Say goodbye to time-consuming searches: Here’s how Awayz makes it easier to redeem hotel points
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One of the biggest time sucks of booking travel with points and miles is finding hotel award availability. Some common pain points include:
Hotel websites that don’t offer a calendar view of award availability, forcing you to search day by day for eligible dates.
Lack of availability for your desired travel dates, requiring you to continually monitor the hotel website for new award inventory.
Awayz, an award-travel tool, does an excellent job at solving issues like these. The site isn’t without its own issues, but at the moment, it’s perhaps the most powerful tool to help you find the perfect award stay for your next vacation.
Note that Awayz also has a flight search tool that’s currently in beta. Because of this, the majority of this article will be about the hotel search platform, but we’ll give you a look at finding flights with Awayz at the end of the article so you know what to expect.
Here’s what you need to know about Awayz before you buy a subscription.
Awayz
Awayz makes it easy to redeem your hotel points by showing pricing across most major hotel loyalty programs. Plus, it has an award-flight search function — currently in beta — that shows you the best ways to redeem airline miles for flights.
How to use Awayz to redeem hotel points
At its core, Awayz is a search engine dedicated to finding award availability. It can make your trip planning exponentially easier by giving you a digestible 12-month snapshot of just about any hotel that participates in a major hotel loyalty program.
Awayz works with the following loyalty programs:
Accor Live Limitless
Choice Privileges
Wyndham Rewards
There are over 40,000 properties worldwide between the above hotel chains. In other words, Awayz can help you find a points-eligible hotel just about anywhere your travels take you. With a quick search, you can view live cash and award pricing, and you can filter your results in several helpful ways, such as by hotel points currencies and free-night certificates.
In the Wallet & Awards section at the top of the page, you can disclose to Awayz the amount of points you’ve got in each loyalty program. You can enter transferable points like American Express Membership Rewards points, flat-rate rewards like US Bank Altitude Reserve points and hotel loyalty program currencies like World of Hyatt.
Adding this information to your profile will give you the ability to filter your search results to return only the hotels that can be booked with the points you collect. For example, if you input Chase Ultimate Rewards points, the Use My Awards feature will let you view only hotels with loyalty programs that partner with Chase Ultimate Rewards.
You can also input the travel credit cards you currently hold to give Awayz a better idea as to which perks you may have that can result in free nights.
To search for a stay, you can enter a hotel name, a landmark or a city into the search bar. Below is a look at what appears when searching Kaanapali, a popular destination in Hawaii. Awayz displays all hotels that are bookable with either points or cash. If award nights are available, it will give you an accurate price for that specific date.
By clicking on a hotel currently showing “no award inventory,” you can set up an Availability Alert with one click. This will let you know when the site detects award availability for your specific dates, giving you a prompt to book before someone else books those dates.
You can also click the Award Availability button on any hotel to see a live look at award prices — up to 12 months in advance. This makes it easy to locate and string together the cheapest award stay.
After you select your dates, Awayz will tell you if you can afford your proposed stay with the amount of rewards you’ve got. You can even see which (if any) transferable points convert into that specific hotel rewards currency in the Transfer Partners box at the bottom right of the page. Clicking these icons will show you how many points you’ll need to transfer for a free night.
You’ll also notice that the site takes into account any free-night perks you’ll receive from eligible hotel programs. For example, Marriott will give you the fifth night free when you book five consecutive reward nights. In the above example, the Ritz-Carlton Maui, Kapalua costs 88,000 points per night, but the total for the above five-night stay is only 352,000 points because you’ll get the fifth night free.
When you’ve found the stay you want to reserve, you can click the Book Now button to go directly to the hotel website with the specific dates you’ve entered. This makes for an easy booking process.
How much does Awayz cost?
There are three Awayz membership tiers: Free, “Trip Pass” and Premium.
The free version of Awayz functions largely the same as any other membership level, but with one enormous caveat: You’ll get just five free searches. That’s likely not going to be enough to nail down a vacation.
The next cheapest option is an Awayz Trip Pass, which costs $4.99. This will give you 72 hours of access with 50 searches. Good for researching a single trip but not much more.
The best value for the traveler who is always planning trips is Awayz Premium, which costs either $11.99 per month or $99.99 per year. You’ll receive 250 searches per month, as well as a deals newsletter that helps you stay on top of extra-valuable booking opportunities.
What we like about Awayz
Hotel alerts
Hotel alerts are a critical time-saving feature among award-travel booking sites. You can ask Awayz to monitor specific hotels for award availability during specific dates so you don’t have to check multiple times per day. Awayz will notify you if inventory appears, and you can lock in your vacation before it’s gobbled up by someone else.
View an availability calendar for all hotels
Not all hotel websites give you the ability to see a monthly calendar of award availability. Hyatt famously will require you to manually search for specific dates. You’ll have to effectively guess which days are bookable with points.
Awayz allows you to easily view 12 months of availability with Hyatt and other major hotel chains to quickly locate eligible nights.
Stay signed in
Points and miles collectors use several valuable award-travel booking sites regularly. One thing that most of these services have in common is the refusal to keep you logged in for an extended period. This can be annoying when you’re doing lots of research for your vacation with dozens of tabs open; a site may be stagnant for an hour or two while you fall into a tangential award-booking rabbit hole, requiring you to log back in.
Awayz will keep you logged in for days without having to sign in again. This is a minor detail, but it’s an excellent feature.
What we don’t like about Awayz
You might miss some award availability
After countless searches, the site seems to reflect true availability. However, it appears that Awayz only replicates search results for a single day. That matters for one simple reason: The award availability of some hotel booking sites changes based on the length of your stay.
As an example, here’s what you’ll see when searching for the Grand Wailea, A Waldorf Astoria Resort, for February. This calendar is identical to Hilton’s calendar when searching for a single day.
However, If you were searching for a longer stay, you would find more availability. As you can see, a five-night stay beginning on Feb. 3 would cost 110,000 points per night (with one night free). You wouldn’t know this by looking at the Awayz calendar, which indicates that Feb. 3 alone costs 728,000 points.
You may not see all hotels
If you’re scouting points-eligible hotels for an area in which you plan to vacation, it’s possible that you won’t see all properties. Awayz will only display a hotel if it can be booked, be it with cash or with points. If a hotel has no availability in cash or points for the arbitrary date you’re searching, you won’t know the hotel exists.
Using Awayz to find award flights
As mentioned, Awayz has a flight search tool that’s currently in beta. You can use this to search for award flights on a limited number of airlines, with more to come. Right now, the service supports these airline loyalty programs:
Virgin Atlantic Flying Club
Using Awayz to search for flights is simple. Just navigate to the flights page and enter your origin, destination, date of travel and class of service. Then click the search button to see available flights.
Search results can take a minute to load. Then you can filter by airline, time and number of stops. You can also choose to sort by price, duration and arrival times.
Clicking “View Details” under a flight will show information like layover times. Once you find a flight you’d like to book, head to the airline’s website and search for it.
In our testing, search results are accurate and are relatively quick to load. That said, it doesn’t support as many airline loyalty programs as competitor Point.me, and the interface is clunky when viewing flight details. Because of this, we don’t recommend subscribing to Awayz for flight searches alone.
Bottom line
Awayz is one of the most advanced hotel-award booking tools out there. It has a clean user interface with plenty of helpful search filters to aid you in quickly finding a hotel that you can reserve with the specific points you collect. Still, its search bar is a bit persnickety, and there are situations where the award inventory it displays is different from the official hotel website.
Regardless, the tool is a good starting point for your vacation planning. But it may still be a good idea to check directly with a hotel chain if you’re not finding what you want.
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