Is Pointhound Premium Worth It?
Tl;dr: Pointhound’s free emails are a good way to see some solid redemption options, but the premium features didn’t justify the hefty fee for me.
The social media algorithms know I can’t resist points content, and recently an ad for Pointhound caught my eye by claiming it could deliver “business class seats for the price of coach.” And I thought, “hey, maybe one day that’ll be true,” so I signed up for a premium subscription—or at least the 7-day trial they offer before requiring a commitment to their $99 $79 premium plan.
The Pointhound Experience 🐾
Rather than alerting you to one specific flight deal, Pointhound typically sends email blasts filled with a variety of award options. The ones I saw were generally solid, but not spectacular. Nothing arrived in my inbox that seriously tempted me or that I hadn’t seen elsewhere. Business-class deals for fewer points than I’m using in coach? Not even close.
The alerts were also frustrating because I couldn’t tell at a glance which points were required. A deal might be exciting with United miles, but much less useful with AA miles—or vice versa. Or the price might be based on a transfer bonus from a card you don’t have. You can filter out certain points currencies, which helps. But you still need to remember to only activate alerts for points you actually have enough of to redeem. And even then, it can take 3–4 clicks to see what the actual deal is.
A Pointhound deal
Once my premium trial expired though, the deals kept coming and, to be honest, I could barely tell the difference. The emails are actually fairly useful to get a lay of the points land, for both economy and premium redemptions. For example, I hadn’t appreciated just how much of a sweet spot San Francisco to Seoul seems to be for United miles, or how much sub-60k (one-way) business class availability there is with American miles.
Lazy Take 🦥
For paid tools, I prefer Thrifty Traveler’s curated, information-dense deal alerts or Roame’s ability to easily conduct broad points searches for the best deals while filtering out options that don’t work for me. Pointhound sits awkwardly in the middle, and felt a bit like someone ran some broad award searches and sent over the better-looking results. Useful, but not something I was eager to pay for. Maybe I would have seen better deals with more time, but with only a short trial and no satisfaction guarantee after billing, I wasn’t going to stick around to find out.
But I will highly recommend signing up for the free emails, especially if you are new to points transfers. It’s valuable information and you might even snag a good deal.