Is Roame Worthwhile for Lazy Travelers?

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Tl;dr: Roame is a travel tool that lets you run open-ended searches for award flights, allowing you to find great uses for your points any time you want; you can even subscribe for as little as one month to keep costs down. 

Redeeming points can be tricky. You can always just take the easy route and redeem your points through your bank or with strong partners like Alaska Atmos or American AAdvantage. But what if you want to start diving into bigger and better redemptions, but don’t want to master the award charts and booking process of a dozen different foreign airlines?

That’s where Roame comes in. Roame lets you scan dozens of loyalty programs with flexible dates and powerful filters to find an award flight that works for you. In this Roame review, we’ll look at how it works, what it does best, and whether it’s worth paying $12.99 a month to find award flights the lazy way. 

How Roame works (and why it’s useful)

Roame helps you find available award flights and links you to the frequent-flyer program where you can book the ticket. 

Powerful searches

Standard flight searches are fairly straightforward. You choose your cabin class, number of passengers, departure, destination, and travel date. Paid users can search flights within three days. 

Where things get special, though, is with Skyview. You can expand your search to up to two months, and search not only by city, but also by country or region. If you’re not aiming for a specific destination and just want to go somewhere interesting with as few points as possible, this search mode makes it easy to locate a great deal.

Roame also offers search alerts, a hotel points search (still in Beta), and a “Discover” mode. I couldn’t figure out the search alerts (this is a lazy review; I gave up quickly and if you’re equally lazy you might too). The hotel search gives the cash cost, points needed, the value per point it works out to, and makes a recommendation as to whether it’s better to pay with points or cash. It’s a solid add-on to the main flight search engine. As for Discover, it just seems to recommend expensive domestic first class flights to me, so I don’t have much to say about that feature. 

Filters that matter

What really takes Roame to the next level is the filters. You can input which credit cards you have, so you don’t need to memorize your card’s transfer partners to see only flight options that are actually available to you and your points. You can also choose to limit flight results to certain frequent flyer programs, or certain operating airlines.

Crucially, you can filter results by stops or fees, so you don’t have to worry about a sweet 12,000-point award flight hitting you with 3 connections or $400 in taxes and fees. 

And if you want to get really nerdy, you can filter by aircraft type—nice if you want to fly in a particular type of seat (especially in business or first class). 

Drawbacks

Although those features are awesome, Roame has some significant drawbacks.

The biggest is that there’s no way to try all these features for free. There is a free tier, but it’s limited (no SkyView). If you want to try the premium tier (“Friends of Roame”), there’s no free trial and no money-back guarantee. This makes some sense—otherwise, you could just sign up, find your flight, then cancel. But it’s tough to spend $12.99 (or more) on the service without seeing first-hand how it works. 

The next major issue is that Roame only offers one-way searches. That’s not the end of the world; booking one-ways offers more flexibility and the pricing is often the same either way. But some programs may price round-trips cheaper. More importantly, seeing a bunch of cheap options in one way doesn’t tell you which will also be cheap on the way back. You’ll have to check to make sure there’s a good deal available on the return, too. (Thankfully, Skyview makes this relatively quick.)

The flight data is also not entirely reliable. Skyview search results are cached, not live, so they may not always be available. And there’s always the possibility of problems in Roame’s data. For instance, Roame told me that there was no way for me to use British Airways Avios to fly to London in summer 2026—something that was clearly not true. So you’ll want to keep those limitations in mind.

Finally, Roame will identify the best flights meeting your search criteria, but can’t point you to a better deal. For fun, I tried to use Roame to find some of those Atmos points business class sweet spots you hear about, and kept coming up empty. Do those deals exist? Does Roame have them? Yes, but you’ll have to search around. Roame makes that pretty easy, and eventually I found a bunch of deals, as long as I was willing and able to fly within a week of my search date. Roame can help you figure out how these sweet spots work, but you may still have to spend some time exploring to do so.

Alternatives to Roame

For a similar service to Roame, you can consider Seats.aero. It’s considered the more “advanced” option, which is probably true. I’ve dipped my toe a few times, and while it’s not hard to use, it’s not as intuitive or beginner-friendly as Roame. It is cheaper, though, at just $9.99 per month, and also offers either monthly or annual billing. One of these days I’ll try to figure it out and write a deeper dive, but if you’re interested, you can use my referral link—same price for you, but a free month for me. Maybe enough time to figure out how to set a seat alert. 

Another option is to let the deals come to you. You can sign up for alerts from a service like Thrifty Traveler or Going and get award deals straight to your inbox when deeply discounted award flights come around.

Lazy take 🦥

Roame is a great way to find a fantastic award flight—just not a guarantee of the best possible use of your points. Despite its limitations, Roame is the best option I’ve found if you’re sitting on a pile of credit card points and don’t know what to do with them. It can help you find a great flight deal that works with your schedule and budget, and is also a fun way to quickly learn which programs work best for your home airport and travel preferences. Best of all, there’s no commitment, so you can give it a whirl for a month for $12.99 and maybe even book a flight without having a big expense for the convenience (although the $109.99 annual plan saves 30% if you’re a power user). To give it a try, you can sign up here; enter promo code LPBLACKFRIDAY to support us and get 40% off your first payment.

Roame is great for redeeming points, but what about earning them? Check out our favorite cards and sign up for LazyPoints Weekly for regular updates on the best welcome offers that you can quickly turn into free travel.