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.
- There is no way to see all the available flights for each date. Since the results are always organized by the rewards program being used, there is no way to simply see all your flight options. However, since 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.
- Juicy Miles only displays one day 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 around on each date to check your options.
- It also only searches one cabin class at a time. Most airline websites will show you availability for all classes simultaneously.
- 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.
- Unfortunately, the current version forces you to click around to see each of your different booking options. You need to click through each program to see whether a flight can be booked and for how many points. 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.
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.
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 does, you can view all the flights by simply clicking on Marriott. Then you can browse around the rest of the programs to find your lowest cost booking option. If it doesn't, you'll need to check each program and scan through the often duplicative listings to uncover any additional flight options.
