Which hotel award search tool is best?

For those with hotel points and free night certificates across multiple hotel programs, finding the best places to use your points and free nights can be a pain. It can be especially hard when your heart is set on a booking a popular hotel or resort which is rarely available for award stays. Luckily there are plenty of tools that can help. In this post I compared 6 hotel award search tools to identify which is best. As you’ll see below, which is best depends upon what exactly you’re trying to achieve, and so I’ve identified the best tools for different scenarios.

Tool Overview

Disclosure: Frequent Miler has a business relationship with each of the tools listed above. If you sign up for a membership through the above links (or by using code FrequentMiler with MaxMyPoint) we may receive a commission.

Scenarios

Best tool for each scenario

Disclosure: Frequent Miler has a business relationship with each of the tools listed above. If you sign up for a paid membership through the above links (or by using code FrequentMiler with MaxMyPoint) we may receive a commission.

Trip planning

Trip planning is the basic function that you’d expect any hotel award search tool to do. Hotel award trip planning tools typically ask for your desired destination and dates of travel and then they show you all of the hotels that are available to book with points. Most show hotels both on a map and as a list. Most show cash rates too so that you can decide whether it’s better to book the stay with points or cash.

Here’s how I rank the tools from best to worst for Trip Planning:

1. Gondola: At the moment (these things change often), Gondola is my favorite tool for Trip Planning. When you search for hotels, Gondola shows prices both in cash and in points, along with Google review scores. For points bookings, it also shows cents per point and whether or not that’s a good value. When you click into a specific hotel, the tool offers an incredible amount of information including the typical cash price and point price ranges for this hotel; benefits you can expect based on your elite status; user reviews; hotel policies; and fees (including resort fees, if any). Gondola is the only tool I know of that lets me sort hotel results by point-value. Awayz lets me sort by points, and PointsYeah lets me sort by cents per point, but neither is particularly helpful when looking at hotels from multiple award programs. Hilton points, Marriott points, Hyatt points, etc. are on different scales. Sorting by number of points or even by cents per point doesn’t make sense when comparing across these programs. Gondola has additional features that some will find very useful: Earn Gondola “cash back” when you book cash stays through the site; Automatically receive Price drop alerts even for hotels not booked through Gondola (although that requires giving Gondola access to your email); and an AI driven “Explore” feature where you can ask the AI for travel suggestions.
2. PointsYeah: Offers outstanding support for a wide range of hotel programs. One thing I really love is that the tool also shows us when a hotel is bookable through AA Hotels, United Hotels, Amex Travel, or Virtuoso. For example, if you have an Amex Platinum consumer card and want to use its $200 FHR (Fine Hotels & Resorts) credit, you could filter to Amex Travel hotels and look for the words “Fine Hotels & Resorts” in the search results. Then, hover over those words to see what specific FHR benefits the hotel provides. PointsYeah also offers a great selection of filters including: Max Points, Free Night Certificates, Suites Only, Club Lounge, Free parking, Free airport shuttles, Pet friendly. Sorting options include Points, Price (cash rate), Miles Earned, Distance, and Cents Per Point. Notably missing: there’s no way to sort by guest rating or point value.
3. Awayz: Awayz supports filtering by Hotel Program, and by free night certificates. It allows sorting by star rating (i.e. guest rating), number of points, and more. My primary hesitation with recommending Awayz for trip planning is that I keep running into situations where Awayz lists the wrong point price. It’s usually only off by a few thousand points, but it’s troubling because it makes me wonder what else may be wrong. I assume that this is due to caching and the price shown was correct at some point in the past. Another caching issue was when an available hotel I found through PointsYeah couldn’t be found at all in Awayz’s search results. It turned out that Awayz thought that the hotel was unavailable for the dates I had picked, but I went directly to the hotel’s website and confirmed that PointsYeah was accurate.
4. AwardTool: AwardTool supports only the big 4 hotel programs: Hilton, Hyatt, IHG, and Marriott. It allows sorting by lowest point price, guest rating, popularity (how does it determine that?), median point value, and availability %. Filters include hotel chains, brands, max point price, free night certificates, minimum review score, max cash price, and max distance. The last one seems very limiting: with one search I did, it wouldn’t let me pick more than a 5 mile radius and yet there were hotels outside of that radius that would have been good picks for my needs. I couldn’t find a way to get AwardTool to show those hotels. Like Awayz, I sometimes found out-of-date results.
5. MaxMyPoint Search: Like AwardTool, MaxMyPoint’s search feature supports only the big 4 hotel programs: Hilton, Hyatt, IHG, and Marriott. The tool appears to let you sort by point value but it really appears to sort by cents per point which is almost always going to push Hyatt properties to the top regardless of whether they’re good value.
6. Rooms.Aero Search: Rooms.Aero’s search feature supports the big four programs and Choice as well. Like MaxMyPoint, Rooms.Aero automatically refreshes its search so that you don’t see out-of-date results. The tool doesn’t seem to offer any sorting capability and its filters are even more limited than MaxMyPoint’s: with a Rooms.Aero search you can only filter by loyalty program, and/or max point rate. The biggest downside of Rooms.Aero’s search, though, is that it only shows hotels that are already in its database. When searching a small city, a MaxMyPoint search returned 109 hotels but Rooms.Aero returned only 4.

Find hotel award availability (award calendar & alerts)

This video shows how to set alerts…

Your heart is set on booking a specific hotel with points or free night certificates, but it’s very difficult to find award space using the hotel chain’s own website (I’m looking at you, Hyatt). The best of these tools provide a quick way to see hotel award availability across 12 months and provide a way to be alerted when award space opens up. Ideally, the tool offers flexible alerts where you can ask to be alerted, for example, any time 5 days in a row become available all summer long.

Caching issues and solutions: All of these tools share a handicap — in order to show 12 months of award availability, they have to pre-cache award search results. The consequence of this is that the award availability calendars are often wrong. The best tools therefore provide some way for the end-user to get fresh results on demand.

Minimum stay issues: Most tools build their availability calendars by searching every day for 1-night-stay awards. The problem with this is that some hotels have hidden minimum stay requirements for award stays. For example, Marriott’s Inn at Bay Harbor allows one-night award stays for most of the year, but during the busy summer months they default to only offering 3-night (or longer) award stays. However, once they’re mostly booked up, they sometimes open up 1-nigth award availability during the summer presumably to fill in the gaps when standard rooms are only available for a night at a time. The best tools here offer some way to find award space in these complicated situations.

Here’s how I rank the tools from best to worst for finding specific hotel award availability:

1. Rooms.Aero: This tool supports Hilton, Hyatt, IHG, Marriott, and Choice Privileges. If a particular hotel within any of those programs isn’t already available, Rooms.Aero makes it easy for the end-user to add the missing hotel. One of the tool’s best features is that it automatically searches for 1-night, 2-night, 3-night, 4-night, and 5-night stays. Then, it shows you right at the top of the screen when a hotel appears to have a minimum stay requirement. For example, when looking at the Inn at Bay Harbor, the tool displays the following alert: “This hotel appears to release more award availability for multi-night stays, likely via a minimum night requirement. If you only need a shorter stay, consider booking a longer stay and attempting to shorten it.” The tool allows filtering it’s results by the number of nights you want to stay, max number of points, and by cents per point value (so you can easily find when your points offer great value). All users can set alerts to be notified when the hotel becomes available on a specific date for your choice of 1 to 5 nights. Pro users can opt to be alerted when the hotel becomes available on any date for a set number of nights. Another killer feature is that, up to once per day, Pro users can refresh the entire 12 months for a single hotel. While I absolutely love Rooms.aero for this use case (finding specific hotel award availability), there are some enhancements I’d love to see:
   • Calendar view: Currently the tool only shows availability as a list. It would be really cool to show all 12 months in a calendar view at once the way that SeatSpy does for award flights. Update: Rooms.Aero now shows a monthly calendar!
   • Flexible alerts within a time range: Currently the tool can alert me when a 5 day stay opens up, but maybe I’d want that limited to a 5 day stay between December and February, for example. Update: Rooms.Aero now supports this for pro users!
   • Support additional programs: I’d love to see Choice and Wyndham added to the tool. Update: Rooms.Aero now supports Choice Privileges.
2. MaxMyPoint: This tool supports Hilton, Hyatt, IHG, and Marriott. Unlike Seats.Aero, it doesn’t seem to offer an easy way to add missing hotels to its database, but it seems to have great coverage anyway. I haven’t noticed any hotels within those four chains that are missing. Calendars can be displayed in calendar view or as a list. MaxMyPoint allows Platinum members to refresh the calendar, indirectly, by creating a “daily change alert” (these are alerts that notify you any time any new award space opens up across the year). MaxMyPoint partially handles the minimum stay issue: on hotels where they know there’s often a minimum stay requirement, their award calendar is based only on searching for the minimum number of nights. For example, with Calala Island, MaxMyPoint’s calendar is based on availability of 3-night stays. The problem with this solution is that some hotels are inconsistent about those rules. The Inn at Bay Harbor, for example, only limits awards to 3 nights or more during prime summer months. So, MaxMyPoint searches 1 night at a time and fails to show availability when the 3 night limits are in place. A partial solution is to set up a Flexible alert (Platinum users only) to search across a range of 7 days for 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5 days in a row of availability. Unfortunately, I find the maximum 7 day range very limiting.
3. Awayz: This tool offers cached award availability calendars, but with no indication of when it was last updated and no way to refresh the results. It also doesn’t do anything to handle the minimum length of stay problem. This tool does let you set a hotel alert, but only for specific date ranges.
4. AwardTool: Not recommended for this use case. This tool offers cached award availability calendars but it appears that the only way to get to them is to find award availability first. For example, to find the Inn at Bay Harbor’s award calendar, I had to do a hotel award search that successfully brought up that hotel as available and then I was able to click in to see the award calendar. Even if you get that far, though, the calendar isn’t very useful: it doesn’t tell you when it was last refreshed and there’s no way to force a refresh. This tool does let you set a hotel alert, but only for specific date ranges.
5. PointsYeah: Not recommended for this use case. This tool doesn’t yet offer hotel award calendars. It does let you set a hotel alert, but only for specific date ranges.
6. Gondola: doesn’t support this use case.

Price drop alerts

There are several reasons you may be interested in being alerted when a hotel’s award price drops for a specific date range:

• You already booked a stay and would be interested in rebooking at a lower rate to save points.
• You want to stay at a particular hotel but the point price is too high.
• You want to use a free night certificate that has a maximum point value. For example, Marriott’s 35K free night certificates can be used at hotels that cost up to 50K points for the night by adding up to 15,000 points. If the hotel you are interested in costs over 50K points per night for your date of interest, it may be worth setting an alert to watch for it to drop to 50K or lower.

Here’s how I rank the tools from best to worst setting price drop alerts:

1. PointsYeah: Allows setting alerts based on the maximum total points for a stay or for max points per night. Rooms.Aero and MaxMyPoint have more flexible alert options, but I ranked PointsYeah highest thanks to its additional support for Wyndham hotels.
2. Rooms.Aero: Allows setting alerts based on the maximum cost in points (per night average). Rooms.Aero does not support Wyndham hotels, but it bests MaxMyPoint thanks to supporting Choice Privileges.
3. MaxMyPoint: Allows setting alerts based on the maximum and/or minimum average points per day for a stay. Does not support Choice or Wyndham hotels.
4. AwardTool: Allows setting alerts with a “Max average points per night”. Pro users can select Infinite mode in order to continue receiving alerts even after alerts have been sent. Does not support Choice or Wyndham hotels.
5. Gondola: If you allow Gondola to read your email, it will automatically alert you when confirmed bookings go down in price (that’s the promise anyway — I haven’t tested it). There’s no way to set up alerts for hotels you haven’t yet booked.
6. Awayz: Not applicable. Awayz doesn’t allow setting alerts based on point prices.

Find best use for free night certificates

Marriott free night certificates can only be used at Marriott hotels where a standard room costs up to 15,000 points more than the certificate’s top value. Old style IHG certificates can only be used at hotels costing up to 40,000 points per night. Hilton free night certificates can only be used at Hilton hotels when standard room awards are available.

The best tool for optimizing use of free night certificates would do all of the following:

• Identify hotels that are available for booking with certificates across a large range of dates. For example, maybe you have 3 months left to use a cert before it expires — you therefore want to find hotels that can be booked with that cert and are available in that timeframe.
• Allow filtering or sorting to the best deals (e.g. find the hotels with the highest cash rate where I can stay for free with this certificate).
• Allow filtering by location.

Here’s how I rank the tools from best to worst for optimizing free night certificates:

1. Rooms.Aero: Rooms.Aero is the best tool for this scenario. The tool even has a “Marriott certificate finder” feature. But you can search for certs-use with other programs too. For example, if you want to find the best place to use an IHG 40K non-top-off-able cert, you can go to Explore… IHG One Rewards, then filter points to “<40,000” (this really means less than or equal to), then filter to value “over 0.75 cents per point” (for example). Finally, sort descending by Standard Room points required to find 40K available nights. Optionally filter further down by selecting particular brands (such as Kimpton and/or Intercontinental). The one big miss here the need to filter by location. You can only filter to specific countries. If you want to find rooms available within lets say 30 miles of your home, you’re out of luck unless you do a trip planning search (which would require you to limit your search to a set date range). Another easy enhancement I’d like to see is the ability to sort by cash rate so that you can find the best cash value uses for your certs.
2. MaxMyPoint: This tool has homepage filters that allow you to filter by hotel loyalty program and by the median nightly points range. You can also optionally filter to a location, including a broad location like “United States”. You can then sort by cents per point to find the best contenders. Within this display, you can’t filter by a date range, though, so any hotels you identify this way may not be available or priced low enough during the dates you need. New: MaxMyPoint now additionally lets you filter by “Hilton Aspire Credit,” “Hilton Best Free Night,” and “IHG Best 40K Free Night.” The latter two are based on hotels identified in Frequent Miler’s own posts.
3. Awayz: This tool allows filtering by free night certificates, and sorting by cash rate from highest to lowest. You can also expand your search to a 30 mile radius. Unfortunately you do have enter specific check-in and check-out dates. So, the tool is pretty good for finding a great use for certs within a general area and for a specific date range, but it doesn’t offer the option to search across a range of dates.
4. PointsYeah: This tool allows filtering by free night certificates, and sorting by cash price from highest to lowest. Unfortunately you do have enter specific check-in and check-out dates. So, the tool is fine for finding a great use for certs within a very specific area and for a specific date range, but it doesn’t offer the option to search across a range of dates.
5. AwardTool: N/A. AwardTool’s hotel search doesn’t allow filtering to free night certificates
6. Gondola: N/A. Gondola doesn’t allow filtering to free night certificates

More about each tool…

AwardTool

• AwardTool is first and foremost a flight award search tool, but it also includes a hotel search feature. If you’re using AwardTool for flight search anyway, you might as well see if this tool can do what you need with hotels too.
• For more about AwardTool, see: Which flight award search tool is best? and A new breed of award discovery tools

Awayz

• A free version of Awayz is available through Bilt Rewards. This is limited to Bilt’s hotel transfer partners, and doesn’t seem to have all of the same filtering capabilities, but it’s otherwise pretty useful. Plus, you can join Bilt Rewards for free (you don’t need their credit card to get this functionality). You can access this feature from the web by logging into your Bilt account and browsing here: www.biltrewards.com/rewards/transfer
• I like too that Awayz has a $5.99 Trip Pass option. This seems like a great choice for someone who only occasionally plans big trips and/or wants to try out the full version of Awayz without committing to a full month (and without having to remember to cancel).

Gondola

• This free tool is designed to let you search for hotels and to quickly and easily compare cash and point prices. It supports more hotel loyalty programs than most other tools here.
• More here: Gondola — My go-to hotel award search tool.

MaxMyPoint

• This tool is primarily designed to show hotel award availability calendars and to support alerts. The ability to do trip planning seems incomplete at this stage (and it is currently still in Beta).

PointsYeah

• PointsYeah was originally just a flight award search tool, but the developers have done a great job of adding an impressive hotel search feature that compares favorably to Awayz.

rooms.aero

• This tool is from the people that brought us seats.aero and the tools are linked: signing up for the pro version of either one gives you pro capabilities for both.
• Like seats.aero, this is designed more as a nerdy explore tool than a consumer hotel search tool.
• For more about Seats.aero, see: Seats.aero – a wonderfully nerdy tool for finding Unicorn flight awards
• Also see: Which flight award search tool is best?

Bottom Line

If you want a tool that helps you find hotels for a specific trip, I like Gondola best. It’s free, it has extensive program coverage, it allows sorting by point value, Google reviews, and more, and it includes a huge amount of useful information about each hotel.

For most other purposes, such as finding when a hotel is available across the year, or finding the best use of free night certificates, Rooms.Aero is my clear favorite. It makes it incredibly easy to find award availability at the most popular hotels.

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