Regular readers of the blog will be familiar with Pointimize, a site that aims to make award travel & booking easier. They have helped us by providing data for the following posts before:
- Best Use Of Chase IHG Free Night Certificate Post Devaluation
- Best Wyndham Properties To Use 15,000 Points For A Free Night
- Best Uses Of Your Chase Marriott Free Night Certificate (Category 1-5)
- Best Uses Of Hilton Free Night Certificates
- Best Uses Of Your Chase Hyatt Free Night Certificate (Category 1-4)
- Best Uses Of Your Chase IHG Free Night Certificate
Unfortunately they were unable to secure funding to continue development, sending out the following e-mail to users.
Fellow Travelers,
Two years ago, we began Pointimize and AwardTravel.com as a way to bring our vision for points and travel to users. We’ve been blessed with outstanding support from our users and have been fortunate enough to have won a few startup awards. What’s more, without the support of our investors and the dedication of the team members here, we wouldn’t have been able to achieve what we have up until this point.
However, despite all the hard work and effort put forth, we weren’t able to secure the necessary funds to further continue services and will officially end bothpointimize.com and AwardTravel.com onJuly 9 at 11:59pm PST.
After termination of all services, all users’ data will be deleted, if you’d like to make a copy or back-up, please do so before July 9.
Thanks again for supporting Pointimize and AwardTravel.com. Wish you all the best in the future journey.
I’ll be sorry to see Pointimize & AwardTravel go. We had some plans to do some interesting things with the data that Pointimize was able to collect, but that will no longer be possible.
This is very sad news! I really enjoyed Pointimize and got great use out of their service. I honestly would have happily paid just like I do for ExpertFlyer but alas it was not to be.
Same. Would also have been willing to pay for the Pointimize service.
Didn’t they have paid options?
They will be missed. I was starting to use it a lot. YeekApp.com is another hotel searcher but with limited features and fewer chains.
That stinks – I really enjoyed using their service when I started my travel planning. Is there anything else similar?
There are a few alternatives, e.g hotel hustle & award mapper for hotels. Travelocity has something for airlines.
Award Mapper seems several years out of date (it’s a static map, so it keeps working as hotel websites change).
Hotel Hustle doesn’t pick up data from many hotel sites, as it tries to get data when you do the search, but the hotel sites are changing constantly and Hotel Hustle doesn’t seem to have the resources to react quickly to every hotel website change. For example, Hotel Hustle tries to show Hilton family hotels, but I haven’t seen it pull up actual point values for over a year now, since Hilton did a website update.
Award Nexus does availability searches on all 3 airline alliances, but it doesn’t tie together the award charts and transfer partners like Pointimize tried to do.
OTOH, when I tried to do airline award searches for LATAM on Pointimize, I got some very bogus results — as if they’d taken sale/discount buckets from a reservation system and interpreted them as award buckets — so I’m not sure how validly they were doing it.
There’s a reason that Expert Flyer is a paid service, it takes serious resources to figure out how to interpret the data that airline reservation systems generate, and keep changing.
Hotel hustle is dead as well due to a loss of data by the developer. Pointimize was far and away the best alternative and other than yeek, there is nothing left. I wonder if Pointimize would be willing to sell their code.