Quick Verdict: Roame Travel is the award search tool I open before any other. It scans 25+ airline loyalty programs in roughly 12 seconds and tells me, in plain numbers, the cheapest way to pay with the points I already have. The free tier is enough to test it. The paid tier (Friends of Roame) earns back its $110/year the first time it saves me from booking a 150,000-mile seat at 85,000 miles instead.

What Roame Travel Actually Is

Roame Travel is, functionally, Google Flights for points and miles. You enter origin, destination, date, and cabin. It runs live searches across 25+ loyalty programs covering 200+ airlines and returns results (with transfer math already done) in about 12 seconds. No logging into Aeroplan, then ANA, then Flying Blue, then Avios in five separate tabs.

Co-founder Tim Qin started Roame after burning multiple weekends hunting first-class award space to Asia. The product reflects that pain: it is built for people who care about specific redemptions on specific dates, not generic "cheap flights."

The thing that separates Roame from a flight-comparison site: it doesn't just show you availability. It looks at your transferable currencies (Chase, Amex, Capital One, Citi, Bilt, Marriott), checks live transfer bonuses, and tells you which currency to move and how many points to send. That math is the whole game.

Features That Earn the Subscription

12-second searches across 25+ programs

Searches return in an average of 12 seconds. That's the headline, and it holds up. Manually checking even five programs across three dates is a 45-minute job. Roame turns that into one query.

Coverage spans the programs that actually matter for redemptions:

  • US carriers: American AAdvantage, Delta SkyMiles, United MileagePlus, Alaska Mileage Plan
  • European partners: Air France-KLM Flying Blue, Lufthansa Miles & More, Iberia Plus, Virgin Atlantic Flying Club
  • Middle East: Emirates Skywards, Qatar Privilege Club, Etihad Guest
  • Asia-Pacific: Singapore KrisFlyer, Cathay Pacific Asia Miles, ANA Mileage Club, Qantas Frequent Flyer
  • Star Alliance partners: Air Canada Aeroplan, Turkish Airlines Miles&Smiles, SAS EuroBonus
  • Oneworld: British Airways Avios, Japan Airlines Mileage Bank

SkyView: Month-At-A-Glance Award Search

SkyView is the feature I use most. Instead of clicking date-by-date, you see an entire calendar painted with availability: premium cabin in green, mixed in yellow, nothing in grey. Patterns jump out instantly. Tuesdays into Lisbon. Saturday departures to Tokyo. The random Wednesday in February that has four Polaris seats wide open.

Free accounts get SkyView Lite with 7-day windows. Paid accounts get 60-day windows, which is what makes the feature actually useful for trip planning.

Smart transfer recommendations

This is where Roame quietly earns its keep. The platform automatically factors in:

  • Live transfer bonuses (Amex to Virgin, Chase to Hyatt, Capital One to Flying Blue)
  • Partner award space across the alliance
  • Where your specific currency lands at the cheapest rate

Concrete example: searching JFK-NRT in ANA First Class, Roame surfaces 85,000 Virgin Atlantic points one-way as the cheapest route. If Amex is running a 30% transfer bonus to Virgin, you only move ~65,000 Membership Rewards instead of 85,000. Roame shows that math by default. The same ANA seat costs 150,000+ miles if you book through United, which is why people who know the trick book through Virgin.

If you carry Chase Ultimate Rewards and the 30% Virgin transfer bonus hits Chase too, the recommendation shifts automatically.

Price alerts for scarce routes

Paid subscribers get five alerts. Use them for routes where availability is genuinely thin: JFK-DOH in Qsuites, LAX-SYD in Qantas First, anything to Auckland in business. Don't burn an alert on JFK-LHR; that space opens constantly.

Roame Pricing: Free vs. Paid

These prices are as of mid-2025. Verify current pricing on Roame.travel before subscribing.

Free

  • Basic one-way award searches
  • SkyView Lite (7-day windows)
  • Standard filters
  • Transfer partner recommendations

Friends of Roame: $9.16/month or $109.99/year

  • 60-day SkyView windows
  • Multi-region searches
  • 5 flight alerts
  • Discover feed for sweet-spot deals
  • Email support

Enterprise: $291.66/month or $3,499.99/year

Built for agencies and high-volume users:

  • Up to 20 team members
  • 180-day SkyView windows
  • 20 alerts
  • Dedicated support

My take: If you book even one international premium-cabin redemption per year, Friends of Roame pays for itself. A single ANA First find at 85k instead of 150k is worth roughly $1,300 in retail-fare equivalent. The $110 annual cost is rounding error against that.

Pros and Cons

What I like

Speed. 12 seconds versus an evening of tab juggling. Compounding savings every time I plan a trip.

Coverage. 25+ programs in a single query catches partner awards I'd otherwise miss, especially the Virgin-on-ANA and Aeroplan-on-Lufthansa kind of routings.

Transfer math done for you. Live bonus factoring means the recommended path is the cheapest path, not the most obvious one.

Clean interface. Filters by program, cabin, alliance, and stops. Easy to scan.

Live data. Results reflect current inventory, not a cached snapshot from this morning.

What annoys me

One-way only. Round trips require two searches. Tolerable but not elegant.

Five alert cap on the paid tier. Enough for serious routes, but you'll wish for more.

No direct booking. You find the seat on Roame, then click through to the airline's site to ticket it. The booking step is sometimes where awards quietly disappear.

Filter gaps. Can't filter by departure time window. Means you sometimes scroll past 6 a.m. departures you'd never take.

Taxes and fees aren't shown upfront. A Lufthansa first-class seat at 87,000 Aeroplan might carry $1,400 in fuel surcharges that don't appear until checkout. Always verify on the airline site before celebrating.

Who Should Use Roame

A clear yes for:

  • Points collectors targeting international premium-cabin redemptions
  • Flexible travelers who can flex dates by a week
  • People with transferable currency balances (Amex, Chase, Capital One, Citi)
  • Anyone who has wasted hours searching airline-by-airline

Skip it if:

  • You only fly domestic economy on the same three routes
  • You book last-minute and need confirmed space inside seven days
  • You pay cash for everything

How Roame Compares

vs. Seats.aero

Full breakdown in our Roame Travel vs. Seats.aero comparison. Short version: Seats.aero is faster for raw availability scanning across partners and has stronger filtering. Roame wins on transfer-bonus math and the SkyView calendar. I use both; they complement each other.

vs. Point.me

Point.me covers similar ground with a more conservative interface. Tighter integration with some issuer portals. Roame is faster and covers more programs.

vs. PointsYeah

PointsYeah is solid, especially for mixed-cabin itineraries. Roame typically returns more programs and better transfer recommendations.

vs. ExpertFlyer

ExpertFlyer is the right tool for seat maps, upgrade space, and fare buckets, not award search. Different category. I keep both subscriptions.

vs. manual searching

Not a contest. 12 seconds versus 4 hours.

Two redemptions Roame actually surfaced

JFK-NRT in ANA First. A reader needed Tokyo for early March. Manual searches on United showed 150,000 miles one-way at best. Roame surfaced ANA First Class via Virgin Atlantic Flying Club at 85,000 points one-way (this is the canonical ANA First sweet spot, and it's invisible if you only check United). Reader moved 85k Amex Membership Rewards to Virgin (no bonus active that week, full transfer ratio), called Virgin to ticket the seat by phone since the website intermittently chokes on ANA partner bookings, and paid roughly $200 in taxes. Net: 65,000 points saved and a confirmed seat in The Room.

LHR business class with three weeks' notice. Another reader needed London short-notice. SkyView showed availability clustered on Wednesdays and Saturdays in Flying Blue, with nothing on Mondays or Fridays for that month. Reader shifted the trip by two days, transferred Amex points to Flying Blue (no bonus active), and booked Air France business JFK-CDG-LHR at 50,000 Flying Blue points plus around $250 in taxes. The day-of-week pattern was the whole trick. Single-date searches would have shown "no availability" and moved on.

Tips for Getting the Most Out of Roame

  1. Search a 14-day window, not a single date. Even with a fixed trip, scan a week on either side. SkyView makes this trivial.
  2. Compare cabins on the same route. Premium economy in Flying Blue sometimes redeems at half the business-class rate and gets you 80% of the experience.
  3. Watch transfer-bonus timing. Roame shows current bonuses, but they expire. If a 30% Amex-to-Virgin bonus is live, transfer the points before booking, not after.
  4. Save alerts for thin routes. JFK-DOH in Qsuites, anything to NZ, Cathay First out of HKG. Don't waste them on domestic flights.
  5. Always verify taxes on the airline site. British Airways Avios can carry $700+ in surcharges from London. Lufthansa First through Aeroplan often runs $1,000+. Roame won't warn you.
  6. Use multi-region searches when you're flexible. "Anywhere in Western Europe in business class from JFK in October" is a legitimate query, and the multi-region feature handles it well.

Getting Started

  1. Create a free account at Roame.travel.
  2. Enter origin, destination, dates, cabin.
  3. Wait 12 seconds for results.
  4. Filter by program, transfer partner, or alliance.
  5. Read the transfer recommendation. This is the part most people skim, and it's where the actual savings live.
  6. Click through to the airline site to ticket.

Tools I Pair With Roame

If your point balances are thin, start with our guides on understanding miles and points, the best premium travel rewards cards, and Capital One transfer partners.

Bottom Line

Roame Travel is the best award-search tool I use, and it isn't close. The 12-second searches, 25+ program coverage, and live transfer-bonus math do real work. They surface redemptions I would have missed and save hours per trip.

The product isn't flawless. One-way-only searches, opaque taxes, and a five-alert ceiling are genuine annoyances. None of them outweigh what the platform does well.

My recommendation: Start free, run a few real searches, see whether the results match the trips you actually want to book. If even one of those queries surfaces a redemption you didn't know existed (which it will), upgrade to Friends of Roame. The $110/year is the cheapest leverage in this hobby.

Try Roame Travel. Then come back and check our guide to getting free travel and how to use retention offers for more points to keep the points pipeline full.

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