I recently reviewed the option to earn airline reward miles with hotel bookings and now it’s time for an in-depth review of PointsHound, one of the portals allowing you to do that! Do the miles earned really make it a better deal than booking through the hotel website with their “best rate guarantee” or the big hotel booking portals? Find out below!
If you want to earn airline reward miles with your hotel bookings, you need to make sure your preferred airline is part of the program: PointsHound is currently partnering with 21 airlines around the world. That is the shortest list of the three portals and includes American Airlines in the US, Air France/KLM and Turkish Airlines in Europe, Etihad in the Middle East and Cathay Pacific in Asia. While that covers a few of the big players, Delta and United in the US, Lufthansa and British Airways in Europe, Emirates and Qatar in the Middle East and Singapore Airlines and Qantas in Asia-Pacific are missing from the list!
PointsHound is the last portal offering airline miles for hotel bookings I’m reviewing. Part of the reason is that they rarely offer promotions for new customers. The last bonus worth mentioning was almost a year ago.
PointsHound also offers fewer points for your stay than Kaligo or Rocketmiles. So, if you are in urgent need of airline miles to top of your account, PointsHound is not going to get you as many miles as the other programs!
Signing up for PointsHound is easy, you only need basic personal information and your airline award program information. And booking a hotel is just as easy – you only need the destination, dates, number of travelers and your reward program and your search is on the way!
To determine if it is worth using PointsHound, I did sample searches in three cities (London, San Francisco, Bangkok) at different days (different months, weekend vs weekday) and for different room requirements (single vs double) and compared the prices for 3 hotels per city across the different portals as well as the hotel’s own website.
Across all my searches PointsHound delivered competitive pricing (when taking miles into account), only beaten by hotels.com overall! While you don’t earn a whole lot of points with PointsHound, you also don’t run the risk of being drastically overcharged (like at Rocketmiles!).
Conclusion: PointsHound doesn’t tease with great sign-up bonuses or promotions and instead offers decent hotel prices, earning airline miles at a slow, but steady pace. If you want the best deal, you are better off with hotels.com. If you can find your airline program on the short list of partners and really want to earn miles, without having to double check every single booking to avoid being overcharged, PointsHound can be an alternative for your hotel bookings!
If you want to sign up for their program, you can go through my referral link, which earns you (and me) 500 points each – the only kind of promotional points available right now! Click here to register!
Check out my reviews of Rocketmiles and Kaligo and stay tuned for a comparison down the road!