Template: Juicy Miles
- 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.