me subscription by using code OMAAT4 Every so often, I think it makes sense to talk a bit about the tools and services that I most use for managing, earning, and redeeming points. While I often mention these websites and services in passing, I think there's also merit to writing dedicated posts about them sometimes.…
Continue reading: POINT.ME: Redeem Points For Award Flights With Ease
Share your questions, experiences, and thoughts below.
How is this compared to Seats.aero or Roame.travel? I've used the free version but find it too limiting for my needs and being "stingy" keeps me on the fence on whether or not I would commit to a paid plan.
I’m curious about how point.me compares to Roame as well. Been using Roame for 1+ years now and have generally been happy with it, but if point.me is superior I’d consider switching when my renewal comes up
Don’t we get a complimentary point.me via Amex Platinum? I’d say, it’s somewhat helpful, as is Points Path extension on Google Flights.
I used point.me and still have subscription to pointsyeah.com and seats.aero. For me, seats.aero works much better than the others.
I have made 20 or so award bookings in the past, so I am reasonably knowledgeable about the process. However, I still find point.me to be quite useful, as it shows me opportunities I did not know existed, which are better than the ones I had initially expected to use. For example, I got sick in Europe last August and decided to try to find an earlier trip home. I looked on point.me and discovered a business class flight home on AA via PHL, and it was only 45,000 Alaska Airlines miles. So I transferred points from Bilt and was home the next day.
That said, I have not compared point.me to competing services, but I certainly think I am getting my money's worth with point.me.
But point.me definitely has some problems. It was reported months ago that point.me had been blocked by Air Canada, and that it was not able to scrape the Air Canada site. I have since then intermittently seen information from Air Canada on point.me, but looking just now at a booking I'm interested in (a European Star Alliance city to the East Coast), there does not appear to be anything from Air Canada on point.me. So I have to do a separate search on the Air Canada website if I think that will be relevant.
A second issue is that point.me designates certain of the offers it shows as "great deal" or "good deal," but these are basically useless. It's based on the alleged cents per point value, which of course is heavily dependent on how much the ticket costs. For example, it will show a transatlantic business class fare from the East Coast to Europe as a "great deal" even when it's 57,500 miles plus $754 in taxes and fees because you fly BA metal for the TATL segment. Uh, no. If you were able to fly that segment on AA, the fees would be like $12 and that would be a great deal. Or 45,000 Atmos miles and $12 is a great deal. 60,000 Flying Blue miles plus $274 is a good deal. But basically anything with UK taxes/fees of $700 will not be a good deal in my book, regardless of what fare BA is currently charging. Point.me should get rid of those designations entirely.
Which leads to problem #3, which is that point.me gives a recommended ranking of all the deals, but the reasons for the ranking are opaque and, IMO, not always compelling. This ranking does not correspond to whether it's a great/good deal or not, and for good reason: other issues like whether it's nonstop, the airline flown, the cancellation fees that apply, etc., can affect why you should choose one deal over another. This is another reason why the great/good deal designations are worse than useless. In practice, this issue means you should always look further down in your point.me search results to see if you think another deal is better, and you also need to look at the various alternative ways to book the same flights because a less-recommended alternative might be better than the point.me recommended option. Most of the time, the point.me recommendations are on the money, but they are off frequently enough that you should double-check.
Bottom line for me: Point.me is worth the money for making it easy to quickly identify options, but you still need to do some double-checking of the results to know if they are really optimal.
IMO Seats.aero is a much better use of money. I’ve been far more annoyed by points.me than impressed.
Have never seen an F award on point.me. Also the one time I booked a 1:1 consultation it had no time slots and had a deveil of a time to get my money back
The only F awards I have found on point.me are on Lufthansa, which only releases them to partners a few days before departure at most. For example, right now I see availability on March 2 for EWR-FRA (and beyond) for 140k United miles.
I've never used a service before...I've just done the "click-work". Tried Point.me free version to decide if I wanted to subscribe. It never provided any options...tried on two different days and finally gave up and took the plunge with Seats.Aero which populates quickly with various options.
Seats.aero is far superior imo. I’ve also tried their concierge service trying to save myself time and both times was left with horrendous options, almost like they put no thought or effort into the request and regurgitated whatever their own tool spit out, thankfully they refunded my money. Long gone are the days of points pro, ripppp