Awayz Award Search Tool is now live for Canada

While we’ve seen the development of airline award search tools like Seatspy, Point.me, AwardLogic, Seats.aero in recent years – consolidated hotel award tools have been conspicuously missing from the party.

Under the Radar: An intriguing way to fly to Hawaii
Under the Radar: Awayz – the hotel award tool we’ve been waiting for.

The good news is we’re finally seeing some hotel search tools popping up across the board lately. Having trialled a couple of these tools, I’ve generally found them helpful – and while they continue to work well for me, they each have their limitations with the interface, often leaving a lot to be desired. Is it too much for some keen mind to put my wish list into a snappy, well-thought-out and all-encompassing hotel award search tool? Introducing Awayz – the tool that’s probably made the biggest splash in this void so far.

What is Awayz Award Search Tool

‘Awayz by Odynn,’ as it’s sometimes referenced, is the hotel award search tool by a company called Odynn – the same folks behind CardArb – a tool for recommending credit cards. The grand vision, it seems, is that in time, Odynn will have a couple of different travel and credit card points-related tools under other names that would then be integrated to essentially become a one-stop shop for your entire trip planning process… hotel booking, flights recommendations, credit card recommendations, points.com integration etc. While the end state seems a long way off, they have made a decent start with the launch of Awayz.

For those familiar with point.me – Awayz is essentially an equivalent tool but for hotel searches – which is to say that it has integration built into its searches for award space and cash prices across a few major hotel programs while providing instructions (if applicable) on how to leverage credit card transferable currencies to book via the various programs.

The site launched in the US market a few months ago and now has a dedicated Canadian website. While the features are similar across the two platforms, some custom features are tailored for each respective market (pricing in USD/CAD, Canadian wallet features, Canadian banks, etc). Canadian users who previously subscribed to an Awayz membership on its US site will, unfortunately, be unable to toggle between the two sites as the two platforms are running as separate products.

In terms of loyalty and bank programs, Awayz currently supports the following :

• The currently supported hotel programs are Marriott Bonvoy, World of Hyatt, IHG Rewards, Hilton Honors, Accor, Wyndham, and Choice Privileges.
• Canadian banking partners include RBC Avion, American Express Canada and HSBC.
• Depending on whether you sign up on Awayz’s US or Canadian website,  US banking partners available on the Canadian site will include Chase and Capital One, while the team is actively working on incorporating US Amex. On the US site, banking partners include Chase, Amex US, Capital One, Bilt, & Citi.

One important point to note is that data shown on searches will not precisely be ‘live’ as of the moment you search. The tool is running searches at various times and caching and storing the results on its servers – so it is possible that the space is no longer available by the time you see award availability. This probably impacts a small proportion of users – but it’s worthwhile pointing out.

Awayz Award Search – Subscription Features & Pricing

The tool has three distinct membership tiers as follows:

• Awayz: Free basic membership upon signing up
• Trip Pass: CAD 5.99
• Premium Membership: CAD 129.99/yr or CAD 14.99/month. Save CAD 15 by registering for CAD 114.99 for the annual membership through PMB’s affiliate link.

Awayz: This is the free basic membership level, requiring only that you register for an account. This free level allows for five free searches and award alerts.

Trip Pass: A one-off pass for 72 hours, allowing for 50 searches and five award alerts that benefit from the full suite of features available at the Premium membership. This would be ideal for users who do the occasional trip planning and need a dedicated resource for a short period.

Premium Membership: The top tier membership level allows for up to 250 searches a month alongside ten award alerts. Premium members can also opt-in to receive a weekly newsletter (see more details below). This tier caters to those who are constantly planning trips and monitoring hotel award space.

Awayz Award Search – The Basics

First, you must create a free account on the site. Once done, you have automatically enrolled as an introductory level “Awayz” tier member and are set to start using the tool and your five free searches and award alerts. To begin the search, you need to select it in the top menu bar, and it’ll take you to the main search page, where the options are pretty self-explanatory.

From the search page, you can select the city or hotel you want to search for specific dates and filter in/out any desired hotel chains. After running the search, Awayz displays the results neatly in a list and map format. It shows the cash rate, points rate, and a dynamic button that toggles through the equivalent points with any transferable currency options for all the listed properties.

One innovative feature in the search results is that when a cash and points rate is available, the application tells you which one it considers the “Best Value.” This appears to be based on their internal valuations of what each of the points currencies are worth – which are continuously tweaked based on user redemptions patterns over time – though it’s not a completely mechanical process and will rely on their views as well as redemptions patterns of their ‘power’ users. It’s an excellent feature for the segment of the audience who might not have a lot of experience making high-value award redemptions.

Selecting a property from the list takes you to another page where additional breakdowns of the booking options are displayed, along with direct links to booking through the website. One new feature introduced since the first time we reviewed this site is the ability to create award alerts. Awayz has made creating an alert incredibly simple by including a button in the top right corner to click once you view the property details (Availability Alerts need to be switched on from your preferences option first). Doing so will automatically create an award alert for your profile using the exact dates as the search you performed.

From the above screen, you can click through to see the property’s award calendar, which Awayz will display up to a year’s worth of award calendar information.

Other features also include the following:

• Search results can factor in 4th/5th nights free using IHG/Bonvoy/Hilton points into the total cost displayed via a little flag in the display results.
• Support for searching by Bonvoy, Hyatt, IHG and Hilton Free Night Awards (yes.. all iterations of Bonvoy certificates – this alone is a technological marvel in and of itself).
• Search results will incorporate any transfer bonuses offered by bank partners. For example, at the time of writing, there is a transfer bonus for points transferred from Amex to Bonvoy. The search results will display this and factor it into the number of points needed to transfer over from Amex to complete a booking. As a general piece of advice, I would always double-check other sources, too, as in the past, I have seen Awayz miss out on displaying certain transfer bonus offers.
• Premium memberships include a weekly newsletter highlighting the top deals from that week – and will usually contain redemptions providing outsized value (>2.5x the internal base value of the points currency being referenced).
• Some additional personalization features are available – which may or may not be helpful depending on your user type. The application allows a virtual wallet to be set up (no personal details are required to save for card type and points balances). The information entered factors into tailored recommendations of what to do based on existing points balances for a particular hotel search. In the below example, I input some points balance into my virtual wallet for Amex, Bonvoy and Chase (this was run on the US site). I then searched for a 5-night stay in Abu Dhabi and selected the Courtyard World Trade Center. Once selected, the below results were displayed.

The screenshot tells us at the top that this stay costs USD 630 or 86,000 Bonvoy points. It then informs the user that the “Best Value” is the cash rate for these nights. It continues to display the points rate as well. As I had my virtual wallet set up, it tailors a recommendation telling me that I don’t have enough Bonvoy points for the whole booking (I input 46,000 points in my wallet for this example) and that I can convert 15,000 Amex MR along with 25,000 UR to make this booking.

At the bottom, using the information in the virtual wallet, the application informs me that I could redeem Chase Sapphire Reserve points to cash at the 1.25 cents travel redemption route.

Awayz has delivered some promised improvements (i.e., award search and more global coverage). However, there are still a couple of features that are expected to be rolled out in future, with the main ones in my mind being;

• (i) Hyatt suite availability
• (ii) dynamic map displaying cost as you move around (at least that is my understanding of how it would work)

Awayz Award Search – What I Like So Far

• I’m a big fan of the interface. It’s clean, intuitive and easy to use.
• This is the only hotel tool I’ve used that displays results for the current hotel programs together. I like scanning a city for hotel options across the programs while viewing cash prices – though this would be less useful should I know precisely where I want to stay.
• The ability to filter for many Bonvoy certificate types is also a nice feature.
• Something that will be useful to newer/occasional users is their “Best Value” feature.
• The successful rollout of Choice (and soon Wyndham) properties gives Awayz a leg up in this space.

How has Awayz Award Search delivered on its promises?

Five months ago, when I first wrote about Awayz, I had tempered my excitement about the tool until they could deliver on some noted enhancements that were in the works. Since then, the website has done a great job in steadily rolling out newer features as promised. A couple of the significant improvements include:

• Introduction of award alerts. Basic users get five alerts, while Trip Pass/ Premium members get 10. This is one of the two single most significant improvements in my mind.
• Hotel coverage globally has significantly improved as they included more cities and rolled out support for Accor and Choice properties. The company now claims they have had full coverage since June and will support over 50,000 properties globally once Wyndham properties are added.
• Support for the Canadian market will allow users to be alerted to transfer promos from Canadian Financial institutions such as RBC or HSBC rewards programs.

Additionally, the company has confirmed that it continues to work on the following enhancements:

• Hyatt suites availability. This is a significant weakness of this application, especially considering that competing tools introduced this feature a few months ago.
• Search criteria are currently locked at 1 room/two guests. This is another aspect they are aware of, and they are looking to roll out the ability to filter by the number of guests.
• Awayz is working on an all-in-one ‘super app’ on the 2024 roadmap.
• I continue to run into some on-and-off bugs.. from issues with the calendar loading to being unable to input a destination. Additionally, I continue to have issues running the website from Chrome, though this issue seems specific to me. I’d had a call with a few people from their support team where they tried to troubleshoot the issue, though I never did hear back from them as promised. For now, I just run it on my Edge browser.
• Generally, my few experiences communicating with the company have ranged from being ignored on one series of communications to being very quick to troubleshoot and respond to the issue I faced. I hope the latter reflects the support users can expect – but the jury is still out on that for me for now.

Final Word: Happy to see new innovative tools being developed.

I’ll preface what I say: I am a big fan of award search tools. Regardless of how they pan out long-term, I rarely don’t find some element that does not enhance my day-to-day in this hobby. I probably have more subscriptions than most people, but I’m always happy to give these sorts of tools a trial.

This brings up a more significant point about paying for travel tools. In this era of travel influencers constantly peddling masterclasses, conferences, and memberships to closed communities – often citing how these are the keys to unlocking greater rewards in this hobby – I instead advocate for paid travel tools – something I feel often gets overlooked. Airline award search tools to hotel search tools to award alert services… these services provide so much tangible value for the right person, not to mention an incredible amount of convenience and time savings – which I think can only help to enhance your award-booking savvy.

With that said – I’ve been impressed with Awayz – impressed enough to try their annual premium membership for the year. Unfortunately – it’s still not quite the one-stop, all-encompassing booking tool I’ve been yearning for. Still, it made significant progress in the past six months, and I remain optimistic. An important consideration for me when considering renewing past the first year will be to see how the rollout of some of the upcoming enhancements goes (app, Hyatt suite award support). Minor quibbles aside, though, for those who aren’t loyal to a particular chain and are open to various cash and award bookings – Awayz could be an excellent fit for your rewards tool kit.