AwardTool: a powerful award search tool with up to 32 simultaneous searches

AwardTool is a powerful flight award search tool with both a free and paid (Pro) version. This tool is very similar to PointsYeah. Both offer powerful search features for free; both allow searching for flight awards across a range of dates; both return results quickly; and both offer email alerts. AwardTool, though, offers greater flexibility in searching multiple airports and multiple dates at once.

Flight Search

Search Multiple Airports & Dates at Once

Like other general purpose award search tools, AwardTool lets you pick your origin, destination, one-way vs round-trip, number of passengers, class of service, and date of travel. AwardTool, though, is very special in how it offers the freedom to select multiple airports and/or multiple dates at once.

Both the free and Pro versions offer multiple simultaneous searches. The difference between the two is that the free version gives you 4 degrees of freedom whereas the pro version gives you 32.

Free version examples (4 degrees of freedom)

• 1 origin airport, 4 destination airports, a single date
• 2 origin airports, 2 destination airports, a single date
• 1 origin airport, 2 destination airports, a 2 day date range
• 1 origin airport, 1 destination airport, a 4 day date range

Pro version examples (32 degrees of freedom)

• 4 origin airports, 2 destination airports, a 4 day date range
• 2 origin airports, 2 destination airports, an 8 day date range
• 4 origin airports, 8 destination airports, a single date
• 16 origin airports, 2 destination airports, a single date

This flexibility is awesome. When looking for international flights from Detroit, I often approach the search in two ways: first, I look for international flights departing Detroit and which will get me to the general area of my intended destination; and second I search from airports that I can easily get to: Chicago, DC, NYC, Toronto, etc. With other tools, this two-part approach can easily mean doing dozens of separate searches. With the Pro version of AwardTool, I can often achieve most of what I want with just a handful of searches. For example, when looking to fly to Europe, I can use AwardTool to search from Detroit to the destination I want, plus all of the destinations where I know there are nonstop flights to Europe: Paris (for flying Air France or Delta), Frankfurt (for Lufthansa or Delta), Istanbul (for Turkish), and Amsterdam, London, Munich, and Rome (for Delta). Iceland is another option but not if I’m looking for lie-flat seats. With AwardTool Pro, I can search Detroit to all of those destinations at once across a 4 day date range. Next, I can use AwardTool Pro to search to my specific intended destination from Chicago, DC, NYC, Boston to my intended destination across an 8 day date range.

Compared to PointsYeah:

• Free Version: PointsYeah allows selecting only 1 origin and 1 destination airport and up to a 4 day date range. AwardTool has the same limit of 4, but it allows much more flexibility in that you can choose whether to use your 4 searches through a 4 day date range or with multiple airports.
• Pro Version: PointsYeah allows selecting up to 2 origin and 2 destination airports and up to a 8 day date range. With AwardTool’s 32 degrees of freedom you can also do 2 origin airports, 2 destination airports, and an 8 day range; but you can alternatively use your 32 degrees of freedom in other ways such as by searching 1 origin airport and 1 destination airport across an entire month (32 days, actually).

Filters

After running a search, AwardTool lets you filter to specific points programs, number of stops, airlines, max number of points, max taxes, % premium cabin (it’s very important to set this when searching for business or first class), travel times, airports, specific aircraft types, and more.

Layouts

A really nice feature of AwardTool’s search results is that it lets you view the results in different ways and you can easily and instantly switch between them:

1) Each class of service is in a different column:

2) Each class of service is on a separate row:

3) Each class of service, and each flight segment, is on a separate row:

Mega Search

AwardTool’s Mega search tool is like their regular search on steroids. Where the regular search lets you conduct up to 4 simultaneous searches with the free version, or up to 32 with the Pro version, the Mega search will do up to 35 searches at once. This means that you can do a 35 day time window; or 35 different destination airports; or 3 origin airports + 2 destination airports + a 5 day time window; etc. The only major limitation is that, unlike regular search, with Mega search you can’t search all supported loyalty programs at once. Instead, free users can pick one or two programs to search at once and pro users can pick up to six programs.

Amazingly, the 32 search Mega option is available to the free version, but with a catch: free users only get three Mega searches per day.

Compared to PointsYeah: PointsYeah doesn’t have anything like this.

Cached Award Search Views

Like many other tools, including PointsYeah, AwardTool caches award search results in order to make it quick and easy to find awards across broad criteria such as from “North America” to “Asia”.

Confusingly, there are three separate pages within AwardTool for users to look through these cached results: Panorama, Routes, and Explore. I asked the folks at AwardTool to explain the difference between these. Here’s the answer:

All three features use cached flight data, but they present it in different ways.

• Routes: This view shows the specific program routes that we actively track. It’s a more focused view of the data we maintain directly. And it focuses on providing users with 365 day worth of data for specific route they’re interested in.
• Panorama: This feature combines our tracked routes with real-time availability data gathered from hundreds of thousands of user searches. This broader perspective means Panorama’s data updates in real-time as you search, giving you the most current view of availability. We update the data in real time as users perform panorama searches.
• Explore: This option provides a more visually appealing interface, showcasing destinations with images. While it uses the same underlying data (cached and real-time), it’s designed for inspiration and discovery, which some users prefer.

Compared to PointsYeah: AwardTool’s Panorama and Explore views are very similar to PointsYeah’s Flight Deals. Both let you search across broad locations (i.e. from “North America” to “Europe”) and across many dates. Both let you set deal alerts. PointsYeah is a much better option for free users, though, since PointsYeah gives free users full access to 60 day ranges while AwardTool severely limits free-user functionality. On the other hand, AwardTool may be better for Pro users since it offers 90 day ranges, real-time updates, and full year route views.

Alerts

AwardTool’s alert feature is similar to their search in that it allows a set number of degrees of freedom with which you can specify multiple airports and/or multiple dates. The free version only gets 3 degrees of freedom so you can create 3 separate single departure, single destination, single date alerts; or you can create 1 alert with a 3-date range; or 1 alert with 3 departure airports, 1 arrival airport, and 1 date; etc. The Pro version bumps the degrees of freedom up to 35.

Importantly, only Pro users can select “infinite mode”. When checked, AwardTool will keep the alert active even after emailing you with results. With the free mode, you’ll have to re-create the alert if the first one didn’t meet your needs.

Compared to PointsYeah: PointsYeah’s free version allows only 1 departure and destination airport and up to a 4 day date range. So, if you value date ranges over multiple airports, PointsYeah beats AwardTool with a 4 day range vs AwardTool’s 3. For the pro versions, PointsYeah offers up to 24 active alerts vs AwardTool’s 35. AwardTool offers more flexibility by allowing more than 2 airport selections for both the departure and arrival.

Supported Miles

Here are AwardTool’s supported programs:

1. AeroMexico Club Premier
2. Air Canada Aeroplan
   (excellent for finding awards with Star Alliance and other select partners)
3. Air France / KLM Flying Blue
   (excellent for Air France, KLM, and SkyTeam awards)
4. Alaska Airlines Mileage Plan
   (Good for OneWorld awards)
5. American Airlines AAdvantage
   (Good for OneWorld awards and occasional great deals on AA itself)
6. Avianca Lifemiles
   (Another good option for finding Star Alliance awards — sometimes with better pricing than Air Canada or United)
7. British Airways Avios
   (Good for OneWorld awards)
8. GOL Smiles
9. Delta SkyMiles
10. Emirates Skywards
11. Etihad Guest
12. Jetblue TrueBlue
13. Qantas Frequent Flyer
14. SAS EuroBonus
15. Tap Miles & Go
16. Turkish Airlines Miles & Smiles
17. United Airlines MileagePlus
18. Virgin Atlantic Flying Club
19. Virgin Australia Velocity

Hotels

Like PointsYeah, AwardTool offers a hotel award search function. Enter a location and date range and AwardTool will search for hotel awards across Hilton, Hyatt, IHG, and Marriott. It’s a nice extra, but it’s not as full featured as PointsYeah Hotels which supports the same four chains plus Choice and Wyndham, and also these booking outlets: AAdvantage Hotels, Amex Travel, United Hotels, and Virtuoso.

Problems

One big issue with AwardTool is that it is buggy. They’re great about throwing powerful new features out there all the time, but they seriously need to do more testing.

While updating this post, I used AwardTool quite a bit and ran into several bugs and issues. Here are a couple of error messages that popped up while using the tool:

Pricing (Get $20 Off)

AwardTool’s basic version is free. Their Pro version is available as follows:

• $10.99 per month; or
• $84.99 per year (for comparison, PointsYeah Premium costs $89.99 per year)

Frequent Miler readers get $20 off their first year by using code FREQUENTMILER20:

1. First sign up for the free version using our affiliate link: frequentmiler.com/go/awardtool/ (thank you!)
2. Click the “Pro” button at the top of the AwardTool page and select the AwardTool Pro annual plan
3. On the check-out screen, you’ll see an option to “Add promotion code”. Click that and enter: FREQUENTMILER20

My Take

Anyone interested only in free tools might as well sign up for the free version of AwardTool… and PointsYeah too. Why not? Use PointsYeah’s Flight Deals to search cached results, use AwardTool’s Mega feature up to 3 times per day to search across 35 dates at once (or across many airports), and use both tools to do regular live award searches. Why both? While they have a similar list of supported loyalty programs, they don’t overlap 100%. Additionally, both tools (and every other award tool on the market) frequently has issues retrieving results with one program or another. By using both tools, you have a better chance of finding results from all of the programs you may care about. Plus, by signing up for both tools you can set up more alerts (or more airports/dates within an alert): 3 with AwardTool, and 4 with PointsYeah = 7.

For those looking for the best power tool, AwardTool has a lot going for it. Personally, I love the ability to search across up to 35 airports, or up to 35 days, or a combination thereof. As a power user, I’d rank AwardTool Pro above PointsYeah Premium, but a bit below Seats.Aero. Seats.Aero is less user friendly, but in some ways even more powerful than AwardTool

For a more detailed comparison of tools, see:

• Flight search tools: Which award search tool is best?
• Hotel search tools: Which hotel award search tool is best?

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