How award searches work today: The PointsYeah origin story

Our goal is to create the simplest and best award search site to make award planning easier for everyone. However, achieving this is not easy, we have devoted countless hours to ensuring accuracy, reliability, and speed simultaneously. As a real-time search site, we don’t have much room for errors as we do understand the trust from all of you. With that trust, we built our product without shortcuts, ensuring that every live search is reflective of what you will see on direct sites. We DON’T falsify results nor do we use partner A results for partner B without actually searching B.

I am sure all of us know, when we are searching for revenue tickets, there are times you see “sorry, your fare no longer available, XXX is our new price or please select different flights.”

The reality for award search is far more complicated than revenue ticket, and we have decided to share some stories about how the award travel search system works in 2025.

Every airline has designed its system differently from another, making a one-size-fits-all solution impossible. Some airlines have very sophisticated systems using the newest technology, while others are legacy systems. To make matters more complicated, sometimes these airlines with technology miles apart are partners who share inventory.

Partners no longer share the same inventory space as they did five years ago due to changes in financial models and system. Delta was the first mover, with Virgin Flying Club, Delta and Air France and KLM Flying Blue also implementing changes. As travel advances, these practices are likely to be implemented by other airlines/alliances over time.

Even if they share inventory spaces on some routes/some alliances(old system vs newer one), the differences in each airline’s system setup may cause discrepancies. For example, Iberia has married segment restrictions only on their and British Airways flights, not on some partners. British Airways, on the other hand, has them on almost all partners. So, some SEGMENTS redeemable on Iberia Avios may not be visible on British Airways Avios because Iberia Avios allows multi-segment mixed matches.

Airlines’ front ends are also built differently. While we get results from the backend, airline frontends may miss airport codes. We have 9000+ airport codes, but many airlines don’t have that many as they were not designed for award search. For example, Iberia Avios doesn’t have IST code, and used BUE instead of EZE or AEP for Buenos Aires or Qantas Frequent Flyer, Etihad Guest don’t have some airports too. As we built our airport code repository, our team even missed many airports that were discovered by our amazing users.

How you search on airline sites will yield different results. For instance, Lifemiles and Turkish Airlines, when searching for their partners, lifemiles.com may not show all Star Alliance results if you use all partners, for lifemiles.com select Star alliance  BEFORE  Search or Carrier BEFORE search on top of departure airports. Turkish Airlines has two places to search for Star Alliance, each with different results. The accurate one is under my account-miles transactions-star alliance awards. Not the standard alliance search from front.

• Frontend blocking: Some airlines block redemption from the frontend for specific routes or carriers for various reasons.
• Sync delay:  Internal systems have sync delays between partners or even within the same company but different sites. For example, the Air France site may have a delay compared to the KLM site, and the same goes for their apps
• Phantom inventory:  This issue has persisted for over 20 years between partners.
• Request Timeout :  There are two types of timeouts—either the request is timed out by the receiver, or we timeout the request. Regardless of the type, you just need to search one more time.

With over 50 systems interacting simultaneously, we cannot guarantee 100% accuracy. Nevertheless, we are doing our best to achieve as close to 100% accuracy as possible.

We want to thank you again for your understanding and we and the airlines are continuing to improve to make your points travel planning effortless.

-PointsYeah team