Online award search tool PointsYeah continues to expand their offerings with the launch of PointsYeah Hotels today. This new feature provides options to search for free night awards and/or cash rates with Hilton, Hyatt, IHG, Marriott, and Wyndham Hotels as well as a trio of other booking sites.
In just 20 seconds, PointsYeah will search real-time:
- Points redemption: 5 major hotel programs, with more to come
- Cash rates: 5 major programs
- Airline hotel booking portal rates with the number of miles earned: Currently, AA Hotels and United Hotels. As you may not be aware, lots of hotels earn thousands of miles per night nowadays, with AA earning counts as Loyalty Points
- AMEX FHR, Hotel Collection, and other rates: The AMEX FHR rate can earn hotel points, stay credit, in addition to benefits received as FHR bookings for Platinum Card holders and can often be a great value even when the base rate is higher than other sites,
- Virtuoso rate: Live search of the Virtuoso rate with benefits and promos listed. You will earn hotel points, stay credit, and other benefits such as confirmed upgrades, F&B credit.
- Search by point of interest, city center, airport, map, individual hotels
- Free night certificates: Hyatt, IHG, Marriott
- Filters: Free Parking, Airport shuttle, travel with a pet, resorts, Infinity pool, plunge pool, kids club, or golf.
- Sort: By points, price, most miles earned and by distance
Once you do conduct a search you’ll be presented with a listing of availability. Here’s a random search for Calgary:
You can also select a map view for the results:
There is a vast selection of options you can also choose to filter your results by and I think the most popular will be the Free Night Certificate option:
With the excellent Marriott Bonvoy American Express Card and Marriott Bonvoy Business American Express Card each offering an annual free night award this search feature will really help speed the process of finding hotels that you can use it at! You would select the Marriott <= 35,000 if you don’t want to top off your cert for a stay or you can select <= 50,000 if you are open to using points to top off your certificate for stay as you are allowed to redeem up to 15,000 points with the top off benefit.
Much like PointsYeah’s airline award ticket search, the results will show transfer options for U.S. credit card and bank programs. The same goes for the cash rates that are displayed, these will be in US$.
Unless your are playing the U.S. credit card game the only transfer partner that will be of significance for Canadians is American Express Membership Rewards as our version of the program allows for transfers to Marriott Bonvoy and Hilton Honors.
Recommended reading: Pointsyeah: The latest to join the ranks of award travel search engines – and it’s free!
Over the past 12 to 18 months we saw an explosion of online tools for airline award flight availability and now we are starting to see the same thing happen for hotels. PointsYeah is not the first to offer this but they do seem to be taking a big leap into this portion of the market as my first impressions of the search and the filtering options make it very versatile hotel free night award search tool.
Click here to learn more and try out Pointsyeah Hotels
Images via PointsYeah