Yet another travel site is now vying for your attention, and this one wants you to spend a little of your money now to avoid spending a lot later.
Point.Me, created by the people behind the travel blog One Mile at a Time, starts with the same origin-destination-date details as any travel-search site but prices flights in the virtual currencies that are airline frequent-flier miles.
Results take a couple of minutes to stream in, because this site must run individual queries at more than 30 airline sites instead of funneling them through one of the “global distribution system” backends that streamline most flight shopping. Its output may reveal surprising bargains, and not just for those willing to connect instead of flying nonstop: Better values may come from booking a flight on one airline using a partner airline’s miles.
For example, looking for flights from Washington, D.C., to Belize revealed that the best deal for a first-class ticket involved booking a one-stop United Airlines itinerary using 25,000 miles from Air Canada’s Aeroplan program—a transfer partner of American Express, Capital One and Chase’s rewards cards, as the results page helpfully noted—plus $36 in taxes and fees.
Point.Me doesn’t handle actual bookings but instead provides illustrated walkthroughs of the process, which in this case (assuming you’re an Aeroplan newbie but have enough Amex, Capital One, or Chase points) involves opening an Aeroplan account, logging into your credit card account to transfer the points, then returning to Air Canada’s site to book the flight.
That kind of booking bank shot may be familiar to regular readers of One Mile at a Time and other travel blogs that refer to optimizing miles and points as “the hobby,” but Point.Me’s developers have a different audience in mind.
“They’re usually overwhelmed by the number of transfer options,” Jordan Rozum, director of product development, said in a Zoom interview. “They have no idea you can transfer points from Amex to British Airways to book a flight to Hawaii on Alaska Airlines.”
Point.Me’s resource-intensive hand-holding—much like booking travel on miles—comes with its own fees. A one-year subscription runs $129, which seems steep for people not looking to commit themselves to the miles-and-points hobby; $12 a month or $5 a day, however, could work for people researching special-occasion trips.
The site does benefit from a lack of competition. The iPhone app of another travel blog, The Points Guy, has an Award Explorer that estimates points and miles pricing for particular routes, but it does not check inventory. (Disclosure: I’ve written a few stories for TPGwritten a few stories for TPG.)
On the other hand, Point.Me also runs the risk of airline sites resenting its automated queries and the resulting server load, not to mention how it may make their currencies easier to spend.
“If one of those carriers is a little more aggressive and wants us to take it offline, we’d have to take it offline,” Rozum said. He added that Point.Me does not store frequent-flier account credentials (the TPG app’s option to do that led to an ongoing lawsuit from American Airlines), although it does allow users who manage them through the third-party service AwardWallet to connect that to their Point.Me account.
Rozum noted that Point.Me has already had real-world airline-relationship-management practice in the form of a flight-search tool it created for Amex that launched in September. He suggested that partnership had already helped elevate the site’s status with airlines—a goal important to any frequent flier.
