Earning points optimally is certainly the first step to gaining amazing travel experiences for pennies on the dollar, but ultimately, earning is only half of the equation.

The other half — and where the real value is unlocked — is redemptions.

Redeeming points well requires:

• Understanding different airline programs
• Knowing roughly what flights should cost
• Efficiently searching for real availability

Without the third piece, the first two don’t matter.

A Simple Rule for Business Class Value

A helpful benchmark:

Business class should generally cost ~10,000 points per hour of flight time.

Examples:

• Toronto → Western Europe (6–7 hours eastbound) → ~60,000–70,000 points one way is reasonable
• 120,000+ points for that same flight → Likely poor value

Knowing this allows you to quickly recognize strong vs weak redemptions.

But how do you find those efficiently?

The Award Search Problem

Let’s say you want to fly to Europe next summer in business class.

You’re flexible:

• On dates
• On cities
• On routing

You’ve been told flexibility unlocks value — and that’s true. But without an efficient tool, flexibility becomes a burden.

You would need to search each airline program individually:

• Air Canada Aeroplan
• Air France/KLM Flying Blue
• British Airways Executive Club
• Aer Lingus AerClub
• Finnair Plus
• And many more

And not just once. You would need to:

• Search one day at a time
• Across multiple months
• Across multiple programs

Your “flexibility” becomes hundreds of manual searches.

Searching like this is very slow and laborious and has turned off many a points-earner in the past.

The Solution: Roame

Roame.travel is an award flight search engine built specifically for points redemptions.

It allows you to search multiple airline programs simultaneously, use various powerful filters (by reward program, by airline, number of stops and more), multiple dates at once, and compare points pricing instantly. Not only this, but with the paid version, you can search by region (e.g. Toronto to Europe), search across 2 months simultaneously, and create alerts that notify you when your desired flight becomes available.

Think of it as Google Flights — but for award travel.

How to Use Roame Efficiently

1. Live Search (Free Version)

The free version of Roame is excellent as it allows you to search across multiple different reward programs (Aeroplan, Avios, Cathay, Flying Blue etc) simultaneously over a 3-day window.

Enter:

• Origin City and Destination City 
• Desired Date (turn on “+/- 1 day” feature to see 3 days at a time)
• Cabin class (Economy/Premium Economy OR Business/First Class)
  Tip: don’t search all 4 classes at once, it won’t work well
• Number of passengers

This alone already eliminates dozens of manual searches. 

The paid version allows you to live search a date +/- 3 days, meaning a 7-day window, or, by using “Skyview”, across a 60-day window (see below).

2. SkyView (Paid Version — The Game Changer)

The paid version of Roame unlocks powerful tools that really increase your efficiency and make redemptions easy. Skyview is the first of these features.

• Skyview:
• A rapid cached search of popular routes across 60 days
  Note: Because this is a cached search, results can be from hours to days old, so you will have to 
• confirm if the flight is still available by doing a Live search or by going to the airline program to search and book the specific flight you found and want. On non-competitive routes like North America to Europe, flights you see in Skyview are usually still available and bookable.
• View broad availability patterns instantly
• Search across entire regions, not just individual cities

Instead of searching individual city pairs, you can search entire regions like Toronto → Europe or North America → Asia.

Instead of checking every date manually, you scan two months (60 days) at once and immediately identify where the value lies.

For flexible travellers, this is transformative.

3. Alerts — Let Availability Come to You (Paid Version)

One of the best features of Roame is the ability to set alerts. Let’s say you want to go from

Vancouver to Japan one year from now. You know this is a competitive route so you expand your search to North America to Japan, knowing this will capture other departure cities that have more availability, like Seattle. You set the filters you need, such as number of seats = 2, cabin class = business, dates = April 1-May 30 of next year and then select, “create alert”. Roame will then search for availability for you and when a flight that meats your criteria becomes available, you are notified by text, email, or with the Roame app’s notification.

This is especially powerful for business class, high season travel, and high-demand routes.

4. Filters — The Advanced Optimization Layer (Free Version)

Premium Mix Filter (Critical for Long-Haul Value)

Many award flights involve connections. If you are hoping to fly in business class, its less important if your short segment, say Halifax to JFK, is in business and more important that the long segment across the Atlantic is. 

Set the Premium Mix to 65% to ensure the majority of the flight time is in premium cabin while allowing short legs in economy.

Without adjusting this filter, excellent itineraries may be excluded.

Filter by Number of Stops

• Nonstop
• One stop
• Two stops
• Three stops

Filter by Maximum Points

Set a maximum points threshold to eliminate poor-value dynamic pricing outliers. For example, if you know that Eastern Canada to Europe in Business costs 60-70,000 points, you can set your maximum point filter to 70,000 to ensure you aren’t having to sift through flights that cost 100 or 200 or even 300,000 points.

Airline Filter

Remove airlines you don’t want to fly or select up to five airlines you prefer.

Airport Filter

Remove specific airports (e.g., Heathrow if you don’t want to travel through London as you know the taxes/fees will be very high on a route that includes London) or select up to five preferred airports.

Critical Tip for Canadians

Roame is US-based and as such, you should avoid filtering by “Card”. If you have a powerful points earning Canadian card like the American Express Cobalt card or the Amex Business Platinum card you may be tempted to filter by Card and simply select Amex. But this filter is for AMEX US Cards which have different transfer partners compared to AMEX Canada cards. 

Instead, filter by “Program”. These are the programs that we as Canadians can have access to:

Program Filters for Canadian Amex Membership Rewards 

• Air Canada Aeroplan
• Flying Blue
• British Airways Executive Club
• Aer Lingus AerClub
• Cathay Pacific Asia Miles
• Delta SkyMiles
• Etihad Guest
• Finnair Plus
• Iberia Plus
• Qatar Airways Privilege Club

Program Filters for RBC Avion Points

• American Airlines AAdvantage
• British Airways Executive Club
• Cathay Pacific Asia Miles
• Finnair Plus
• Iberia Plus
• Qatar Airways Privilege Club
• Aer Lingus AerClub

Advanced Tips 

Finding Award Flights

Skyview, which searches across a 2 month time period, is a cached search. Meaning Roame’s servers are constantly searching for award flights and storing them to then present to you rapidly. However Roame cannot do this for absolutely every flight, across every program, across every date as Roame’s processing power would need to be astronomical. As a compromise for speed, Roame’s servers only search for common routes and caches those. If your desired route is not a very popular one, lets say Halifax to Cancun, and you try a Skyview search and find no award flights, they may exist, but Roame isn’t automatically searching this route.

The solution(s):

First, confirm that your desired flight is actually possible using Flight Connections (the free version is good enough for most travelers though if you sign up for the paid version, feel free to use my link). If you are searching for direct flights from Toronto to Sydney, Australia you won’t ever find a result because this flight doesn’t exist.  Once you’ve confirmed the flight is does in fact exist, try the two steps below.

Second, try a live search across 7 days and see if you get lucky and find the flight you want (results take a little longer than Skyview searching as it actively pulls award flights from any and all programs). But if nothing still turns up…

Third, set an alert for your desired route/redemption. This then triggers Roame to start looking for this particular flight in the background and you might find that in a day or two, you start getting notified of availability! 

Indirect Searching

No search tool is perfect and as such, some award flights can be missing from the results of your search even though they exist. In these situations, its good to have some extra workarounds to find these award flights. 

Lets say you want to go from Halifax to Cancun. You’ve checked Flight Connections and it shows that WestJet flies this route. You’ve been reading other blog posts on Points Potential and have learned that Flying Blue miles can be an excellent way to book Westjet flights. You search on Roame for Halifax to Cancun and use the program filter to select only points programs we have access to as Canadian Amex holders (including Flying Blue of course). Nothing turns up. Perhaps nothing truly is available, but maybe we have to try a little harder as we know this itinerary is not super competitive and Westjet has lots of economy seats available for award bookings. Now can be the time to try this advanced technique of indirect searching. 

To search indirectly, in the Program filter, turn on all programs (even ones we Canadians have no access to) and search again, filtering for only WestJet flights using the Airline filter. Now you DO see a flight on Roame! Its Halifax to Cancun on Westjet but the points program is “Smiles” which belongs to Turkish Airlines or “Frequent Flyer” which is Qantas’ program. So the flight and some award space exists but for the “wrong” program. Now you head over to Air France’s website (or KLM) and search YHZ to CUN for that specific day and voila! You see that flight is available and bookable with Flying Blue miles. 

Now this doesn’t work every single time as some flights truly are only bookable with programs we Canadians don’t have access to. But sometimes it does work when the award availability is shared across all partner programs and its nice to have a way to unlock these seemingly hidden award flights. 

This method can be especially useful for One World airlines (like JAL as one example) as Roame does not have perfect coverage of these. Using indirect searching can help find these gems.

Why Roame Is So Powerful

• Massive Time Savings — One search replaces hundreds
• Regional Discovery — Search entire continents at once
• Intelligent Cabin Filtering — Premium Mix prioritizes long-haul comfort
• Multi-Program Comparison — Instantly compare pricing
• Wide Date Scanning — SkyView searches across 60-day windows
• Automated Alerts — Checks in the backround for you

Bottom Line

Earning points is strategy. Redeeming points is leverage.

Without an efficient search tool, flexibility and redemptions become overwhelming.

With Roame — especially when combining SkyView, regional search, intelligent filtering, and alerts — flexibility becomes your advantage.

It turns days of searching into minutes of intelligent decision-making. And that’s how you extract exceptional value from your points.

Next Steps

I encourage everyone who is into points and miles to explore the free version of Roame using Live search across a 3 day window.

The paid version is what really unlocks the ability to find great redemptions efficiently and it costs about $9 USD per month when you get an annual subscription to Friends of Roame. 

From personal experience, it is easy to save upwards of $4,000 by redeeming points for a single flight, so the upfront cost of Roame is relatively trivial in this context. If you choose the paid subscription, use this link and the promo code PP10 to save 10% off the first year. Update: Summer 2026 Promo Code: PP25 for 25% off.

Referrals

If you found this article helpful, please consider using one of my referral links to support the work I do. It costs you nothing extra and by using a referral you are often able to get elevated sign-up bonuses, access to points promotions, or a discount. Most importantly, this helps convince my wife that the hours I spend on this hobby are worth it! 

For Amex credit cards earning Membership Rewards, the most powerful and flexible travel points in Canada, like the Cobalt, Gold, Business Gold, Platinum, and Business Platinum please reach out to learn about the best sign up bonus options. 

If you shop a lot (>$550 month) at Costco and are interested in flying to Europe, the Brim Flying Blue Mastercard is a solid choice and can be applied for using this link.

After your flight is sorted out, you’ll need a hotel room. For Amex credit cards that earn Marriott Bonvoy points such as the Marriott Bonvoy Amex and Marriott Bonvoy Business Amex, please reach out to learn about the best sign up bonus options.

If you are going to book a hotel with cash, check Rove first. Think of Rove like Expedia but instead of earning Expedia points, you earn Rove Miles which are a transferrable points type that has 14 different airline/hotel transfer partners. Rove is a US site that allows you to book hotels (in USD) and gives you up to 10-20x (sometimes even more!) Rove Miles per dollar spent. If the hotel price is similar to what you would have booked elsewhere, use Rove and collect powerful transferrable points.

To supercharge your points earning, use Chexy via this link to pay for things like rent, taxes, professional fees and other expenses that normally cannot go on a credit card.

Once you have accumulated points, you will need to search for flight redemptions efficiently. Roame is the best tool to quickly search multiple programs, multiple destinations, across many dates. Please use the following link and use code PP10 for 10% off the Friends of Roame subscription. Update: Summer 2026 Promo Code: PP25 for 25% off.

If you are new to points and rewards and want to learn more about optimization and have a personalized approach, please reach out to me for a free one-on-one session.