Roame rejoins the award search tool race

When Roame debuted it was amazing. While point.me was the first tool to offer user friendly flight award searches across many airline loyalty programs, Roame was the first to do it so that results came back quickly. Soon after its debut, though, tools like PointsYeah and AwardTool eclipsed Roame with better features (such as email alerts, and ability to select multiple airports) and similar speed. I’ve largely ignored Roame since then, but Roame developers haven’t been idle. They have made multiple improvements which make Roame a contender… especially for advanced award seekers and/or those looking for Singapore Krisflyer awards.

Overview

Most tools have one interface to let users do live searches and another to let users search previously cached results. Roame is different. Roame’s search interface has a simple toggle switch where you can turn on or off SkyView (the name for Roame’s cached results). With SkyView turned off, you can search for award flights from one airport to another, and you can search across 3 days or 7 days depending upon whether you have the free or paid version of the tool; and then the tool searches across many loyalty programs to find award flights that meet your criteria. With SkyView turned on, you can broaden your search to zones. For example, you can search from “United States” to “Asia”. Or you can be more granular with a search such as “West Coast (US)” to “Southeast Asia”. And you can make your date range as wide as 60 days. When you search this way, Roame only searches through its cached results. The Roame folks tell me that they search and cache over 6,500 popular routes every day.

The way Roame uses a single interface for both live and cached searches is innovative, but I find it more confusing than helpful. I suspect that novices will find it especially confusing and will probably incorrectly assume that a lack of good results within SkyView means that there are no good awards available. However there may be great awards available that Roame didn’t happen to cache in advance.

The thing I like about the latest version of Roame is that it has some advanced features that can be really useful under the right circumstances…

Roame Basics

Roame offers a simple and fast way to search in real time for awards from one airport to another. Additionally, with SkyView, it offers a way to do broad searches across their cached results.

• Supported Programs: AA, AeroMexico, Aer Lingus, Air Canada, Air France/KLM, Alaska, Avianca, Delta, Emirates, Etihad, Iberia, JetBlue, Qantas, SAS, Singapore, Spirit, Turkish, United, Virgin Atlantic, Virgin Australia
• Subscription options:
  • Free. Includes 3 day range for live searches, no alerts, and only an extremely limited version of SkyView
  • Friends of Roame Subscriber: Includes 7 day range for live searches, 60 day range for SkyView searches, and 5 email alerts.
    • $12.99 per month; or $109.99 per year. Look for a coupon code on their site for anywhere from 10% to 30% off. If you can’t find a better one, save 10% off your first payment with code “FM”
• Subscribe here (our affiliate link)

Advanced Features

Where Roame shines is with advanced features I haven’t seen in other tools:

• Full support for Singapore Krisflyer award searches. This can be used to find Singapore first class awards, for example. While partner programs like Aeroplan and Qantas can be used to book Singapore business class, no partner programs can be used to book Singapore first class.
• Filter by Aircraft. For example you can filter your Singapore first class search to “A380” to try to find Singapore Suites availability (good luck with that — Singapore is incredibly stingy with awards for their first class suites).
• Filter by Airport. This can be used to limit SkyView to results of interest. For example, if you searched from United States to Europe, you could filter to airports in the US you’re willing to depart from and/or filter to airports in Europe you’re interested in visiting. More advanced users may want to use this to look for skip-lagging opportunities because, in addition to departure and arrival airports, it will filter to flights that include a layover at the airport(s) you selected.
• Add a route to SkyView. By creating a SkyView alert that is from one specific airport to another (rather than a broad zone-based search), SkyView will search and cache results for that route at least daily, like they do with ~6,500 popular routes. So, for example, if you want SkyView to monitor Singapore’s Frankfurt to Singapore route (which they might do already — this is just an example), then you can set up a SkyView alert so that route will soon return SkyView results for everyone. When you delete that alert, the route will be removed from future SkyView caching unless Roame decides that it’s a useful enough route to add to their collection. Note that some other tools let you add routes in limited ways. For example, with AwardTool, users can add a route for a particular rewards program; and with Seats.Aero pro users can add a route (direct or non-stop only) for a particular rewards program. With Roame, when you add a route by adding an alert, the route is added to their searches across all rewards programs that they support.

Pros and Cons

Pros

• Supports date ranges (3 days for free version, 7 days for paid version)
• Offers email alerts
• Supports Singapore Krisflyer
• Supports filtering by aircraft and airport
• Offers and indirect way to add routes to SkyView

Cons

• Only allows a single departure airport and a single destination airport in any live search. Both PointsYeah and AwardTool offer ways to include multiple specific airports in a single live search.
• Doesn’t currently offer a direct way to go from a cached result to a live search to make sure that the cached result is still valid.
• Difficult to scroll through a full year on SkyView. Some other tools make it easy with 60 or 90 day forward and back buttons, but with Roame its necessary to go back to the calendar to change your 60 day date range each time.
• Doesn’t offer a way to edit alerts. If you want to change an alert, you have to delete it and recreate it.
• Doesn’t appear to offer a way to see which routes are already supported in SkyView

Conclusion

For those looking for an easy to use but powerful flight award search tool, Roame is a fine choice but I still prefer tools like PointsYeah and AwardTool that let you search multiple airports at once. For those looking for an easy way to search and set alerts for Singapore Krisflyer awards, I think that Roame is the only choice. For very advanced users, Roame has a few key features that make it pretty good, but I still think that Seats.Aero is a better choice overall for that crowd.

To see how Roame stacks up side-by-side against other award search tools, see: Which award search tool is best?

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