Booking airline awards can be a challenge. And, getting the most from your miles can be really hard. Luckily there are professional award booking services that can help. Here are some potential advantages to going with a good award booking service:
- Better Award Availability. Many people assume that if their airline tells them there are no award seats available, then it must be true. A good award booking service can often find the seats that don’t appear to exist.
- Save Miles & Money. A good award booking service will know which of your points can get you to your destination and back for the lowest cost in terms of both miles and cash. Ideally they know which options to avoid due to high fuel surcharges or unfavorable award charts. And, they know how to stretch your miles further by taking maximum advantage of flexible routing rules such as layovers and open-jaws.
- Better flight experience. A good award booking service will know which flights have the best seats and service and will try to get you on those flights. And, they’ll proactively find itineraries with the fewest stops and shortest layovers (while avoiding layovers that risk missed connections).
- Less Aggravation. Booking award travel can be a huge headache. Simply finding available award seats can be difficult. With some airlines, booking award travel can be extremely difficult even when the award seats are available! A good award booking service will do the hard work for you even if it means calling an airline a dozen times until they find someone who knows how to book your flight.
Available Award Booking Services
We do not run our own award booking service. Instead, below is an incomplete alphabetical list of available services. The presence of an award booking service on this list does not mean that we recommend this service. For reviews, please see this FlyerTalk thread, or the user-comments, below.
- Award Advocate
- Award Booking Service
- Award Magic (disclosure: this is an affiliate link)
- BookYourAward
- Cranky Concierge
- JJ Award Travel
- MileValue
- point.me (disclosure: this is an affiliate link)
- Point Me to the Miles
- The Hub ‘N Wifi
- Travel is the Point
- UPGRD award booking service
If your award booking service is missing from this list, please let us know via our contact Frequent Miler page, and we’ll add you in.
Reader feedback
Have you used an award booking service? If so, which one? How would you rate the service? Was it worth the fee? Please comment below.
AnA RTW ticket help
Any idea what happened to Award Advocate? Theor facebook and site were not updated since 2019. Also, I sent a request a few days ago and have not heard back 🙁
What happened to the Juicy Miles Website? Is that going to come back or only their concierge service? Is there anything similar to that available? Thanks!
The replacement site should come out soon.
[…] process of searching for and booking the award travel on the airline’s or hotel’s website, many award-booking services are available; these can be particularly useful for booking premium-class flights where […]
[…] process of searching for and booking the award travel on the airline’s or hotel’s website, many award-booking services are available; these can be particularly useful for booking premium-class flights where […]
[…] process of searching for and booking the award travel on the airline’s or hotel’s website, many award-booking services are available; these can be particularly useful for booking premium-class flights where […]
Please note that Awarding Canada is closed effective 26JAN2020.
Hi there. Adding Travel Codex: https://www.travelcodex.com/award-booking-service/
We used Bookmyaward.com. Sorry to say it was not a positive experience and was expensive. There is the initial fee paid to the broker and then additional fees for every time a flight is changed.
Part of the problem was due to a lack of understanding of how their program actually works. From the initial conversation, it was explained that their program trolls the internet looking for award travel that the common traveler does not have access to. Although that is true, there is a hitch.
In reality, searches are done individually, one at a time and there is a cost for every search, to the broker. It is to their benefit to keep the number of searches to a minimum, as it is more money in their pocket.
Both of the flights they booked were in segments, with legs missing to the final destination. We were assured that there was plenty of time to get the flights and times we were hoping for, as we were planning a year in advance.
For our first flight, I found a flight that matched our requirements and contacted them to make the change. A bit later, while surfing the airline site, I found an acceptable return flight and was hoping they would catch it on their end. They did not.
Their return flight was booked a day later than originally hoped for and missing the final leg home, which would mean spending a day at the airport.
Five months out from the trip, the agent recommended an outright purchase for the last leg of the trip.
Although an expensive lesson, there were several things learned. First, booking one way trips today is comparable in award travel points to booking a round trip. Second, if you are travel savvy it is possible to find your own flights and not have to depend on someone else. Third, using this service was not more convenient or cost effective.
We just used Bookmyawards to book an international trip. To be honest, I was not happy with the service for what it cost. The agent on several occasions sent us partial bookings with the notation “we will add in time” for missing flight segments. On our outbound flight, I found the flight that had all of the legs and an acceptable travel time. He had not seen it and booked it after I called him. For our return flight, I again found a nice flight home. I should have called him to let him know it was there, but was thinking his search program would see it and he would call. He did not and his return flight, months later was on the wrong day with a missing segment AGAIN. It was to be a placeholder until he found something better. Come to find out, that it really wasn’t a placeholder. We were informed that the airline award program we are using has limited options and probably couldn’t do much better. His final suggestion was to purchase the last leg of the trip outright. This is not what was expected. So, there is a long flight home with too many stops, long layovers and additional expenses beyond the award booking service fees. What did I learn? Book trip flights separately (one way) for award travel. If I would have known this, I could have saved myself money, time, aggravation and had the flights I wanted.
Who did you use?
Thanks to others for recommending Kam @ AwardAdvocate.com I ended up filling out the form on his online website. He called within 12 hrs. I was a little skeptical never having used a booking service before. It was so easy and worth the money. If I was going to use my points I wanted a good deal and good flights to Europe. I ended up getting business one way and economy on my return. This was fine because I’ll sleep on the way (business) and be up on the return (economy). Kam also knows the planes and which are the best. It was a huge time saver and you may even save money rather than doing it yourself!
Glad I found this post, and really glad I decided to go with PointsPros. (pointspros.com) I’ll start off by answering what this post is asking: For me, ABSOLUTELY worth the price!
I had a last minute window open up at work so my wife and I could get over to Thailand for my brother’s 60th birthday celebration.
I have a paid ExpertFlyer account and thought it might have been fairly easy to do myself, but after looking for 2-3 hours a day for 3 days ,I was getting frustrated. I’m president of a software and payments company, super busy right now with the new year on us, and with just a couple of weeks to put it all together I decided to reach out to a service rather than do it myself. So I started searching for info about booking services and found this post.
I have read, envied, and admired ‘Lucky’ for a few years now as I have been learning more about points, miles and award travel, and so it’s that familiarity and confidence in Ben’s experience, along with a mention on ThePointsGuy website that helped me decide to go with PointsPros.
I signed up as a member on the PointsPros website (not required, but I will definitely maintain it) and was contacted almost immediately by Tiffany to review my itinerary and goals. Tiffany then sent me an introductory email to me and Jordan, my PointsPros rep, and within 24 hours Jordan already had several options in front of me.
I was initially thinking I had no choice other than a JFK departure which would mean another segment for us to get from Maryland to JFK the night before travel. But Jordan was able to put together an amazing Business Class itinerary for us leaving from BWI which is just a 20 min drive from my home in Columbia MD. That alone saved us about $800 in flights/meals/hotel had we been forced to leave from JFK!
Jordan guided me through several points transfers and even booked the tickets for us. I know some of the sites just find the availability for you and then you still have to do all the booking, but what I got from Jordan and PointsPros was really concierge-class service, with end-to-end bookings, and tickets in hand within a couple of days.
My brother is blown away that we will be able to join him and his friends and family in Thailand, and it’s thanks to Tiffany, Ben, Jordan especially, and the whole PointsPros team that we will be riding in the front of the bus the whole trip! #frontofthebus 🙂
FANTASTIC AND HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!
Maybe something has gone down hill with Points Pros since you did your booking 8 months ago, but I’ve just had a really rough time with them recently. Communication was just awful–weeks passed between emails. I too signed up for their membership for $300, plus booking fees. Waste of time and money. Look elsewhere for your rewards booking services.
We just used Kam of Adward Advocate. We had tried 3 other services in the last week and none of them could come up with anything from lax to italy. some of the routings were not ideal. He called to talk with us and then promised something that afternoon. He came up with a route that had only 1 stop each way and into Florence which is one of our favorite cities. He helped us transfer the points and stayed on the phone with him. We will fly on Air France and KLM in their newer planes. We had used another service in the past and never got to talk to anyone. Everything was done by e mail and there were delays plus that service was way more expensive. His service is exceptional and very reasonably priced. He has also offered advice on what to do with miles, etc re new cards. Highly recommend.
My “magician”, Kam of AWARD ADVOCATE just booked 2 very complicated business class award tickets to Barcelona with return from Lisbon for the least amount of miles. My husband and I are on the same flights using a combination of points from three different frequent flyer points and miles from two different banks. Kam is quick to respond, friendly and exacting in detail. And did I mention he is very reasonably priced??? He’s the BEST!
I recently had a very difficult booking need (Family of 4) and contacted 3 companies from the below list. After 4 weeks of struggle 2 of them said, its very difficult to get one. Book Your rewards even have me move the miles to Asia Miles and then said its not available. Finally I contacted Award Advocate (Kam) and he was able to complete the booking on 2 hours. We had to spilt the booking between AA, BA, Asia Miles etc.. Just 2 hours and his fee was lower than others. Kam is the best !!! Next time I would just go straight to him..
Thanks for sharing that! (but sorry you had so much trouble!)