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tl;dr—We’re basking in the Pax Romana of online travel tools, as there are many wonderful applications to help you find open availability to redeem points for hotel stays. In this third installment, I’ll cover the tools I use the most to scope out availability for hotel reward nights. Disclosure: I won’t cover every tool out there to achieve a given objective, but instead, I’ll focus on the two tools that work best for my preferences.
Finding available nights to redeem points or free night certificates for a hotel stay is more straightforward than searching for premium cabin award fares, but it can be a beast in its own right. As hotels typically have more inventory than flights and are better equipped to adjust award availability dynamically (say, opening up more categories of rooms available for redemptions), in response to the ebbs and flows of demand, it’s more likely that there will be something available. That said, stringing together consecutive nights at some of the most popular properties can be challenging, and it helps to have tools that will help you quickly pinpoint availability over a range of dates. Two tools I use to help find hotel award availability are Rooms.aero and MaxMyPoint. Let’s take a look at how and why I enjoy using them.
Tools to Help You Find Hotel Award Availability
Rooms.aero
Rooms.aero is a search engine for hotel awards availability. In the second installment of this series, I wrote about using Seats.aero to find award fares, well Rooms.aero is Seats.aero’s sister product. Rooms.aero tracks the hotel award availability from four leading hotel chains – IGH, Hilton, Hyatt, and Marriott. There are three core features to know about:
- Explore
Explore is a powerful tool that allows you to mine through an entire hotel loyalty program’s portfolio and filter for a property that matches your needs. For each of the four hotel chains, you can filter by brand (i.e., “The Autograph Collection” within Marriott Bonvoy, ‘Hyatt House’ within Hyatt, etc.), country, redemption cost (in points), number of consecutive nights available (1-5 nights), and value – a cents per point measurement to help you gauge ‘how good a deal’ you’re getting when choosing to redeem your points. Explore is a good option for several situations, but it’s truly beneficial when you don’t have a concrete idea of where you’d like to travel to but you 1) have accumulated points with one (or more of the major hotel chains) and 2) you hoping to get an idea of the available hotels in a given country where your post can cover all (or part) of your stay.
Let’s say you need a vacation and decide to spend a few days eating good food and sightseeing. You’ve limited your options to a 5-night jaunt somewhere in Asia that you can reach on a direct flight but otherwise have no additional parameters for the destination. You want to stay in a luxury hotel, and ideally, you’d cover the cost of your stay with the slew of Bonvoy points you’ve accumulated over the last year. You could use Explore to run a search that looked something like this: Taking advantage of the filtering options to find a hotel – Source: You Are Travel via Rooms.aero
In the screenshots above, I am exploring Marriott hotel options and filtering for hotels with five nights of award availabilty; that are luxury brands; located in Hong Kong, Japan, Malaysia, Singapore, or Taiwan; and cost less than 100,000 points per night. Hotel The Mitsui Kyoto, a Luxury Collection Hotel & Spa looks like a great choice!
- Search
Search is my tool of choice when I need to find all the points hotels (from the four major hotel chains) in a given area. For example, if I’m headed to New Orleans for a weekend and want to see what points rates are across Marriott, Hilton, Hyatt, and IHG, I could use Search to accomplish this:
Searching for points hotels in New Orleans on Rooms.aero – Source: You Are Travel via Rooms.aero
Each marker represents a hotel, and in this case, I’ve selected The Roosevelt New Orleans, A Waldorf Astoria Hotel, on the map. On the left, I can scroll through a list of all my options.
With its map-view interface and Rolodex of all the points hotels of each loyalty program, Search reminds me of one of my all-time favorite hotel award tools of yesteryear—more on that below.
- Specialized Tools
Similar to Seats.aero, Rooms.aero also offers a few pre-built tools to help you uncover deals. The Marriott Certificate Finder can help you find available nights at hotels to use free night certificates (35K points, 50K points, or 85K points certificates). In 2024, Marriott announced that Bonvoy members could ‘top-up’ free night certificates with up to 15K additional points to cover a redemption that exceeds the value of the free night certificate. You’ll find that Rooms.aero has a built-in option to cover just such a scenario – which I find very impressive:
If you’re planning to pay a cash rate for a hotel, you can use Rooms.aero’s ‘Cheapest Cash Rate’ Finder, which is available for all of the core four loyalty programs. This tool might be handy if you are low on points (and have exceeded your limit for purchasing them), reasonably flexible about when you travel (hello shoulder season!), and have your eye on checking out a specific property (or type of property). If I’m keen on checking out the InterContinental Hayman Island Resort on Hayman Island in Queensland, Australia, I might use the ‘Cheapest IGH Cash Rate’ to do the following search:
Looking for the cheapest night at the InterContinental Haymand Island – Source: You Are Travel via Rooms.aero
As you can see, Rooms.aero has several savvy tools to take the guesswork out of finding hotel award availability.
MaxMyPoint
MaxMyPoint is my go-to award fare search engine when I have a focused idea of where I’m hoping to stay. It’s extremely easy to use. Similar to Rooms.aero, MaxMyPoint supports Marriott, Hilton, Hyatt, and IHG.
- Calendar View Availability
The default landing page invites you to search by hotel name or keyword to filter for a specific property or assortment of properties. From there, you can click on any property to view the award availability in calendar format, making it easy to figure out how many points you’ll need to book consecutive nights. In the example below, I search for ‘Waldorf Astoria Costa Rica’ and then click on the tile to display the calendar availability. I have to click over a few months to find the first set of dates for consecutive award night availability. It’s worth mentioning that this property isn’t even open yet (at the time of this writing, it should open in April 2025), so it’s cool that it’s already searchable on MaxMyPoint!
MaxMyPoint will also show you the percentage of days in the next 365 days that the hotel is available for standard points redemption—a thoughtful feature that lets users gauge the demand and allotted award nights for a given property one year out.
- Search
The MaxMyPoints Search feature is currently in beta and is very similar to the search functionality of Rooms.aero. Put in a destination, and you’ll see all of the points hotels available in that region. Then, in map view, you can select different properties alongside their redemption cost, cash rate, and cents per point.
- Max FHR
Ok, so this isn’t technically about hotel award availability but it does have everything to do with finding great deals on hotel nights. For any American Express Platinum or Centurion U.S.-based cardholders, the American Express Fine Hotels + Resorts® program (FHR) offers benefits at over 2,600 luxury hotels and resorts worldwide to eligible card members such as noon check-in, room upgrades, daily breakfast for two, or spa, food and beverage or general purpose property credits up to $150. Max FHR is a tool that indexes all FHR hotels by their lowest cash rate. You can also filter for the specific FHR benefits, as they differ by property. In the screenshot below, I searched for FHR hotels in Niseko (a popular ski area of Hokkaido, Japan) looking for available benefits and any ‘Special Offers.’ I’m left with the Park Hyatt Niseko Hanazono, which has a nifty complimentary third-night free offer.
Max FHR makes sifting through Fine Hotels + Resorts® properties a breeze
But that’s not all you can do. Why not take advantage of a robust search and mine for lower prices and special offers at some of the leading luxury brands and aspirational properties?
Rogue searching a few Luxury hotel brands in Max FHR to see the best offers
As you can see, MaxMyPoint and Max FHR can make searching for your next hotel redemption or luxury accommodation so much easier.
MaxMyPoint recently revamped it’s workings so that many useful features are now paywalled behind premium plans. Still, at $3.99/month for a Gold Plan, $7.99/month for Platinum, I do think it’s a worthy investment if you travel frequently and are a habitual points-redeemer.
Pour One Out For A Real One – AwardMapper.com
It wouldn’t be right to conclude this piece without raising a glass to one of my all-time favorite award travel tools. AwardMapper displayed map view results of all the points hotels worldwide, organized by category (where applicable), and including the upper and lower ranges for each property’s redemption rate based on the published award charts from 8 leading hotel chains. What I loved most about it was that no searching was needed. While you could filter the results (I could deselect all options except ‘Category 7’, Marriott hotels), it was best used as a hotel discovery tool. By loading the page and moving the map to a part of the world you were interested in, you could browse all your options for all your ‘points stay’ options for a given part of the world.
Award Mapper provided the original map view display of all points hotels – Source: AwardMapper.com
Why all the past tense? Sadly, AwardMapper shuttered a few years back as the creators cited the difficulty of keeping the service. The difficulty stemmed from maintaining an up-to-date record of all the new hotels coming online for each hotel chain, as I don’t believe the site worked on ‘live data.’ As most chains have moved to dynamic award pricing and there are no public-facing APIs to make life easy, tools are built off of scraping search results. Running repeated scripts to scrape for fresh results, particularly at a cadence that promises a high-fidelity of accuracy, can be costly, so I get it. That said, as rooms.aero now defaults to map view results, and MaxMyPoint has map view in beta; AwardMapper’s influence is clear, and its legacy is secured. Shout out to AwardMapper, a true pioneer for the points and miles game.
Ok, Part 3 in the books. In case you missed them, here are Parts 1 and 2. Hopefully, this dive into some of my favorite tools can help you plan your next stellar trip.
