There is a strange kind of dead money sitting in most American wallets. It is measured not in dollars but in points and miles - the loyalty currency that piles up from credit card spending and never quite gets spent well. Each year, roughly $100 billion of it goes unredeemed. Not because people don't want the trips, but because turning points into the right flight, on the right date, in the right cabin, has always been genuinely, aggravatingly hard. point.me is a company built entirely on that difficulty.
Based in New York and founded by Adam Morvitz, point.me is a real-time search engine for award flights - the redemptions where you pay with miles instead of cash. You type in where you want to go and when. Its algorithm scans more than 150 airlines across over 30 loyalty programs, finds the seats that are actually bookable with points, and then does the part most tools skip: it tells you, step by step, which points to transfer where and how to complete the booking. What used to take a hobbyist an evening of forum-crawling, or a paid concierge a few phone calls, becomes something close to a Google search.
01The problem it solves
Award travel has always run on a two-tier system. On one side are the obsessives who fly first class to Tokyo for the equivalent of a few hundred dollars, because they know that a card portal valuing points at one cent each is quietly overcharging them. On the other side is nearly everyone else, who lets that portal make the decision and never sees the difference. point.me's pitch is that the gap between those two tiers is not talent - it is information. The good redemptions exist; they are simply buried under airline-program complexity that most people never crack.
The company frames the payoff bluntly: booked well, the same points can be worth roughly six to twelve times what a credit card travel portal will give you, and on some premium routes a traveler spends up to 90% fewer points than the cash-equivalent fare would suggest. The catch has always been finding those seats. Airlines release award space unpredictably, price it in currencies that don't convert cleanly, and give you no map. point.me is the map.
Illustrative, based on point.me's stated 6-12x range versus card-portal value.
02From a blog to a concierge to an algorithm
Morvitz did not arrive at software first. He started as a writer, launching the blog "Point Me to the Plane" back in 2011, then turned the expertise into a hands-on concierge business called Juicy Miles, where human agents booked award trips for paying clients. At its peak the operation ran on roughly 60 agents doing the searching by hand. It worked, but it did not scale - every booking was a person's afternoon.
Around 2019, Morvitz's team began merging that concierge knowledge with a consultancy run by Tiffany Funk, a veteran of the travel blog One Mile at a Time who became point.me's co-founder and president. The idea was to convert a decade of manual pattern-matching into an engine. The consumer platform launched in February 2022. The counterintuitive move is the one worth stealing: a domain expert with a profitable, human-powered service decided the algorithm should replace the very thing he was good at.
03What you can actually do with it
The core product is the search itself: enter a route and dates, get a 365-day award calendar, filter by cabin and program, and receive booking instructions specific enough that a first-timer can follow them. On top of that sits a small suite. My Points is a wallet that tracks live balances across programs, so you know what you're working with. Explore, launched in 2025, flips the usual search on its head - instead of a fixed origin and destination, you browse by region and flexible dates on a map with a calendar heat map, comparing cash, card-portal points and airline-transfer points side by side. It is aimed squarely at the traveler who knows they want to go somewhere warm, sometime soon, but not exactly where.
For people who want a human after all, point.me kept the concierge - done-for-you bookings start at $200 per passenger, and a one-on-one points strategy consultation runs $200 (free on the top plan). The old business became a premium tier of the new one.
04The business model, and the quiet second act
On the surface, point.me is a freemium subscription. There is a free Basic tier, a Standard plan at $12 a month or $129 a year, and a Premium plan at $260 a year that folds in deal alerts, a free consultation and concierge credit. That alone is a reasonable consumer software business. But the more interesting move is the one that does not show up in the pricing table.
In 2024, point.me began licensing its award-search engine to the companies that sit on the points in the first place. American Express embedded it as "point.me for Membership Rewards," letting cardholders search award space across 150-plus airlines before transferring their points - an industry first for a card issuer. Bilt Rewards ran a similar integration inside its app. The insight is sharp: a bank would often rather pay to embed award search than build it, and point.me is happy to be the layer they rent. It is why investors describe the company less as a travel site and more as infrastructure at the intersection of personal finance and travel.
The seed round, $2 million in 2022, was led by PAR Capital Ventures and notably included the co-founders of ITA Software - the flight-search engine Google bought and turned into Google Flights, which is about as pointed an endorsement as a flight-search startup can get. A $10 million Series A led by Thayer Ventures followed in 2023. Then, in September 2024, point.me raised a $15 million Series B co-led by Nyca Partners and Citi Ventures, announced on stage at the Skift Global Forum. Brian Kelly of The Points Guy - nominally part of the competitive landscape - put his own money in.
05Who uses it, and how it's different
The user base runs the full range - from someone booking their first business-class award seat to the enthusiast optimizing a multi-city itinerary. By the time of the Series B, point.me had processed more than 18 million searches, with registered users up over 1,000% and monthly recurring revenue up 378% since the Series A. The team itself, around 50 people spread across three continents, skews toward lived expertise: many senior hires come from the award-travel media world and from travel-tech companies like ITA Software and Freebird.
The competitive field is crowded and good. Seats.aero is a fast power tool; Roame ships a sleeker map interface; PointsYeah, AwardFares and ExpertFlyer each have their partisans. Reviewers will tell you point.me is not always the quickest to return a result. Where it competes is a different axis entirely: making a nervous beginner actually finish the booking. The step-by-step instructions, the plain-language comparisons, the concierge safety net - that is the bet. Speed is a feature; completion is the product.
06Where it fits, and where the risk sits
point.me has picked up the kind of recognition that signals it is more than a niche tool - a spot on Fast Company's Most Innovative Companies list in both 2024 and 2025, the Skift and JetBlue Ventures "Visionary 2030" award, and a place on PhocusWright's Hot 25 Travel Startups. The strategic position is genuinely interesting: it is a consumer product that is also becoming plumbing for the finance industry, which is a rare and defensible place to stand.
The obvious question is what happens when a bank partner walks away, since embedded distribution is powerful right up until it is switched off. It is a real dependency, and worth watching. But the underlying market - $100 billion in points that people want to use and mostly can't - is not going anywhere. point.me's wager is that the hard part of travel rewards was never earning the points. It was spending them. Building a business on the second half of that sentence has, so far, worked.