How to turn your airline miles into a great vacation
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Sitting on credit-card points? A new breed of travel search engine can help you convert them to a vacation. There are over a dozen websites that show award redemption rates across airlines.
Customers have taken note of these so-called award-search sites: Point.me, to take one example, reached one million monthly users in November. Other sites include PointsYeah, Pointhound, AwardTool and SeatSpy. “People are earning all these points and miles from all these credit cards, and they want to use them effectively," says Greg Davis-Kean, founder of travel website Frequent Miler.
Here’s what you need to know before using these services. At their core, these sites function much like travel sites such as Kayak and Expedia. To search for a flight, users enter their departure and destination airports and the dates of their travel.
But instead of showing how much a flight costs in cash, these sites present prices in points or miles. Many of these sites include features that allow for more open-ended searches if you don’t have a time frame or destination in mind. Some allow you to search for hotels, too.
The sites vary in many ways, including which airlines are factored into search results. For instance, Point.me lets you search for round-trip tickets, while Roame.travel looks for one-way fares. Some sites enable users to set up price alerts or seek out concierge services for an additional charge.
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