For many enthusiasts, the ultimate joy in collecting miles and points is redeeming them for incredible awards like international business or first class flights or luxury hotels. The nemesis of that joy is the challenge in finding award availability, particularly in for multiple passengers in premium cabins on international flights. Readers frequently ask us for strategies to catch those elusive golden eggs. The “secret” isn’t a magic trick hiding in my hat but rather knowing that you’ll need some combination of money, points, and flexibility. As you add constraints to one are, you’ll need to add more of another element in order to find the awards you seek.
You need: Money, points, and flexibility
There are really only three things you need to travel the world in comfort and style:
- Money
- Points / miles
- Flexibility
If you have an infinite amount of any one of those things, it’s easy to travel the way you want. If you’re a billionaire, you can just buy the travel you want. If you have a billion points and miles, you can pay whatever the award price may be for an “anytime” award any time you want to travel. And if you can travel any time you want, you can simply go when the availability comes.
However, most of us have limits. The more limited you are in any one of the above, the more you need to increase one of the others to compensate. However, the good news is that we frequently write about ways to increase your supply in any of those three columns.
Increase your money
No, I can’t help you become a billionaire. However, we do frequently write about ways to increase your supply of cash.
Cash back credit card introductory bonuses is an obvious source of additional cash. If you add up all of the cash back new card intro bonuses on our Best Offers page, you can add thousands of dollars to your bank account, which might be just what you need in order to bridge the gap for a particular trip. See our Best cash back credit card offers for a list filtered to only cash back bonuses.
We also post about notable checking and savings account bonuses. Often, you can get rewarded for moving your business around from one bank to another. In years past, my wife and I have made as much as $6,000 in a single year from new checking and brokerage account bonuses (and made over $10,000 in a span of two consecutive years).
Furthermore, we regularly write about business credit cards. Those opportunities can be so compelling that they might inspire you to become more entrepreneurial. I’ve often found side hustles in pursuing deals, which can both be satisfying for the deal-hunter in you and also help add to your bottom line.
Increase your points & miles
This blog is primarily about earning miles without flying. If you’re reading this post, you most likely know that there are millions of points and miles available in the form of new credit card introductory bonuses. You’ll find all of the best publicly-available offers on our Best Credit Card Offers page.
If you’re playing the game in two-player mode, it is possible to juice up your points and miles at double-time by both opening the same or complementary cards.
But new card welcome bonuses aren’t the only way to build up your mileage bank: you can sometimes earn excellent referral bonuses when referring a friend or partner (and in two-player mode, my wife and I frequently refer each other for new cards in order to stack more household points). Then you must also consider the best category bonuses, the best big spend bonuses, and quarterly bonuses for chances to earn even more points and miles with relatively low effort.
Beyond those things, there are retention bonuses, shopping portal bonuses, and dining bonuses. You can link credit cards to your free Bilt Rewards account to earn additional bonus points on purchases at Walgreens and select dining establishments. There are card-linked offers and authorized user bonuses and buying groups and other techniques for building your points and miles fortune.
When it comes time to redeem your points, you’ll want to keep an eye out for transfer bonuses, which could increase your stash even further.
Subscribing to this site is a good step, but let there be no doubt: accumulating miles is an active process. You’ve gotta want it. But if you do want to learn how to earn more points and miles, you’re in the right place to find opportunities and learn techniques to do just that.
Increase your flexibility
This factor is the hidden gem. I think that many people think they have less of this than they do or fail to consider the ways in which they might increase it.
The key here is understanding that there are different types of flexibility.
- Time flexibility. I have far more than most people here since both my wife and I work remotely, though the school schedule is starting to push back on this. Time is finite and many people are constricted in terms of travel dates. The good news is that this isn’t the only flexibility.
- Destination flexibility. I think this is the single most impactful factor in allowing my family to travel the way we do. In part due to the decade of travel we’ve enjoyed thanks to miles and points and in part due to the years prior that my wife and I spent traveling on a shoestring budget, we’ve been fortunate to get a chance to see a lot of the places that were on our original “bucket list”. Over time, we discovered that we just loved to travel and see new places and that many times our favorite memories were unexpected treasures that had happened by chance rather than by plan. We realized that we found things to enjoy almost everywhere we went. Since we continue generating more miles and points, we expend far less effort chasing a trip to a specific place and rather we tend to follow where availability takes us. On previous trips even before kids, we’ve wound up in places like Saipan and Phu Quoc and Lithuania and so many more spots that hadn’t been on a list of places we planned to visit but rather came up because there was a good deal / good availability. Just last year, we went to Ghent, Belgium simply because I found a very good deal with seats for four passengers to get to Brussels and when I looked up hotels in Belgium I found that there was a Marriott in Ghent that was a solid deal on points. I knew absolutely nothing about Ghent, but I looked at some pictures and thought, “Wow, that looks beautiful!”. Sure enough, it was breathtaking and utterly charming. I know that most people plan trips by saying, “I want to see X” and then they search for flights to X. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, but when you limit destination flexibility by setting the destination to a specific place, it means that you may to increase more money or points to make it happen. Of course, you can add more flexibility back into the mix by saying, “I want to see X, but if I can get a business class flight that puts me within a 2-3hr flight of X, I’d be happy to check out that place and then grab a separate flight to X from there. That might require a little bit more money or points, but it can increase your odds of getting a long-haul flight redemption that fits your plans.
- Departure flexibility. This is very similar to #2. If you’re only searching from one city / airport, that’s going to be a significant limitation in terms of availability. I tend to look at availability from New York (Newark-EWR or New York-JFK are each a 3-4hr drive depending on the day), Boston (also a 3-4hr drive), and Washington-Dulles (a 1hr flight and United has a couple of options to get there each day) to start. If I can’t find anything from those cities, I’ll add Chicago (a ~2hr flight for me with plenty daily nonstops), BWI (1hr away on Southwest), and Philadelphia (AA flies there from here, but it’s a tiny plane, so this is my last choice because my wife hates small planes). If I’m looking at Asia, I start out searching from Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle because I know the sheer number of flights available increase the odds of me finding award space. Then I’ll work backwards across the country with Chicago and the rest of the lot. A tool like Seats.aero or one of the award search tools that allows for searching to/from multiple airports is very useful for this (See: Which award search tool is best?). I live in upstate New York — if I’m limited on dates (time flexibility) and I can only find a departure from Chicago, then it’s going to cost me a little points or money because I have to position to Chicago, but I’ve got enough of those two to usually make things work.
Where I think people get tripped up regarding award availability is in self-imposed limits on flexibility. We all want what we want and perhaps I’d prefer to fly from my home airport or only take a nonstop. Those things are usually possible to do with points and miles, but the more I choose to constrain flexibility, the more I’ll need to compensate with additional money or miles.
Obviously none of this is written in stone. You might have infinite flexibility and still not find the award you want. You may be willing to pay hundreds of thousands of points per seat and simply not be able to find business class award space. However, you’ll greatly increase your odds by increasing flexibility.
Be persistent
Apart from increasing your money, points/miles, or flexibility the final piece of the puzzle is persistence. They say that persistence pays off, and that can absolutely be true with award searches. Oftentimes, the award booking floodgates will open when you least expect it. Fortune favors the prepared and persistent. What I mean by persistence is repeating award searches regularly. I run award searches every day — when I’m waiting in line at the grocery store, when I’m stuck waiting for my kids in the bathroom, when I sit down at my computer in the morning or come back from lunch and when I sit down on the couch at the end of a long day, my first move is usually searching for an award ticket or hotel room. You don’t need to obsess over it, and award alerts can be a way to alleviate some of that pain, but the bottom line is that when opportunity knocks, you need to be in the right position to answer.
This is particularly true when searching for multiple seats. I search again and again — and then when I find something that I want to book in one direction, I don’t wait for the other half to fall into place, I simply book and get my hands on one half right away and then I keep looking for the other half until I find it. Award seats for 3 or more passengers can be hard to find in premium cabins, so don’t limit your booking flexibility by waiting for the stars to align on both ends of the trip.
Do pay attention to award cancellation policies so that you focus your effort on programs that offer flexibility. If you book the “outbound” and simply can’t find the return, hopefully you’ll have booked that “outbound” through a program that offers free or reasonably cheap cancellation.
Bottom line
There isn’t a magic trick to finding award availability. There isn’t some hidden route that always has award space for 4 or more or a specific day of the year or month or week to search or a time of day when you can trick the system into making more seats available. Some programs do make seats available at the moment when they open the schedule, others are far less predictable. If you focus on increasing what you can out of money, miles, and flexibility, you’ll exponentially increase your odds. That’s not to say that you’ll win the game every time, but those are the factors that are most likely to give you some options.
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This is one of the more disappointing posts I’ve read on this site. Obviously more money and more points will allow you to travel more, but I still don’t have a good plan for booking business class on points for a family of 4. There’s a screenshot of Seats.aero here, but I have tried to use it to search for 4 seats on the same flight and the “minimum seats available” number is actually very inaccurate. I was searching for United, ANA, and Virgin flights with 4 seats but when I found one on Seats.aero and actually went to book with the airline there were actually 1 or 2 seats available.
And good luck finding any tool that will tell you how many seats are available for codeshare bookings (booking ANA via Virgin for example).
Give us some actual good tools to use! Because they are not all good for this particular use case.
I’ve been working on improving Seats.aero for multiple seats — it can be a bit rough sometimes as you mentioned. In the past we sometimes showed a direct flight but the number of seats for a connecting flight, so we now break it out more accurately (i.e. 9 seats but 3 direct). If you enable our filters for direct flights it will also ensure your # of seats is available directly.
There are some programs where it is just difficult to support this though because they do not provide us seat counts at all. There’s a new setting for Pro users to hide results with unknown seat counts, and we now pass your seat count to the airline when doing live searches.
Good to hear this is a known issue that is being improved!
That’s an unfortunate down side to cached result searches – the number of seats that were available at last update may no longer be. On the flip side you can’t live search availability for a whole year on a bunch of routes as it would simply take too long (or maybe get a search tool blocked for web scraping). You have to pick your poison on searching in narrow date chunks or weeding through out of date results. At least the search tools can be a quite a bit faster than searching individual airline sites!
PointsYeah has worked well for me showing how many seats are available on an award search. I’ll often filter by 3 seats for our family to get rid of the single award seat results. Doesn’t work with every airline but have had good results with AA and Alaska awards for One World and other partners like Condor or Air Tahiti Nui, Air France/KLM, Virgin, Delta, and Jet Blue (can see availability with Etihad then book through Qatar). Star Alliance with Air Canada seems to be one of the main ones that won’t show number of seats.
@David Feeling entitled much? How about you do your own research based on your travel needs. Don’t expect everything to be spoon fed in the point games.
I linked to our comparison post that shows a full rundown and comparison of all of the award search tools. The point of this post wasn’t to demonstrate how to use those tools. Rather, the point of this post was to say that there isn’t a magical one answer. If you took one thing away from the post, I’d hope it would be that if you’re set on flying the nonstop on JAL from New York to Tokyo on a specific day, there is no tool that’s going to make available what either is or isn’t. I think it’s easy for a lot of people to get stuck on their home departure airport or a specific route, and if you’re looking to travel with 3 or 4 people that’s just not always going to be realistic (or, as the post says, it may cost significantly more). If instead you can widen that net — looking flying to Singapore or Taipei or Seoul perhaps or maybe even flying to the west cost to fly Fiji Airways through Nadi to Tokyo, you can really increase your odds. Readers often ask me how I find seats for my whole family — in fact, I got an email just this week from someone who said that they saw my summer trip (we traveled 28,000 miles and visited 10 different countries over about 5.5 weeks) and wondered how I’m able to consistently find four seats in business class for my family. A large part of that is increasing my flexibility, and not just in terms of dates — but rather, as the post says, widening my net to consider other options that get me “close enough” to where I want to go or perhaps even add another destination to the trip. I mentioned the award search tools because they make it far easier to do that than it used to be when you have to search so many different sites. And, again, I linked to more information about those tools within the post.
In terms of finding seats that are available via different partner programs, your experience there is going to vary. I used a lot of Pointsyeah and Award Tool for my summer travels, searching for four passengers and finding space on partner awards. Obviously YMMV depending on which ones you’re trying to find.
Thanks for the further explanation. My point is that everything you mentioned applies to any award booking, not just those for 3+ seats. Based on the title of the article I was hoping for more discussion about problems specific to booking 3+ seats on the same flight, such as the difficulty actually getting an accurate number of seats available from common tools (which Ian admitted above is a real problem!).
Sure, but you would agree that finding 1 or 2 seats is **FAR** easier than 3, 4, or 5, right? You would agree that it requires far less creativity / flexibility, right? If you’re a lone wolf, you probably don’t have to worry about strategies to find awards to different places. People frequently reach out to say that they can’t find any flights for four or five people. I think the vast majority of those folks probably need to increase flexibility — even if they don’t have the flexibility to change dates.
I do understand what you were looking for here now that you’ve explained, though I haven’t actually found that specific thing (tools showing inaccurate seat counts) to be a particular issue in my searches for my family of 4. That’s surprising to me since we do travel a decent amount as a family of four. I’m surprised I haven’t noticed / run into the problem you’re describing. Good to know it exists though.
Which program did you use in the picture above showing the award availability?
Persistence is key. The harder you look to find award space, the higher chance you will. I have the good, better, best mentality for awards. If I find a good option, I will book it. But I will keep searching for something better. If I find a better option, I book the better option and cancel the good option. But I will keep searching for the best option, which sometimes comes around a few days / a week before the trip begins. Never assume the award price now is the price it always will be. Award prices do come down and you have to be ready when they do.
Excellent post, Nick. As a family of 5 (and often traveling with wife’s parents), I’m often tasked to find availability for 5-7 seats. As you mentioned, flexibility is key. I’d also like to add that following FM and the FM Facebook group and looking out for posts that highlight routes with “wide open availability” really helps too. Remember when both ANA and JAL had wide open availability from the US to Japan last year? My sister and I were able to pounce on that availability thanks to FM and the FB group. We were able to nab two seats in ANA first class and 5 seats in JAL business class, same day and almost same time from SFO to Tokyo! Also, some airlines like Air France release saver availability in business class quite often and frequently with 9 seats available. If you want to go anywhere in Europe and don’t have a ton of flexibility, seems like Air France is a decent option if you need to find availability for more than two people. That’s what we’ve done the past few years 🙂
Great post. Could you let me know what search site was shown with the airline programs and the point costs plus filters?
Aero
Looks like seats.aero
Thanks for this great post, Nick! As a family also trying to travel with young kids, I always look forward to hearing your thoughts.
Excellent guidance. It’s this sort of thoughtful content that makes FM *the* hobbyist site.