The point of this post is all in the title. I love tools that let you set up alerts so that you’ll get notified when airline and hotel awards open up. I’ve recently had success using these tools to fly the exact United Polaris flight to London that I wanted, and to book the exact dates I needed at Nick’s favorite European hotel: the Grand Hotel Victoria at Lake Como. Of course, you won’t always get the exact flight or hotel award that you want, but it happens often enough that I think it’s an essential part of award booking.
For details about tools that offer alert capabilities, see:
- Flights: Which award search tool is best?
- Hotels: Which hotel award search tool is best?
People often ask me which tool offers the best award alerts. I don’t know. For flight alerts, I’ve had good luck with Seats.aero, AwardTool, and PointsYeah. For hotel alerts, I’ve had good luck with Rooms.aero (the companion tool to Seats.aero) and MaxMyPoint. The only one I’ve had problems with is StayWithPoints. With that tool, I haven’t received hotel alerts when I should have. (Note that each of the links in this paragraph are affiliate links which means that Frequent Miler will earn a commission if you click through and sign up for the paid version of the tool).
With flights, sometimes award seats open up far in advance, but often they don’t open until around a week before the flight or sometimes even closer to departure than that. That’s why, with flights, I think it’s essential to build up a large pile of miles in programs that offer free (or cheap) changes and cancellations right up to the day of departure. That way, you can use those programs to book “good enough” flights to get where you want to go and then when your alert triggers, you can book the award you really want and cancel the original. Programs that are particularly good for this purpose include American, Alaskan, and United. Delta is a good choice too if you can somehow find a good enough back-up flight through them (Delta’s award prices tend to be outrageously high — but not always). Where applicable, Southwest and JetBlue are good options too.
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I wish I could set up an alert for a flight that is not on a schedule yet – like more then 11 month in advance. Kind of set it and forget it approach.
On Seats.aero, Pro users can create alerts up to 550 days out!
Of course, we won’t start checking for it until the schedule opens, and we don’t check immediately once the schedule is open, so if you want to book at schedule open you should probably just do it manually.
Alaska not Alaskan BTW
I get zero alert from AwardTool compare to Pointsyeah with the same alert setup. Emailed AwardTool team and got zero response.
Staywithpoints also did not alert me when they should have and also have not responded to requests.
I will take any relevant opportunity to voice my grief over how expertflyer has been left to wither and die. It’s pretty rough to see. I let my subscription lapse about six months ago (which would have been unthinkable to me a few years ago), but have been doing well with paid seats.aero subscription + a few free pointsyeah alerts.
For this particular instance why was the tools used to receive the alerts not listed? Which specific tools came through for this particular flight and hotel booking?
I don’t think that’s important. I’ve been testing lots of tools so I often set up similar alerts with multiple tools. And usually I receive alerts from all of them. I mentioned the one tool where alerts didn’t work for me. I think that’s the important info.
Ok thank you.
Agree. I’m still a bit to new to this, but have flown a couple business class flights to Europe but had to position to East coast cities to take them. I knew there were direct flights to Europe from my home airport (Detroit) but was never able to find award space. I’m guessing there is typically less space made available from DTW too. Anyways, after reading this site’s evaluation of the various award tools, I signed up and set up an alert with AwardTool for next summer and voila, found DTW -> CDG award space for 50K points just like that! Really appreciate this site!
Indeed. Scored many hard-to-get award tickets as a result of alerts. Absolutely worth the subscription fees.