Recently, I covered Seats Aero and AwardTool. Both award tools are great. However, PointsYeah is making long strides, too. I’m impressed by how PointsYeah offers many things for free—probably because it’s new. But does it make sense to sign up or subscribe? Let’s find out.
What features are available?
PointsYeah has both features of finding award flights & award stays.
- Award Flight Search:
- Live results
- Cache results via flight deals
- Award Stay Search:
- Live results
- Cache results via Hotel Collections
- Alerts
Available Loyalty Program on PointsYeah
PointsYeag has access to 22 airline loyalty programs and six hotel loyalty programs.
Airline Loyalty Programs
- Aerolíneas Argentinas
- Aeromexico Club Premier
- Air Canada Aeroplan
- Air France-KLM Flying Blue
- Alaska Airlines Mileage Plan
- American Airlines AAdvantage
- Avianca Lifemiles
- Delta Airlines
- Emirates SkyWards
- Etihad Guest
- Finnair
- Iberia Avios
- JetBlue True Blue
- Qantas Frequent Flyer
- SAS EuroBonus
- Singapore Krisflyer
- Spirit
- TAP Air Portugal Miles&Go
- Turkish Miles & Smiles
- UnitedMileage Plus
- Virgin Atlantic Flying Club
- Virgin Australia Velocity
Hotel Loyalty Programs
- Choice Privileges Rewards
- World of Hyatt
- Hilton Honors
- IHG One Rewards
- Marriott Bonvoy
- Wyndham Rewards
Hotel Booking Portals
- AAdvantage Hotels
- Amex Travel
- United Hotels
- Virtuoso
Award Flight Search Using PointsYeah
Searching for award flights is easy on Pointsyeah. The interface is neat, and you can use it even if you are a beginner. As a free user, you can search for a flight for 4 days at once, and it is 8 days for premium users.
For now, I’m searching for flights between London and New York, and Pointsyeah came up with 755 flight options for a single day. It shows the same flight twice or more based on where you can book it.
There are a number of filters you can use to get the flight you were looking for.
PointsYeah Fliters
- Cabin Filter: Choose your preferred Cabin
- Preferred Frequent Flyer Program: The frequent flyer program you would like to book your flight with. The best part is that it shows the number of flight options available. For example, in our case, there were 755 flight options, and you can book 174 of these flight options using Air Canada Aeroplan points. Great.
- Stops:
- Preferred Airlines: You can also choose your preferred airline. Many of the programs don’t have this filter option.
- Max Points, Taxes & Duration: You can also filter search results based on points, taxes & duration of the flights.
- Mixed Cabin Filter: You can also filter the flights based on a mixed cabin filter. Again, Seeing the number of options available against each mixed cabin award is good. Indeed, it is clean.
- Departure/Arrival Time:
- Aircraft Filter:
- Airports: You can also filter your departure & arrival airports. This is also a good filter option.
- Sorting Option: There are a number of sorting options, too. You can also set your own points value for each program.
Search Results
In the search results, you will see several flight options. The same flight will appear twice because the searches are based on each frequent flyer program. So, to book the flight with the lowest miles, you would want to use the airline filter option once you have found your preferred flight. For example, I found a Brussels Airlines flight between LHR and JFK via BRU that is bookable with both Air Canada and United Miles.
The search result also shows the change cancellation charges, similar to what Awardtool does. However, PointsYeah also indicates the program’s stopover benefits. For example, our case shows that an Aeroplan stopover is available at 5K points. This is good for beginners who may not be aware of such benefits.
Unique: Multi City Award Search
PointsYeah has a unique award flight search filter, “Multi-City.” Most award tools don’t have this feature. It isn’t what you think, but it’s still good.
The multicity option allows you to search for two flights at once. Here, the limit is two, but it is still a good option.
You can practically use this feature to search for two flights between any airport. For Example, I’ll search for flights from Manchester to New York in addition to London and New York flights on the same date. So, you can do many things with the multi-city search option, including finding a return flight.
Here is the result of my multi-city flight search. I can easily switch between both flight options. But there is one limitation.
If you apply a filter on one flight, the filter will also automatically be used on the flight 2 option. But it is still a great feature.
Flight Explorer aka Flight Deals
Like many award tools, PointsYeah also includes Explorer, aka Flight Deals. With flight deals, you can search award flights between any airport in the world, any continent to any continent, country to continent, or many more options.
The flight deals search results are cache results. However, you also see when the result was last updated. The flight deals show the award deals refreshed a few seconds ago to seven days.
Hotel Award Stay Live Search
The PointsYeah Hotel Award Stay search is decent and has a filter that is good enough to use. The only downside is that there is no monthly calendar. You can see the search results for a period.
The best part is that it has access to all popular hotel programs. There are also some neat filter options. For example, you can filter Hyatt by category and Marriott by free night certificate.
You can also filter hotels based on whether the hotel has a club lounge, offers free parking, etc.
Hotel Explorer aka Hotel Collection
The hotel collection shows the cache results of hotels. But this is better than live search results regarding filters and features. One of the reasons is you can see a cached calendar result. However, the limitation of hotel collection is that it shows only a fraction of hotels as compared to what would be available via the live results. That means not all hotel searches are cached. So, you may not get the best deal by using the Hotel collection. It would be great if the calendar option were added to the live results. Also, not all hotel program results are cached. For example, Choice & Wyndham hotel results are not cached.
Hotel Booking Portal Search
If you use hotel booking portals to book hotels, you can use PointsYeah to see the lowest price across portals. As of now, you can search for hotels bookable via AAdvantage Hotels, Amex Travel (US), United Hotels , and Virtuoso.
Set Search Preferences
PointsYeah allows you to set your search preferences, which is excellent and can save you time.
Alerts
With the free version, you can set four alerts on PointsYeah. You can also create alerts for flight deals and hotel collections, which is good.
It is easier to set alerts, and you can set filters, too, while setting alerts.
System Status
You can also check which loyalty programs will be shown in the results and which are unavailable. As of the writing, you can not access awards from:
- Iberia Plus Avios
- Virgin Atlantic Flying Club
- Finnair Plus Avios
Check the latest system status here.
Premium vs Free
Subscription Options
PointsYeah is a unique tool that allows you to earn miles on an annual subscription.
- American Airlines: 25 Miles/$ (Effectively: 2475 Miles)
- Alaska Airlines: 20 Miles/$ (Effectively 1980)
- Delta Airlines: 20 Miles/$ (Effectively 1980 Miles)
- United Airlines: 15 Miles/$ (Effectively 1485 Miles)
You will earn miles only if you subscribe to an annual subscription. If you choose a monthly subscription, you can use our affiliate link here.
The Sequence of My Award Tool Use
Even though PointsYeah is a good tool, I use Seats Aero primarily as a tool. After that, I hover over AwardTool and, in some cases, Award Logic or PointsYeah.
Feature I wish were there
- Stopover Hours Filter
- No ads on Free Account
- Hotel Award Calender
Bottomline
PointsYeah is a good tool for beginners who are still learning to search for awards. However, there are still some limitations that I find. PointsYeah is not my first-choice award tool, but I do come back in case things are not working out. The best part is that there are a number of features available for free, and it makes sense to sign up to use them.
