Why I Built Point Auctions (I Kept Missing Great Auctions)
PointAuctions.com didn't start as a product idea. It started because I was annoyed at myself.
The auctions I missed
I'd been sitting on a decent balance of Wyndham Rewards points for a while, mostly accumulated through stays I'd have done anyway. One day, out of curiosity, I poked around their experience auction page and noticed something interesting. A few recently closed auctions had ended at what worked out to roughly 3-4 cents per point, several times the value of a standard stay.
For context, standard Wyndham redemptions typically land around 0.8 to 1.2 cpp depending on the property. Getting 3-4x that value on an experience is genuinely great, and I'd completely missed them because I wasn't checking regularly.
That happened a second time, and a third. Different programs, same problem. By the time I noticed the good listings, they were already closed, or the bidding had already spiked past the point where the value made sense.
The Atlanta festival that made it click
A few weeks later, I was scrolling through listings and stumbled on a deal for a music festival here in Atlanta: VIP passes to Shaky Knees, which is basically a rite of spring if you live here. I've gone almost every year since I moved to the city, but always on general admission. VIP was never something I'd pay cash for.
But this time the points math was different. I actually paid attention to the timing, watched the bid history, and placed my bid strategically.
I won. The math worked out to roughly 1.75 cents per point by my count, not the 3-4 cpp I'd been kicking myself about missing, but still significantly better than a standard hotel redemption. And standing in the VIP area at Piedmont Park with a shorter beer line and an actual view of the stage? Worth way more than what I would have paid in cash.
That's when it clicked. The value is there, but only if you're actually paying attention, and paying attention across multiple programs is a part-time job.
"I need a better way to track this"
That thought kept coming back. I'd check United one day, forget about Delta for a week, completely miss a Hilton listing that would have been perfect. The information was all public. It was just scattered across a dozen-plus different sites, each with its own interface, with no single view of everything at once.
So I built PointAuctions.com. The initial version was rough, basically a script that scraped a few programs and dumped the results into a spreadsheet. But even that was immediately useful. I could see all active auctions in one place, sort by end date, and actually catch the good ones before they closed.
From spreadsheet to site
The spreadsheet turned into a database. The database got a frontend. The frontend got filters, categories, bid tracking, and AI-powered location tagging. These days PointAuctions.com scrapes every major program hourly, and I keep adding new ones as I find them. If you want the mechanics, I wrote up how PointAuctions.com actually works.
It's still fundamentally the same tool I built for myself, a way to not miss good auctions. The difference is now anyone can use it.
What I've learned
A few things that have become clear since I started tracking this stuff systematically:
• Most auctions close at mediocre value. The "exciting" ones that everyone bids on often end up at 0.5 to 0.8 cpp. Not terrible, but not special.
• The deals are in the middle. Less flashy experiences that don't attract a bidding war routinely close at 1.5 to 3+ cpp. That's where the real value is. (If the cents-per-point math is new to you, I break it down in how to read cents per point on an auction.)
• Timing matters more than the program. A great auction on any platform can be a better deal than a mediocre auction on your "best" program.
• Buy It Now listings are underrated. Fixed-price experiences often offer solid cpp if you grab them quickly.
If you're sitting on points and wondering whether experience auctions are worth exploring, the answer is yes, as long as you're paying attention. If you're brand new to this, my getting started with miles auctions walk-through is the place to begin. You can browse everything that's live right now on the auctions page, or dig through what past lots actually cleared at in the closed-auction archive. That's what PointAuctions.com is for.