For hotel reward night search we introduced Zaozao recently, which is a great tool and has virtually no match in the market as far as I know. When it comes to reward flights however, the market is much more open and many options are available, with their pros and cons. I myself use Seatspy and seats.aero from time to time.
We’ll be talking about a relatively new face today – PointsYeah. Most importantly, with a free account you can already access many of its features, so you don’t have to pay to start benefiting.
[Flight Search]
Flight search is rather straightforward: simply enter your origin, destination and the date(s) to initiate a search. It can be either one-way, return or multi-city. For multi-city you can choose up to two cities – I appreciate they support “city” in addition to “airport”, as for London you’d need up to six searches otherwise!
A multi-city search example, Beijing / Shanghai to London on October 2:
Some explanations:
- You could apply many filters, such as cabin class, airline, airline program, number of stops, flight time and maximum points
- Results are ranked by the point price – taxes and fees are also displayed
- For certain airline programs, (US) bank partners are shown for reference
What I really like about PointsYeah is their 1-click search feature, so I don’t need to manually switch between different programs and repeat the search. Some of the supported mainstream programs are:
- Star Alliance: United, Air Canada, Avianca, Turkish
- Oneworld: Iberia, American, Alaska
- Skyteam: Delta, Air France / KLM, Virgin Atlantic, SAS
- Other: Etihad, Emirates
Note that these are “airline programs” not “airlines”. For example, with United and Air Canada you can search flights operated by all Star Alliance partners as well as Oman Air, Gulf Air and Juneyao etc. The number of airlines PointsYeah has exposure to is much bigger than the list above.
One notable drawback: British Airways is not supported, and although Iberia is, I did some dry runs and couldn’t see anything from Iberia Plus. We can still find Avios availability through American and Alaska, but the inventory could be very different.
You can also search by date range: for one-way and multi-city you can choose four consecutive days, and for return two.
[Alert]
One other important feature is creating alerts, for which you’ll need “points”. Free accounts have 4 points, and each (origin, destination, day) combo costs one point. In other words, you can choose to monitor a route over four days, or four different routes.
You can apply similar filters on alerts like in search, such as number of passengers, airline program, number of stops and flight duration. Whenever an eligible flight becomes available, you’ll receive an email alert.
[Premium]
As you have seen, PointsYeah’s free account can already access great features. If you need more you can pay the $89.99 annual membership free to upgrade to Premium. The main advantages are:
- No ads
- Double date range in search: 8 consecutive days for one-way / multi-city, and 4 days for return
- 32 points for alerts
It doesn’t hurt to create a free account and try PointsYeah first. If you sign up using our link, we’ll earn a commission should you pay to upgrade later – thanks for your support!
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