seats.aero, point.me and Roame all search the same airline award inventory — none has secret seats. What differs is how far ahead you can look, whether anyone explains the booking, and who alerts you. seats.aero is free forever (Pro $9.99/mo extends the search window from two months to a year), point.me is the only one that supplies booking instructions ($0 / $12/mo / $260/yr with concierge), and Roame is alert-and-deal driven ($9.16/mo or $25/mo, top tier with up to $100/quarter of hotel rebate credits). Start free, and do not pay for all three. Prices read from each company's own pages August 14, 2026.
The short version: Three award-search tools, and they are not competing for the same job. seats.aero is free forever and is the best place to answer "where can my points take me." point.me is the only one that tells you how to actually book what it finds, which is where most people give up. Roame is built around alerts and deals, and its top tier hands back hotel credits that offset the fee. Every price below was read off each company's own pages on August 14, 2026.
If you have tried to book a flight with points, you already know the hard part is not having the points. It is finding a seat the airline will let you book with them. Airline sites hide partner space, show one program at a time, and the good seats disappear.
Three tools solve that. People ask which one is best, and the honest answer is that they do different jobs.
First, the thing none of them will tell you: they are all searching the same airline award inventory. Nobody has secret seats. What differs is how far ahead you can look, whether anyone explains the booking, and who tells you when space opens.
seats.aero's own page says it plainly: "seats.aero is free, forever."
The free tier lets you explore availability and create alerts for flights departing within the next two months, and it does not even require registration. That is unusually generous, and for a lot of people it is the whole answer.
The paid tier, Pro at $9.99 a month, is about time: up to a year of availability on all routes, advanced filters, and SMS alerts. The free window is two months; the paid window is a year. If you are planning a trip eight months out, that is the entire difference.
The feature that makes it distinct is not the search box, it is the purpose-built finders for specific cabins. There is a Qatar Qsuites finder, a first-class finder, a Delta One finder. The Qsuites one, in seats.aero's words, will "find direct Qatar Airways Business Class award availability. Seating is identified from flight amenities and scheduled aircraft, but last-minute aircraft swaps can still occur."
That last clause is the sort of caveat most tools leave out. On the day we looked it was tracking over 18,000 Qsuites results, each stamped with how recently the space was seen.
Best for: answering "where can I go with what I have" without spending anything.
This is the gap the other two leave, and it is the reason point.me is on this list.
Finding the seat is half the problem. The other half is that award booking often means transferring points to a program you have never used, then calling an airline you have never flown. point.me's paid plans include booking instructions, the actual steps for the specific itinerary it found you.
Their three plans, from their own help pages:
| Plan | Price | What you get |
|---|---|---|
| Basic | $0/month | Explore tool, plus limited access to the search engine |
| Standard | $12/month or $129/year | Real-time flight searches, booking instructions, price alerts |
| Premium | $260/year | Everything in Standard, plus Concierge access |
Premium is the unusual one. It includes a Point Strategy Consultation that point.me values at $200, a $100 credit toward your first Concierge booking, and 10% off Concierge services after that. Concierge means a person books the flight for you.
Whether that is worth $260 depends entirely on whether you would otherwise not book at all. For someone sitting on a large balance who has been putting off a complicated redemption for a year, a human doing it is a different product from a search box. For everyone else it is a lot of money.
Best for: people who keep finding seats and then stalling at the booking.
This is the part that can save you the subscription entirely.
point.me runs a separate American Express version of the tool at amex.point.me, and Amex's own terms for it are unambiguous:
"US American Express® Membership Rewards® Card Members have complimentary access to the 'point.me for Membership Rewards® points' award flight search tool."
You log in with your American Express credentials rather than a point.me account. If you hold an eligible Membership Rewards card, check that before paying $12 a month.
Two limits worth knowing, both from those same terms. It shows transfer options only for airline programs participating in Membership Rewards, so it is a narrower search than the paid tool. And you cannot transfer points or book through it: "you must transfer Membership Rewards® points to a participating airline loyalty program through your Membership Rewards® account and book the flight directly with the airline."
So it finds the seat and hands you back to Amex and the airline. For a lot of Amex holders that is still the whole job, at no cost.
Roame's angle is alerts and deals rather than raw search. There is a free tier, including a free daily email of award flight deals, which costs nothing to try.
Paid, from Roame's own subscription page:
| Plan | Price |
|---|---|
| Friends of Roame | $9.16/month, billed $109.99 annually |
| Top tier | $25.00/month, billed $299.99 annually |
The top tier includes something the others do not: up to $100 per quarter of instant hotel rebate credits. Used fully that is $400 a year against a $299.99 fee, which changes the maths, but only if you book hotels through them at a rate you would have taken anyway. A rebate you have to change your behaviour to earn is not a rebate, it is a coupon.
The feature worth naming is SkyView. Roame's own description: "See every award seat across whole regions, months at a time." Rather than one airport pair, you search "a whole city, state, country, or continent", scan months of the calendar at once, and set what they call multi-region Super Alerts. Pro unlocks the full 365-day calendar and the wider ranges.
If you know you want to be in Southeast Asia in March but do not care which city, that is a different question from "JFK to SIN on the 14th", and SkyView is built for the first one.
Best for: people who want to be told when something good appears rather than going looking.
See Roame's free tier. Our code REWARDSGURU takes 10% off, and 25% during their current promotion.
Worth knowing before you pay anyone: the Avios programme runs its own reward-flight search at avios.com, and it costs nothing.
The catch is the sign-in. It is members-only, and it redirects straight to a British Airways login, so you need an Avios-family account to open it at all. There is no anonymous preview.
Once you are in, it searches a month at a time rather than a single date. You set from, to, travellers and a month, return or one way, and it prices the routes in Avios with taxes and fees quoted separately as "+T&Fs". Treat that separation as the point, not a detail: the Avios number is not the price you pay, and the cash component is a real part of the decision on this programme.
The feature no third-party tool can copy is the Companion Voucher. The search has an "I have a Companion Voucher" option, and in Avios's own words on the page:
"You can now apply a Companion Voucher to your flight search! Simply choose a voucher type and see how it can affect the prices for your next trip."
That is the whole argument for using it. seats.aero, point.me and Roame can find you the seat, but none of them knows what is in your account. If you are holding a Companion Voucher, only the programme's own search can price the trip as you would actually book it.
It also shows sample routes with starting prices, which is a fair way to calibrate what things cost. On the day we checked, London to Rome started at 26,000 Avios, London to New York at 55,000, and London to Cape Town at 66,000, all before taxes and fees.
So it is program-specific by design, and that is the trade. If Avios is where your points live, it is free, first-party, and it knows about your vouchers. If your points are spread across Chase, Amex or Capital One, it cannot compare anything, and that is what the tools above are for.
Every tool above is a destination you visit. PointsPath is the opposite: a free browser extension that rides along while you shop for flights normally, showing what each result costs in points next to the cash price. Their own line for it is "the best price for travel, no matter how you pay."
It runs on Safari, Chrome, Edge and Brave, plus Safari on iOS, and it costs nothing.
We showed this pattern before without naming it, in how to find flights you can actually book with points: the screenshot of a Google Flights search with coloured points badges over the results is exactly this kind of extension at work.
It is not a replacement for a real award search. It will not scan a region or a year. What it does is remove the step where you forget to check at all, which for most people is the actual failure.
Genuinely, in this order:
What we would not do is pay for all three. They overlap heavily on the search itself, and the second and third subscriptions buy you far less than the first.
Two of these are roughly $110 to $130 a year. That is real money against a hobby whose entire point is not spending money. A tool is worth it when it converts into a booking you would not otherwise have made. If you subscribe and do not book, you have paid a subscription to browse.
Our own free tools sit alongside these rather than against them: which of your cards wins each purchase and every live transfer bonus with its end date.
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REWARDSGURU takes 10% off. Through August 16, 2026 only, that first payment discount is 25% instead.Every price and quoted term above was read from each company's own pages on August 14, 2026. Subscription prices change, and promotional discounts change faster, so confirm on their sites before paying.