Point.me Review: Limited Features, But OK for Beginners

Point.me was a first-of-its-kind award flight search tool when it was released many years ago, allowing you to connect your loyalty accounts and filter live search results for award space based on your available points. But now, a handful of other services do what Point.me has always done, only better and much faster.

While Point.me is okay for beginners, the free search option only covers flights within the next 60 days. The standard plan costs $12 per month or $129 per year, and the premium plan costs $260 per year. That’s more expensive than PointsYeah ($100 annually) and Roame ($110 annually), though you can get a complimentary limited-access version of Point.me by holding the Bilt World Elite Mastercard® Credit Card and certain American Express cards.

Point.me also comes up short on features. It lacks what I think is the most important thing in an award search tool: the ability to receive alerts when award space opens. Searches are painfully slow, and results only show departures on a specific day, from a specific airport and in a specific cabin class. Browsing for both economy and business class award space will require multiple lengthy searches.

Other tools like PointsYeah and Roame are fast and allow searches between multiple airports and cabin classes over an entire week, while also offering more functionality for free users.

You’ll need to create a login to access Point.me, then sign up for a membership to access the search tool. There’s also a basic membership, but it doesn’t come with access to the search tool.

Here’s an overview of some of the differences between Point.me Standard and Point.me Premium.

Both membership levels offer access to the same airline and bank loyalty programs and five alerts for a price drop on a specific route. While that’s useful, Point.me won’t alert you when award space opens up like you can with other tools like PointsYeah and Roame.

In addition to the search tool, Point.me premium members receive a free points strategy consultation and a discount and credit to Point.me’s concierge service, which creates custom itineraries starting at $200 per person.

To search for award space on Point.me, enter your departure and destination airports along with your date of travel, and select the cabin you want to travel in.

Although the platform is easy to use, it can take a long time for search results to show. I timed one search and it took nearly two minutes to complete. You’ll know the search is done when the purple bar at the top stops flashing.

From the results page, you can filter by credit card and airline loyalty programs, airline, cabin type and number of stops. In the example below from New York to Amsterdam, Point.me found 94 business class options on my selected date with one stop or less. The cheapest is United Airlines partner space on Swiss International Air Lines by transferring 88,000 points from Bilt Rewards or Chase Ultimate Rewards® to United MileagePlus.

It looks like you can toggle through dates across an entire week from the top results bar. But in fact, the tool will initiate a brand new lengthy search if you click on another date. Additionally, each results page will include a “Point.me Pick,” which is the website’s recommended flight based on your search query.

Point.me stands out as a beginner-friendly award flight search tool. Every search result comes with step-by-step instructions for how to transfer credit card points to a supported airline. Once you choose a flight and “Book myself,”  select “Learn how to book this flight.” You can also choose to have someone with Point.me book your flight for you for $200.

From there, you’ll enter a tutorial on how to set up a loyalty account with the transfer partner, find the same award on the airline’s website that you found on Point.me, transfer points to the airline from your credit card and finally, how to book the award.

Search results show both the retail price and number of points required to book a flight, making it easy to determine your redemption value. While Point.me doesn’t do the final calculation for you, just divide the cash price by the points price to determine redemption value.

In the example above, there were 94 flight options on my selected date to fly in business class from New York to Amsterdam. The cheapest option is to use 88,000 United MileagePlus miles (which can be transferred from either Bilt Rewards or Chase Ultimate Rewards®) to fly on United’s partner Swiss Airlines, which would otherwise cost $1,852. With this redemption, you’d effectively get a value of 2.1 cents per mile.

Credit card transfer bonuses are my favorite way to get more value from your transferable card rewards. If a transfer bonus is available from any of the major card issuers, Point.me will integrate the bonus into the price it shows.

In the example below, there’s a 20% transfer bonus from Citi ThankYou Points to Air France-KLM Flying Blue. Point.me shows the amount of the active transfer bonus and how many bank points would be required for the booking. This flight would only require you to transfer 23,000 Citi ThankYou Points instead of the normal 27,000 points you’d need without the bonus.

Point.me subscribers can set alerts for particular routes and get notified when the award price drops. This can be especially useful if you book award travel on an airline with a generous award cancellation policy, allowing you to book your flight today and get alerted later if the price drops.

There’s no way around it; Point.me is one of the slowest award search tools I’ve tested. One search for a round-trip flight from Tampa, Florida to Paris took 1 minute and 51 seconds to complete. Subsequent searches seemed to take just as long.

When I asked Point.me about this, the company said, “Our results appear to the user as we receive them, and because of how extensive the results are, a completed search may sometimes take longer than other platforms.”

However, we’ve found options like PointsYeah, which offers live award space inventory with more customizable results than Point.me in a fraction of the time.

Point.me doesn’t really do anything unique compared to its competitors. Seats.aero is great for super-specific searches on particular airlines and aircraft. PointsYeah has multicity searches and a better explorer tool than Point.me. But aside from the beginner tutorials, Point.me doesn’t do anything that stands out. There’s no use case that makes me go, “I need Point.me for this,” because other services probably already do it faster.

Especially lacking from Point.me are alerts for when award space becomes available. The ability to know when that space opens up is a key feature for those other tools, but not Point.me, where alerts are limited to price drops and deals.

Point.me doesn’t offer multi-city searches, so you’ll be stuck doing a new (slow) search for every combination of departure and arrival airports. By comparison, other tools allow you to search for two or more departure and arrival airports simultaneously, saving time and making it easier to scan for broader availability.

I reached out to Point.me for comment and was told that multicity searches are now live for “a percentage of subscribers” and that “roll-out to 100% will be complete soon.” However, I wasn’t able to test that feature and will update this section once that changes.

There’s no ability to search by all available cabin classes at once with Point.me. The tool is already slow, but if you want to search for both economy and premium cabin availability for a certain date, it requires two independent and slow searches.

When I asked Point.me about this, they said the ability to search for multiple cabins in one search is “on our roadmap,” but did not provide a timeline.

Point.me is OK for award travel beginners who want guided help and are willing to pay for a simple interface and educational tools. Transferring credit card points to airlines you’ve never used can be intimidating, and the step-by-step tutorials available to make sure you get the process right are top-notch.

However, the Point.me free search tool only covers 60 days from the day of your search, so you have to pay if you’re looking for availability further out. There are no alerts for new award space, and an annual subscription costs more than with other tools. In general, Point.me doesn’t do anything uniquely well.

If you get a free limited-access subscription to Point.me through your Bilt World Elite Mastercard® Credit Card or certain American Express cards, I’d definitely recommend trying out the platform. But unless you’re a true award search novice, tools like Seats.aero, PointsYeah and Roame will offer a better value with more advanced features.