Best Award Travel Search Tools

Searching for the perfect way to use your miles and points can seem like a part-time job. But the right award travel search tool can do the hard work for you.

Choose one that’s aligned with your particular redemption. One tool may be best for finding a specific flight on a particular date, while another tool will work better if your dates are flexible or you want recommendations on where your points can take you.

Here are NerdWallet’s top picks.

Points Path is a browser extension and app that shows airline award prices next to cash fares on Google Flights. It’s fast, accurate and provides a simple search and results interface to understand if you’re better off using points or cash for each flight based on the Points Path valuation for each airline’s rewards.

We picked Points Path as the best overall airline search tool because its features and search function allow people to find award flights using the same process they typically use when searching for cash flights. There are no extra steps or complicated features to navigate, and the interface is easy to understand.

The free version provides access to five major domestic airlines, while the Pro version provides access to 12 additional international airlines. Features include everything that typically comes with Google Flights, including the ability to search across multiple origin and destination airports and a chart showing historical pricing trends, so you know if it’s a good time to book.

All searches are live and there’s no cached discovery. That means you’ll know the results can be booked. One drawback: It’s limited to the search capabilities of Google Flights and users can’t scan results over a broad set of dates or queries.

With the tool, you can:

Points Path is also the only award search tool to actively tell you if an airline program is not online and won’t show in the search results. Search tools sometimes lose temporary access to individual airlines, so this feature will let you know why a potential redemption you’d expect to see isn’t showing up.

If your travel dates are flexible, Seats.aero is probably the most powerful tool for you. You can search for premium cabin award space across a wide range of dates and airports for specific aspirational redemptions like Japan Airlines first class, Qatar Airways Qsuites and Etihad apartments. Pro users can search over an entire year for availability, and all users can filter by regions, such as North America and Europe.

While Seats.aero is powerful, it’s not very beginner-friendly. That’s why Points Path is ranked as our better overall tool, even though Seats.aero covers more airline programs (25). In NerdWallet’s hands-on testing, we found that the user interface wasn’t always intuitive. To make sense of the results, you’ll need to have more details about each award program, especially around how partner award availability is handled. Additionally, text or email alerts are removed after they’re triggered, so if you don’t like the results from the first alert, you have to set it up again. But there’s also no limit on the number of alerts Pro users can set.

Similar to Points Path, Seats.aero has a Chrome extension that shows award pricing inside Google Flights. Even better, the extension also works in Chase’s travel portal. That’s huge, as you can immediately see whether you’ll get a better value for Chase Ultimate Rewards® by booking through the portal or transferring points to a partner airline.

Seats.aero generally displays cached search results and only uses live results for Pro users performing specific origin-and-destination searches. For that reason, you’ll want to confirm award availability with the specific airline website before transferring credit card points.

PointsYeah is a great all-around tool, but the most notable aspect is its map-based “Daydream Explorer” feature. It’s great if you have a stack of travel rewards and want to see different places you can use them for both flights and hotels.

For flights, the explorer tool can search over a 60-day window using useful filters, including:

You can search between up to three arrival and three departure airports, continents or regions.

Note that Daydream Explorer uses cached discovery, meaning the results aren’t live. However, PointsYeah also supports fast, live searches through its standard award search engine.

Point.me offers limited complimentary search access to American Express and Capital One Business card holders. However, you can only search for award availability from airlines that are transfer partners of those rewards programs.

Say you’re trying to decide between redeeming Hyatt points and Marriott points. Gondola can show you the cash and points costs for properties in both chains, plus color-coded redemption values. That makes it easy to scan the results for the best deals.

Gondola includes many of the features you’d expect from a strong travel search platform, like alerts when cash or points prices fall, fast search results and useful historical pricing data for individual hotels. You can also sort results by redemption value, making them easier to scan than other tools such as PointsYeah and Rooms.aero.

Beyond credit card and hotel loyalty rewards, Gondola has its own rewards program called Gondola Cash, which gives you 3% to 7% back on future cash bookings depending on your status with Gondola.

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