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Searching for award travel can be time-consuming, but tools like PointsYeah simplify the process by quickly finding the best flight and hotel redemptions across multiple loyalty programs. With its free and premium versions, PointsYeah offers features like multi-date searches, price alerts, and extensive filtering options to help travelers maximize their points and miles.
Here’s a deep dive into how PointsYeah works, what it offers, and whether it’s worth using for your award travel searches.
Page Contents
Introduction to PointsYeah
PointsYeah is an award search engine capable of multiple date searches for flights or hotels. For flights, you can search for up to 22 airline loyalty programs at a time. You can also search over at least a four-day window to see availability. A wide variety of filters allow users to sift through results to find (or not find) their flights of interest, too.
For hotels, you can check out up to six different hotel loyalty programs for hotel stays. Again, there are a lot of filtering options when searching for hotels to narrow down where you want to stay
PointsYeah offers award alerts, which lets you track a particular award routing/location and price point for a specified window of dates. Also, PointsYeah provides a few extra options for travelers beyond standard searches. There are options called Flight Deals and Hotel Collection that show possible savings for flights and hotels.
When it comes time to book, PointsYeah also guides you through how to transfer points from transferable points programs such as American Express Membership Rewards, Chase Ultimate Rewards, and Citi ThankYou points.
To sign up for PointsYeah, you must provide an email address. You'll then get a verification code via email, and you can log in using your chosen password and email address. While PointsYeah offers a quick guide for getting started, it is just as easy to start from the front page and naturally search for flights and/or hotels.
Using PointsYeah
Flight searches
Like other flight search engines and tools, PointsYeah requires an origin, destination, and date to search. You can change between one-way, round-trip, or multi-city for your searches. The number of passengers defaults to one, but you can change the number of adults and children flying. The tool lets users select up to four cabins (economy, premium economy, business, and first-class). Finally, you can filter to the bank and airline programs you wish to use in your search. Even better, the tool permits multi-date searches, limited to a consecutive four-day window for the free version. If you buy the premium version, you can search for up to eight consecutive days.
Once you have made all these selections, click the orange “Yeah!” button on the right to initiate the search.
Once complete, you can use several filters to narrow the preferred selections. For example, you can refine the number of stops, the maximum number of points/taxes you wish to spend, and the upper limit of flight duration. You can also search on the premium cabin % – this is useful for international flights when you want to fly business for that longer flight itinerary. You can even filter down to the type of airplane you want to fly!
On the sorting side, you can sort by promotional offers, departure and arrival airports, and connecting airports. You can even search for flight quality, such as if you want to fly overnight — proper for those longer flights.
You can also click “Live Seat Map” to see the seat layout on the plane you fly on. It includes helpful information about the number of seats in that area, the reclining distance of the seats, and where the galley/lavatories are on the plane.
PointsYeah boasts very quick search times: 20 seconds for flights and hotels. The results populate quickly – full single-day search results populated in as few as 10 seconds! Complete results were usually available, even for multi-date searches, in 20 seconds or less. Even a five-day search for flights between New York and Madrid airports took just 36 seconds — an average of about 7 seconds per day of results.
Related: Which Flight Award Availability Search Tool Is Best?
Hotel searches
PointsYeah's hotel search functions similarly to the flight search. Enter where you're going, when, and how many guests you have. You also can narrow your search results by which points you have available or if you're looking to maximize your rewards with a transfer promotion. A purchased point filter is also available.
Once you've hit the “Yeah!” button, you'll see an interactive map showing the available results. You can zoom in and out on the map on the right side if you are looking for a specific area to find a hotel
Once you get your results back, you'll have the option for further filters, including:
- Hotel Brand
- Maximum distance from your desired location
- Maximum points to spend
- Maximum price in cash
- Free night certificate if you are using
- Points you're using
- Transferable partners available
Even better, you can determine whether the property has features like free parking, a club lounge, or pet-friendly. Also, PointsYeah's information for each hotel is valuable, especially since it compares the cash rate against the cost of points. PointsYeah will also factor in transfer bonuses, fifth-night-free options, and how you'll earn rewards if you're booking with cash. It'll even show non-chain hotels as long as there's a good way to earn rewards while you're doing it – very cool!
Defining Features of PointsYeah
Several details establish PointsYeah as a premier award search tool in the points and miles space. Some of these features truly set it apart from competitors like Roame.Travel and Point.me, while others improve the user experience.
Multi-day searches
This feature alone puts PointsYeah in its own award search tool category. Being able to simultaneously search 22 separate airline loyalty programs for award space across up to four consecutive days (for the paid version) lets you easily see if being flexible with your dates could pay off.
Searching for four days instead of one day for award flights makes the process four times more efficient. Especially if your dates are somewhat flexible, searching multiple dates simultaneously helps identify the best possible award flights.
Points price alerts
Another standout feature is Points Price Alerts, which lets users receive email alerts for flights of interest. The free version of PointsYeah allows you to create up to four alerts per account. To set up an alert, click on the bell icon at the top right corner of the website.
Setting up an alert requires including the number of passengers, cabin class, originating and destination airports, a window of travel dates, and the maximum number of points per passenger. You can set further parameters for the number of stops, flight numbers, max flight duration, departure time, arrival time, the percentage of the flight in a premium cabin, and the maximum taxes you're willing to pay. You can also exclude certain carriers or trim the number of airline programs to include. Finally, you can name your alerts to help you keep them organized.
While no limit exists for the window of dates for an alert, PointsYeah counts each day as a separate alert. Considering the limit of four alerts for a free account, this creates a practical limit of a three-day window.
Points Price Alerts save you from constantly checking for award availability. Since award availability can appear and disappear quickly, alerts offered by PointsYeah let travelers monitor award flights without conducting round-the-clock searches. Alerts are sent out once a day.
Highly customizable search results
A powerful tool like PointsYeah yields a wide array of search results. However, a large quantity of information without a way to organize it limits any potential value. Thankfully, PointsYeah offers countless ways to customize award search results. Whether filtering, sorting, or both, PointsYeah lets users find the flights that fit their needs.
Perhaps you want to use points from a particular loyalty program or bank transfer partner; there are filters for both. Perhaps you want nonstop flights; a filter exists for this, too. How about the option to sort high to low by taxes and fees and the option to set a maximum amount of taxes and fees per person? Nothing sets back a planned award trip like needing to add a lot of cash to the miles you're redeeming.
PointsYeah also offers the ability to save preferences for searches. These include filtering by loyalty programs, premium cabin percentage, how you want your results sorted, and your home airport.
Related: Airline Programs That Don't Add Fees and Surcharges to Award Flights
Conditional reminders for your travel
Even expert award travelers won't know every award program's ins and outs. For example, not all travelers know that itineraries with a connection in New York might require a ground transfer between airports, depending on the airlines involved (United Airlines does not operate flights from JFK, but several international Star Alliance carriers serve only JFK in the NYC area). With that in mind, reminders about these and other booking considerations become all the more critical. PointsYeah does a fantastic job of communicating these types of quirks when showing search results.
For example, here's an itinerary for economy flights between Los Angeles (LAX) and Atlanta (ATL). PointsYeah highlights a couple of key award considerations:
- Cancellation policy: If this award requires a change, a $50 fee applies. If the flight is canceled, a $150 fee is assessed (both prices are in CAD)
- Option for stopover: AirCanada allows stopovers for 5,000 miles. In this case, it recognizes a stop between the starting location and the final destination that could take advantage of this benefit. This could be helpful for someone who would like to stop in Chicago (ORD) for a few days before continuing on to Atlanta.
Daydream Explorer
Want to go somewhere but not sure where? Daydream Explorer lets you check out real-time award availability for flights and hotels worldwide. This is an excellent option for those with points to burn and a flexible schedule. It's also fun to look at; you can quickly see hundreds of thousands of flight options for using your points.
Daydream Explorer is split into two sections: Flight Deals and Hotel Collection.
At first glance, Flight Deals looks similar to the regular search screen. However, below the standard features, you can see different travel options – for instance, beach, golf, and honeymoon based on traveling from your home airport. This can give you ideas for something you would like to do but don't have a specific destination in mind. It also shows a “Weekends Only” toggle, so you can narrow the search even more to Fridays/Saturdays/Sundays!
Similarly, Hotel Collection mirrors much of the standard hotel search in PointsYeah. However, there are additional options for selecting the type of hotel location—say, all-inclusive, boutique, or even historical! You can also toggle “Suites Only” to find nice, large rooms for your stay! It also has the “Weekends Only” toggle to further restrict the search for hotels available during the weekend timeframe.
System dashboard
Sometimes, there can be issues between the award search tools and the different airline/hotel programs — maybe the searches are not showing available flights and/or hotels in the PointsYeah ecosystem. PointsYeah has a system dashboard that you can check to see if there are any issues. Ensuring there are no integration issues between PointsYeah and the airline/hotel programs they usually support is very handy. In the example below, all the programs are available except Iberia.
PointsYeah Premium Perks
While the basic PointsYeah version is free, the premium version of PointsYeah gives you the following:
- More flight alerts (32 versus 4)
- Multi-airport searches (up to 2 origin and 2 destination airports)
- Wider date range to search (8 days versus 4 days).
- More hotel alerts (15 versus 4)
The price aligns with other award search tools: $11.99 a month or $99.99 per year. For comparison, Roame charges $12.99 per month or $109.99 per year, while Points.me charges $12 or $129.99 per year.
Final Thoughts
PointsYeah is an incredibly fast and efficient award search tool. It offers access to 22 airlines and six hotel chains, many filtering options, price alerts, and a multi-day inventory search — many great features!
Yet, despite its well-rounded appearance, PointsYeah continues to develop. They continue adding more filters, airline programs, and features. PointsYeah is already marked as my go-to multi-program award search tool. Will PointsYeah make the same impression on you?
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