Seats.aero vs Roame: Which Award Search Tool to Use

Seats.aero and Roame are both award-availability search tools, and the practical difference is how you search. Seats.aero describes itself as a way to "Search award flight availability across 20+ airline mileage programs" and presents results as a dense, filterable table. It is fastest when you already know your route. Roame searches "up to 25 airline loyalty programs" and leads with browsing: SkyView region views, a daily deals email, a mobile app, and a hotel search. That suits you when you have points and an open mind about where to spend them.

The short rule: if you know the route, Seats.aero. If you're shopping for a trip, Roame.

Both answer the same question: where is there award space. Roame will even store your balances: Roame Wallet tracks "your credit cards and loyalty points" on the free tier. What neither does is turn those balances into a funding plan: which transfer pays for this specific seat, at what ratio, with which bonus attached, and what it strands in the program you drain. That is the question AwardMath answers, and it is free.

Both price rows were read from the vendors' own pages on 19 August 2026. Roame's were promotional that day (see the cost section).

Seats.aero offers a free tier and a paid PRO account. Quoted from its own site on 19 August 2026:

"Support the development of seats.aero by signing up for a PRO account — $9.99/month for access to the full year of results, live search, SMS/push alerts, and more!"

So PRO buys the search window, live search, alerting and the advanced filters; the free tier shows a shortened window of results.

Roame publishes three tiers, read from its own subscription page on 19 August 2026:

• Community, free. Real-time search across up to 25 loyalty programs, 3-day flexible search, SkyView Lite (7-day window, departures within 60 days), and Roame Wallet.
• Friends of Roame, $109.99/year, shown as $9.16/month, 30% off a struck-through $155.88. Adds 7-day flexible search, SkyView 60-day flexible search across the full 365-day award calendar, multi-region search and SMS alerts.
• Inner Circle, $299.99/year, shown as $25.00/month, 69% off a struck-through $959.88. Adds 100 multi-region Super Alerts, always-on alerts and larger hotel rebate credits.

Two caveats we'd want stated if it were our pricing: those were discounted prices displayed on the day we checked (30% and 69% off the struck-through annual figures), and the page was showing annual billing, so month-to-month prices exist behind a toggle we didn't capture. Check the current page before subscribing.

AwardMath is free. No subscription, no paid tier, no affiliate links on this site. After a plan is delivered we ask for a voluntary contribution against the savings we actually showed you, and nothing is ever gated.

Roame will hold your balances. Its free tier includes Roame Wallet to "track your credit cards and loyalty points". What no award search does is answer the question that follows: given those balances, what is the cheapest way to actually pay for the seat it just found? A neutral comparison of the two put the gap plainly: "Neither one tells you whether the seat is worth your points", and "Neither will tell you whether your Chase or Amex points can even reach the airline in question."

An award search returns a seat priced in one airline's currency. What it costs you depends on which balances you hold, which of them transfer to that airline, whether a bonus is running, what fee the transfer carries, and how many points you strand in the program you drain. Get that wrong and a "cheap" award costs more than the cash fare.

AwardMath is built for exactly that step, and it is free. It holds a dated, source-tiered graph: today 119 transfer pairs across the six major transferable-points issuers (90 corroborated across independent sources, 2 confirmed on the issuer's own page) and 453 dated award-price observations. It runs a deterministic solver over your balances to return up to three funding plans, each showing the ratio used, the bonus applied, the fees, and the points left behind, next to what the obvious transfer would have cost you.

Two limits on our side. We do not show live seat availability. That is Seats.aero and Roame's job, and this site will keep telling you to confirm space there before you move points. And our route pricing is partial: where we have not priced your route yet we say so rather than guess, and you can leave a watch and we will email you once when we can plan it.

Not reliably, and Seats.aero says so itself: "The seats.aero web interface uses bot protection that may prevent automated access. AI agents and automated tools should use the API instead of attempting to interact with the website directly."

This matters more than it sounds. When you ask an assistant "is there award space to Tokyo in March", it generally cannot read a live award search, so the answer comes from whatever text about award availability it can reach, which ages badly. Availability has to be checked by you, in the tool, at the moment you are ready to book. Anything an assistant tells you about a specific seat should be treated as a lead, not a fact.

1. Decide what the trip is worth funding. Start with your balances. AwardMath returns the cheapest funding paths for the trip and shows what each transfer costs you in ratio, bonus, fees and stranded points.
2. Find the seat. Take the program the plan names and search it in Seats.aero if you know the route, or Roame if you are still choosing the destination. Set an alert if the date is flexible.
3. Re-check the funding math before you move points. Transfer ratios and bonuses change, and a transfer is one-way and usually irreversible. Confirm the seat is bookable and the plan still holds, and only then transfer.

That order matters because the expensive mistake in award travel is not a missed seat. It is points moved into a program that turns out not to be the cheapest way to pay, or moved before the seat was confirmed.

Every claim on this page carries the date we checked it, because tool pricing and features move faster than most comparison articles get rewritten.

• Product descriptions and feature claims: read directly from seats.aero and roame.travel on 19 August 2026, quoted verbatim above.
• Prices: both read from the vendors' own pages on 19 August 2026, covering Seats.aero's PRO tier and all three Roame tiers. Roame's were promotional that day and are labelled as such. Third-party figures we had previously seen for Roame (a $6.99–$19.99 tier ladder, March 2026) did not match its own page and were dropped.
• AwardMath's own coverage numbers: counted from our live graph on 19 August 2026.

Refresh cadence: pricing re-checked monthly, features and coverage quarterly, and the date above changes when a fact changes rather than on a schedule. If you spot something stale or wrong here, including anything unfair to either tool, tell us and we will fix it and re-date the page.

For balance: Roame publishes its own comparison of the two. It is worth reading alongside this one; it is written by one of the two products, as is the convention in this category.