Easier Award Search Using Premium Award Searching Tools (2021)
Using Your Points for Free Travel, 1. Search for Frequent Flyer Award Availability Like a Pro
There are several premium tools designed to help you search for award space. The four main premium options are Juicy Flights, ExpertFlyer, the KVS Availability Tool, and Award Nexus.
While the award search features of these tools can sometimes be helpful, infrequent travelers may want to save their money and stick with free search tools. That said, some of these tools have free features that can be incredibly useful and paying a small fee can be worthwhile for planning some trips.
With the exception of Juicy Miles, all these tools provide free trials. So, you can you check them out for yourself and determine whether they provide enough value to justify their cost. Juicy Miles doesn't have a free trial but does allow you to sign up for 5-days for "only" $10.
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Juicy Miles
Unfortunately, the Juicy Miles Search Tool has inexplicably shut down, but it is rumored to be relaunching under a new name. Juicy Miles continues to offer award booking consulting services.
Juicy Miles is the best available tool for finding award space. It doesn't always find every possible award seat, but it is far easier than searching multiple sites. Many people are likely to find it "good enough" and decide not to bother with more complicated approaches.
- Juicy Miles costs money to use. An ongoing membership is $30 per month! However, you can pay $10 to use the service for 5 days. If you are able to find award space and book right away, it can be affordable to sign up for $10 each time you are planning a trip. But if you need to periodically check to see if award inventory has recently become available, the ongoing membership rate is pretty expensive.
- Behind the scenes, Juicy Miles is searching a set of airline websites and only finding "most" of the available options. There is no "central reservation system" for award flights, like there is for regular airfares. Juicy Miles only sees the award availability on the sites it is searching—the same availability you would see if you manually searched them yourself. Since it doesn't search every airline's website, it doesn't find all the available award space.
- Juicy Miles only displays one day and one cabin class at a time. You can ask it to search a multi-day span, but the results for each day are always displayed individually and you can't even be certain when it has finished searching each date. You'll need to individually click on each date to check your options. And unlike many airline websites, it won't show available space across economy, premium economy, business, and first class tickets.
- If you are putting together a segment-by-segment routing, you can filter the results to just non-stop flights by clicking the "Refine" button.
- Not only does Juicy Miles make it easier to find award availability, it also shows you how many points it what take to book the flight with all the popular rewards programs. It even accounts for current transfer bonuses when calculating the required number of points from each different transferable point currency. And it often, but not always, does a decent job of estimating fees and surcharges.
- While it looks nice, some aspects of the user experience can be difficult to use. For example, since the results are always organized by the rewards program being used, there is no simple way to see all the available flights for each date.
Unfortunately, Juicy Miles doesn't publish what websites it is actually searching. As a result, it is hard to know which flights it might be missing. People who aren't okay with Juicy Miles's "good enough" approach will likely decide to not use it all, because it is hard to tell what steps to take to augment its results. At the very least, their FAQ suggests that you'll need to look for Cathay Pacific flights elsewhere and that they miss many American Airlines flight segments.
Our workaround takes advantage of the Marriott program. Because the Marriott program has so many partners, you can usually select it to see every flight that Juicy Miles uncovered, even if you don't intend to use Marriott points to book your ticket. To be sure, you can compare the number of flights listed under the Marriott program to the number of overall flights found to see if it includes all the available options. If it doesn't, you'll need to check each program and scan through the often duplicative listings to uncover any additional flight options.
Similarly, if you see a flight you want to take, there is no way to easily see how you can book it for the lowest cost. You need to click through each of the program options to see which one is cheapest. Experienced users can guess which programs would be likely candidates for any given flight, but it would just be easier if Juicy Miles provided a list of award options for each flight, rather than a list of flight options for each award program.
SeatSpy
Seat Spy is an amazing but specialized award search tool.
It only works with a handful of airlines. The current list is Air France, American Airlines, British Airways, Etihad, KLM, United Airlines, and Virgin Atlantic. It only searches the individual airlines, not the airline's partners. For example, a search for United Airlines only searches United flights, not those of other Star Alliance airlines. But it is a relatively new tool, so more airlines are likely to be added.
For each airline it does three things.
- Searches for availability an entire year at a time. This only works for "direct" flights. You simply enter your origin and destination (and number of passengers) and it quickly shows you availability for every day in every class of service. There isn't even a box for your to type your travel dates. The little colored partial rings correspond to economy, premium economy, business, and first-class flights.
- Searches every direct flight available on any given day. Rather than showing you all the dates that work for a given destination, you can see all the destinations that work for a given date. Unfortunately, it is currently only working for British Airways and Virgin Atlantic and then only for a specific set of starting cities. Still it is pretty cool.
- Alerts you to new award availability. SeatSpy will let premium subscribers set up availability alerts for any range of dates for any of the routes they can search (any direct flight with one of the supported airlines). Regular "premium" members can have a maximum of 4 active alerts and will get notified on an hourly basis.
This is the most useful feature of the site and it doesn't require a paid membership (at least for an unspecified number of "limited" searches).
For example, here is all the flights that still have award space from London on British Airways on November 14th.
This feature requires a 3 pound per month subscription (or 30 pounds per year), which also includes unlimited year-at-a-time searches.
"First Class" members can have an unlimited number of active alerts, will be notified as soon as SeatSpy uncovers newly available seats, and can choose to be alerted by text message. This level of services costs 8 pounds per month or 80 pounds per year.
Compared to ExpertFlyer, SeatSpy's alerts only work on a restricted set of routes. But it is convenient to be able to create a single alert for all the flights across a set of dates instead of one flight at a time.
Award Nexus
Award Nexus is a handy tool that makes it easier to search multiple dates and websites for award availability.
- Award Nexus allows you to search faster. With Award Nexus, you enter your information once and their meta-search engine searches several different airline websites looking for award availability. It will individually search each day for up to a week at a time and can even search for multiple destinations at the same time.
- You can always search the same websites yourself. While Award Nexus will automatically run a bunch of searches for you, it is fundamentally just searching up to seven different airline websites (Air Canada, Air France, ANA, British Airways, Cathay Pacific, Japanese Airlines, and Qantas). You can search the same airlines websites yourself. In fact, these are generally the websites where we recommend that you do your searching. Award Nexus saves you the hassle of having to re-enter your information and manually search for each possible day, but it doesn’t provide access to any information you can’t get for free.
- Award Flights has similar functionality and doesn’t cost anything to use. Award Nexus has been a valuable tool for some time. However, recently a similar tool called “Award Flights” has become available. It works the same way as Award Nexus and is free to use. At least for now, Award Nexus is the more polished and reliable of the tools, so if you don’t mind spending a little bit of money, it is the better one to uses. But if you don’t want to spend any money, you can try Award Flights instead
- While Award Nexus makes searching more convenient, it can be expensive to use. There is no fixed subscription fee. Instead each search costs a certain number of points. You are charged one point for each website it searches, for each day, for each class of service. Want to search the 5 main supported airline sites for a week at a time? It will cost you 35 points. You’ll burn through points quickly if you are checking alternative airports, different segments, and different dates. At a cost of around $12 per 100 points, the more you use it, the more it costs, with no “cap” when you need to try lots of searches. You could easily spend tens of dollars searching for a flight. But you can also save a bunch of time.
- You can sign up for a free “community account” that will give 200 points right away and another 100 free points every 3 months. That may be enough to plan a trip without needing to spend any money. You’ll need to join the FlyerTalk community (which is free) and then sign-up for an account with Award Nexus.
- Award Nexus provides a useful “Route Explorer” that can help you find alternative routes for an award trip. We highly recommend signing up for a free account just to take advantage of this tool. It doesn’t cost any points to use.
ExpertFlyer
- ExpertFlyer is sometimes the only, or often the most convenient way, to search online for award availability on many unaffiliated airlines. The best frequent flyer program websites do a good job of searching for award availability on the airlines that belong to the big three alliances. However, there is no convenient way to search for the dozens of other airlines that you can book with your credit card points.
- However, you'll need to search one airline at a time. While ExpertFlyer can search a larger number of different airlines, it forces you to search one airline at a time. This isn’t a big obstacle when you are searching a limited set of additional airlines that fly to your destination. But when you want to search the bigger airlines, it is more convenient to use the best airline websites first, which will simultaneously search all the airlines in the alliance, uncover routes that use multiple airlines, and provide an easier-to-use experience.
- ExpertFlyer charges a monthly fee. It costs $5 per month for a up to 250 queries (one query per airline) or $10 per month for unlimited queries plus the often invaluable availability alerts and the ability to search a week at a time. You can get started with a hassle-free 5-day trial.
- It is worth “temporarily” signing-up when you need to search hard-to-search airlines. While you may not want to spend $60 or $120 per year on a subscription, it can easily be worthwhile to sign up for a single month at a time, while you are planning a difficult trip. You can then cancel your subscription, until you need to use the tool again. Make sure to occasionally pay for some months to compensate them for their work.
- ExpertFlyer’s premium service can notify you when new award space becomes available—which can be hugely valuable when you can’t immediately find availability for your trip. If someone cancels their reservation or the airline juggles the available inventory, you might be able to book an award routing that is not currently available. You will need to set up individual alerts for each specific flight you want to track.
- Expert Flyer offers a free alert service that will let you know if a better seat becomes available for your flight. With the free version of the service, you can track one flight at a time. With the premium version, you can track multiple flights.
Checking these other airlines takes time and effort. Calling in to various frequent flyer programs is time consuming and the phone representative might not search very exhaustively. You might be able to search online on the airline’s own website, but you’ll often need to sign up for an account first, you’ll always need to learn the quirks and unique user experiences of each site, and you’ll need to use a different site for each airline. In some cases, smaller airlines don’t provide online availability information, even for their own flights.
With Expert Flyer, you can search for availability on many of these airlines, using a single, consistent tool. Click to see a list of the airlines you can search.
KVS Tool
The KVS Tool is the least useful of the premium services. It is harder to use, only runs on your PC, and doesn’t have Expert Flyer’s useful alerting feature. However, it does support a small set of airlines that ExpertFlyer does not.
