotel chain. All seven are auto-selected by default, but you can de-select each one to narrow your search.
Presently, Aways supports the following hotel rewards programs:
- Accor Live Limitless
- Choice Privileges
- Hilton Honors
- IHG One Rewards
- Marriott Bonvoy
- World of Hyatt
- Wyndham Rewards
A distance slider lets you search between 1 and 100 miles from your destination, plus an arrow that sorts search results by price from highest to lowest and vice-versa. Awayz also allows you to filter searches by hotel chain, transferable points partners, free night certificates, and “use my rewards”. That last option filters by points and miles you've logged in your Awayz account — thus, only showing what you have enough points to book.
Use the free night certificate menu to check a box for any free night rewards you might have from credit cards or welcome bonuses.
Related: Hotel Credit Cards That Provide Free Annual Night Certificates
The above search of Tokyo hotels resulted in 40 results across the supported programs. Not only do the results display both the points and cash prices, they also recommend whether points or cash provides the best value. Awayz also tells you whether a property has award availability and if it's sold out for the selected dates.
Since it's not available at the time of the search, clicking through on Grand Hyatt Tokyo reveals an “availability alert” button in the top right corner. Clicking this sets an alert in case the hotel becomes available for the nights you entered. Track availability alerts under the preferences wheel icon in the bottom left hand corner of the home screen.
Choosing the “award availability” option once you've clicked a specific hotel will reveal a twelve-month award calendar you can scroll through by month. To book award stays you find on the platform, you'll be given the option to click through to the chain itself. Some cash nights are bookable straight through Awayz, and some are not–you'll be notified to book directly through the chain in some cases.
We found a basic Awayz hotel search to be easy, fast and comprehensive. At a glance, you can scroll through a city's award availability across nine hotel chains, determine whether to use points or cash, and set availability alerts for sold out properties. Now we'll move into some of Awayz's customized features, then discuss how they makes searching hotels on their platform even more convenient.
Awayz Features
Awayz allows you to enter and store your personal points and miles information. They do not interface with banks or loyalty programs to gather your information — it's all entered manually by you. That means it's going to be tedious to maintain.
AwardWallet offered Awayz access to our free API — which would let users opt to connect their Awayz and AwardWallet accounts to show updated balances. Unfortunately, Awayz has declined to implement this so far.
For now, click on the “wallet and awards” icon in the bottom left corner to get started.
Under the ‘My Wallet' tab, subscribers can click the “+ add a card” field to reveal a dropdown menu and add their credit cards (you're not entering your credit card numbers — just telling Awayz which cards you have). Through the banks tab, users enter how many points they have with six different banks. With the hotels tab, subscribers enter how many loyalty points they have with seven different chains.
Once you've entered all your information into Awayz, they incorporate the info into your searches. Click the dropdown arrow on the “use my awards” filter and choose which points you want Awayz to use in the search, or choose “select all” and they'll search using all the points you've entered.
Even in you don't filter using your personal points and miles information, Awayz uses it to customize your searches. For instance: click through on a hotel and choose the “click to view breakdown” option.
In this case, once I clicked through, Awayz informed me that, sadly, I don't have enough Hilton points to book this location. The only reason Awayz knows this is because I've entered zero Hilton points into my account.
I did add my Chase Sapphire Preferred card to my Awayz Wallet, and Awayz cleverly knows that card makes my Ultimate Rewards worth 1.25 in the Chase Travel portal. So if I click “click to view breakdown” on the “use points as Chase UR” field, it shows me how many Ultimate Rewards it would take to book this property in the portal. In this case, for Chase Sapphire Preferred cardholders, it would cost 35,800 Ultimate Rewards to book a $448 hotel room–and you can even click through to Chase Travel from inside Awayz.
Awayz Flights Beta
Awayz Flights uses the same concept with flights as it does with hotels. Right now, it's a basic search function. As of this writing, they've incorporated over 40 airlines into the site by searching:
- American Airlines AAdvantage
- United MileagePlus
- Delta SkyMiles
- Air Canada Aeroplan
- JetBlue TruBlue
- Alaska Mileage Plan
- Virgin Atlantic Flying Club
Additionally, Awayz shared with AwardWallet that Cathay Pacific, Singapore KrisFlyer, and Air France Flying Blue should be coming soon.
While Awayz hasn't rolled out the wallet integration for flights yet, eventually subscribers will be able to enter points, miles, and credit cards for airlines the same way they do for hotels.
Best Points Deals of the Week
Do you love lightning deals for luxury travel? As an Awayz subscriber, I receive a Best Points Deals of the Week email every Friday. The email includes high-value deal availability across Hilton, Hyatt, IHG, and Marriott, with flames indicating the best deal found for each brand. If you have travel flexibility and a stash of points to use for luxury travel, this is exactly the kind of alert you need in your life.
Awayz Areas for Improvement
It's pretty difficult to complain about Awayz. Sure, you have to pay after your initial free trial, but if you use rewards to travel very often, you'll use it all the time. It's a beautiful, fast, comprehensive product, and after each search I come away thinking wow–they thought of every detail. If you do think of something else they should incorporate into their platform, there's a feedback button in the bottom right hand corner of the screen.
Bottom Line
Awayz is the only platform of its kind, incorporating both cash and award hotel and flight searches all on one site. If you travel at all consistently, it might be just the right tool to use when searching for airfare and lodging for your next destination.
The comments on this page are not provided, reviewed, or otherwise approved by the bank advertiser. It is not the bank advertiser's responsibility to ensure all posts and/or questions are answered.
