How to use Rooms.aero to find the best hotel award availability

Seats.aero is one of our favorite tools for searching award flights, and its sister site, Rooms.aero, is handy for finding hotel award stays.

If you use multiple hotel loyalty programs and collect transferable currencies like me, Rooms.aero is an easy way to round up all the points hotels in your destination. I’ve found the site particularly helpful for planning trips to remote destinations, like national and state parks, and mapping out road trip itineraries.

Here’s everything you need to know to use Rooms.aero for your next vacation.

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How to use Rooms.aero to plan a trip

Rooms.aero searches across five major hotel programs — Choice Privileges, Hilton Honors, World of Hyatt, IHG One Rewards and Marriott Bonvoy — to show all your options in one place.

For instance, I’ve been mulling over a road trip to Utah’s various national parks. I can search for the entire state and adjust the map to the region I’m interested in.

The results are color-coded based on the value you’ll get per point: Green indicates a great value, blue is good, yellow is average and red is poor.

For example, Hyatt Place Page / Lake Powell is considered a great value, with prices on my dates starting at $342 or 18,000 points per night. That comes to 1.9 cents per point, above TPG’s June 2025 valuation of 1.7 cents per World of Hyatt point.

You can use the drop-downs in the top left to filter by points program and maximum number of points per night. Unlike with Seats.aero, you don’t need a Pro account to search more than 60 days out.

If you click on a hotel, you’ll see a calendar page with more information on the property and points and cash rates across each month. You can then filter by number of nights, points price and value per point.

Instead of searching for a particular stay, you can explore various options. Click “Explore” on the homepage and choose your program in the drop-down. Then, you can filter by number of nights, hotel brands and categories, countries, price, and value.

Here, I explored four-night Hyatt stays in several countries in the Caribbean.

I’ve generally found the search feature more useful than exploring, but this could be a fun way to plan a last-minute vacation on points.

Related: The best hotel elite status tiers and how to earn them

How to set alerts and find free night certificate availability

As I’ve mentioned, Rooms.aero shines for travelers who don’t stick to any one hotel program and have transferable points at their disposal. However, the site’s hotel alert feature could be useful even for the most loyal hotel guests.

You can set alerts to notify you when a specific hotel (or any hotel in a city of your choice) becomes available. This is particularly useful if you’ve got your eye on an aspirational property with limited availability, or have a free night certificate with a maximum points value.

Here’s an example alert for the Waldorf Astoria Maldives Ithaafushi, a high-end Hilton property with notoriously limited award availability. If you can find an opening for a standard room reward, this is a great place to use your Hilton free night certificate.

Because I have a Pro account, which unlocks additional features on both Rooms.aero and Seats.aero, I can create an alert for the number of nights I want during a date range or across any date. With a basic account, your alerts are limited to a single date.

Other Pro features include a Marriott certificate finder, which lets you choose which type of free night certificate you have and whether you want to top it up with up to 15,000 points. I have a 50,000-point certificate that will expire soon, so I searched for U.S. hotels where I could use it.

This is a neat feature, but it’s a little clunky because you can’t search by date and can only search one country at a time. Hopefully, this tool will improve and add certificate finders for programs like Hilton Honors and World of Hyatt.

Related: The most exciting hotel openings of 2025

Bottom line

The main drawback of Rooms.aero is that it only covers five of the most popular hotel programs (for now). If you collect points with Accor Live Limitless, Best Western Rewards or Wyndham Rewards, for example, this tool won’t help you.

Still, I’ve gotten a lot of use out of the site. I can quickly see which points properties (if any) are in my desired destination, saving me the time I’d otherwise spend searching. And between the Pro features I mentioned above and the additional flight search features, I think a Pro account is worth the price tag ($9.99 per month or $99.99 per year).