Credit card reward maximization requires attention to detail at every step along the way. Maybe you're already a pro at collecting points, you know when to get which SUBs, how to work referrals, and how to squeeze every point per dollar you can from your purchases. But how good are you at maximizing redemptions?
This is another in my series on reward search tools, today we are looking at PointsYeah check out my previous articles on Roame, Reward Flight Finder, or my more general article about maximizing redemptions in which I use Seats to go over some foundational knowledge of why you should consider a flight search tool.
Referrals and disclaimers at the bottom. Note that I was given a premium membership for the sake of review, but PointsYeah has no editorial input over this article.
Search Tool Basics
If you're new to reward flight searching, you may not yet realize how important these tools can be both in terms of saving you time finding the best flight options, but also saving points when redeeming them. As I've outlined in previous articles, the best value for reward travel can be unlocked by leveraging flexibility in travel dates, routes, and destinations. Due to the quirks of reward flight pricing, sometimes changing the date of the flight just a little forward or back, or changing to an airport a little further away, can make the difference between having enough points for business class instead of economy. If you can change your plan of "going to Amsterdam on September 14th" to a broader "going to Europe in the Fall", the options available to you can expand dramatically. Unfortunately searching all of these combinations on even a single airline's website can be daunting, let alone comparing all the different transfer partners available to you if you hold an Amex card.
Search tools help simplify this process generally in three different ways, classic search, discovery, and alerts, and they typically do so with at least some free options and one or more paid tiers. So let's look at PointsYeah in these three areas, across both free and paid tiers, and highlight its strenghts, but first it is important to confirm that any tool you're considering covers the programs you're concerned with.
Airline Program Support
Each tool has slightly different lists of supported airlines so it is important to make sure that your primary target airlines are included. PointsYeah includes an impressive list, but most pertinent to Canadian credit card holders would be (transfer point source listed):
Air Canada Aeroplan - Direct or Amex
Air France/KLM Flying blue - Amex
American Airlines AAdvantage - Avion
Delta SkyMiles - Amex
Etihad Guest - Amex
Iberia Plus Avios - Amex and Avion (transfer first to BA then to Iberia)
They also have a long list of programs that may be useful if you have access to American rewards programs US Amex, Chase, Citi, Capital one or Bilt.
The highlight here for me is that they cover my primary transfer partners and are one of a short list of tools that has direct searching of any of the Avios partners. This can be very useful as it allows you to find Iberia's amazing deals for east coast to spain business class flights such as the below 7 seat availability business class for 38.5k Avios. With the current Avion to Avios transfer bonus this would be less than 30k Avion per person. Note that Roame however also includes Aer Lingus, Qatar and Cathay.
With this broad airline support confirmed, lets jump into the different search types/tools available in free and premium form.
Classic Search
Like its competitors, PointsYeah offers a real time search tool where you can input airport pairs such as YUL-CDG, a date range, and select from a wide range of filters.
In the free version you can search a full year in advance, 4 days at a time, with the full range of filters. Being able to set a premium cabin percentage to filter out low value mixed fares and focus on specific airlines and aircraft types within a mileage program are amazing tools and unexpected for a free membership. To contrast, Seats only allows you to search 60 days in advance and doesn't allow use if its advanced filtes with the free membership. While different in the specific restrictions, Roame allows a whole year of searching, but only +/- 1 day and lacking many of these filters even in its paid version. PointsYeah also allows you to search 2 origin or destination airports at the same time unlike Roame.
With such a powerful free option, what does a paid membership get you? While the most notable changes are in Alerts, a paid membership does expand your search windows from 4 days at a time to 8. It also now offers you a hotel alert tool which can be useful for tracking point prices with Marriott Bonvoy. But what if you want to search even more dates than 8, and more airports than 2? That's where discovery tools come in like their Daydream Explorer.
Discovery
Unlike classic search tools which show up to date award flight availability, discovery tools leverage cached search data to show far wider date ranges and destination options. These results are periodically updated, but may show awards that have already been snatched up, so it is important to verify the availability before getting your hopes too high and transfering your points.
Once again PointsYeah punches way above the competition when it comes to its free offering giving access to the full year and range of filters while both Roame and Seats are limited to the next 60 days.
Note the "updated X days ago" in the corner of these results, indicating that they are cached results.
Personally I love using discovery tools as a way to come up with ideas for potential trips, but sometimes it can be a bit saddening to find what appears to be a great redemption only to find out that the seats have already been snatched up. This is where Alerts come in, and are the main reason you should pay for a premium membership.
Alerts
Assuming you couldn't find the flight you want with a live search, your use of Daydream Explorer may have piqued your interest for a potential flight that was no longer available.
PointsYeah makes a distinction between two different types of alerts, Points Price Alerts and Deals Alerts.
Deals alerts are free and unlimited and give you a wide range of filters across a wide day range and supports regional destinations like "europe" or multiple separate airports.
While these alerts can not be set further than 1 year from current, they can be very effective for notifying you when your general needs are potentially met. You'll note however these alerts do not have a max point option, for that you'll need to use their points price alerts.
Points price alerts are far more powerful but extremely restricted with a free account. You can again set up airports and dates, but now can even add departure time, flight number(s), and critically a max number of points per passenger. With a free account you'll be able to make 4 of these alerts, but note that each day counts as a separate alert! Also, you can not use regional destinations and you must use separate alerts for each airport pair. So for example looking at YYZ-IST across a 4 day range will use all 4 of your alerts, and if you're looking at YYZ or YUL to IST or SAW, you could only assign a single date for each of the four combinations. This is where the premium account shines by allowing 32 alerts. This allowed me to set up a relatively wide date range across multiple airports for my next big trip. For example YYZ-LIS, YYZ-FCO, YYZ-AMS, and YYZ-ZRH all for the same 8 day range used up my 32 available alerts.
Shortly after setting up the above alerts I received notification of flights meeting my crtieria both to Lisbon with TAP and Rome via Amsterdam with KLM at great price points!
Note that while the YYZ-LIS flights are labeled as "mixed cabin" they are only economy for the YYZ-DCA leg, and business for the IAD-LIS leg, and their price is per person. The airport change isn't ideal for a shorter layover, but I have friends in the area and could easily find something to do with them between the flights.
The Avios "Problem"
While PointsYeah covers most of the primary transfer targets from Canada including Aeroplan, Air France/KLM, Delta, and Etihad from Amex MR as well as American Airlines from RBC Avion, it does not cover Cathay Pacific Asiamiles or British Airways Avios. Not covering BA Avios is a common issue I've discussed multiple times and I've gone over potential workarounds including using BA tools that search single legs and combining them using tools like Seatspy, or searching related programs like Alaskan and American and cross referencing potential flights with BA to confirm availability. PointsYeah adds another option to the list as it was the first tool which could search Iberia Plus Avios flights (more recently Roame leapfrogged over them adding Iberia, Aer Lingus, Qatar and Cathay). Iberian Avios can be obtained by transfer from BA avios, and some of their reward flight availability/pricing is similar.
I was curious about whether or not I could use PointsYeah's Iberia search availability to find flights with BA and other Avios airlines, as well as partner airline flights with companies like JAL, and American Airline. I was also curious how that availability and pricing would compare to BA or other Avios partners.
Overall what I found was mixed. For some routes partner availability seemed to be essentially identical in pricing and number of seats:
Above - essentially equal pricing Chicago to Cancun in business, same availability, with AA booked whether through Iberian or BA Avios. I saw similar when looking at YYZ-SEA with Alaskan, finding the same pricing and availability through Iberian as BA avios.
But while there was often overlap, this was not always the case. For example when searching YYZ-CDG, I saw availability connecting in JFK or PHL with Iberia booking AA, but only availability connecting in PHL with BA. The price was also somewhat more divergent with BA charging more than $100 extra per person.
This inconsistency was broad, as I also could find flights YYZ-MXP via New York with AA in economy with Iberian for 37750 Avios, but could see no availability on the same date when searching on British Airways.
Also, I was unable to find any availability for some Avios airlines including Qatar and Aer Lingus.
Is this a solution to the lack of ability to search Avios? No, not completely, but it can at least search some of the partner airline award space in that currency, so I would argue that it makes PointsYeah essential for those holding an RBC Avion card given their frequent (and currently ongoing) transfer bonuses to Avios. But if you want flights specifically with Qatar, Aer Lingus etc, you still have to search their specific pages and due to differences in pricing and cancellation policies you may want to check with alternative programs regardless.
Criticisms
When searching using the classic search it will often display results that should be filtered out while in the search process. This can be a bit misleading/jarring when you see what looks to be a great price only to realize it is with Qantas miles which you don't have. I infrequently use their classic search so this doesn't often impact me but can be annoying.
Also, after finding a flight on Daydream Explorer (the discovery search), when you click the classic search to confirm availability, while it will highlight the desired flight, it will also show flights you had filtered out. For example I was looking at Aeroplan flights yyz-ord-mke, and when I was confirming the availability, it removed the mileage program filter and also showed me results from AA. In this case not the end of the world as I can access AA via RBC avion, or book this flight using Avios Finnair... but for someone with only Aeroplan points it could be disorienting. The bigger issue is that it seemed to remove my seat count filter - this could be particularly frustrating if the outdated discovery data suggested there were more seats than still available, but the live search defaulting to 1 seat obscured this from you. Instead what I typically do is confirm availability on the actual airline/program's website - so I avoid any confusion from the classic search tool.
Conclusion
PointsYeah has become my new favourite free search tool, however if you are considering paying for a premium membership I would suggest you also consider Roame. Pointsyeah has some of the strongest free search options and has wide program coverage, including Iberia. I like the ability to save my default filters and airport, and have found the tools generally user friendly and helpful. My main criticisms are related to their classic search tool which I don't use nearly as often as its alerts and Daydream Explorer tool.
Referral Links
Interested in PointsYeah and looking to support this website? Consider using my affiliate link.
With its best in market 5x multiplier Amex Cobalt is a powerful point earner that can get you on flying for free 5 times faster than much of the competition. If you're interested in it, or other personal Amex cards such as the Platinum click here. For business cards reach out for a free consult to review your situation and learn about elevated offers you can't find on the public Amex page such as one for 200k points on the Business Platinum card.
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You're going to need somewhere to stay after all of these free flights. The Amex Bonvoy or the Business Bonvoy card will earn you free hotel stays and can be combined with the Aeroplan eStore for some incredible double dipped rewards. Sign up here
If you're on the fence, or wondering about other cards reach out to me for a free consult, and if you sign up for a card through my link, let me know and I will walk you through advanced tricks and personalized advice to help you get the maximum benefit both from earning and redeeming points - getting your travel journey going faster than you ever thought possible.
Check out my Keeper Cards series to see other cards worth exploring
Disclaimer
This should not be taken as financial advice and details are subject to change. I have made good intentioned efforts to be accurate but ultimately consult card/program/website terms and conditions. Note that I may receive points or commission for products signed up to through links on this page.
