Seats.aero: a wonderfully nerdy tool for finding Unicorn flight awards

Seats.aero makes it easy to find close-in awards on long-haul flights. When I first learned about this tool I was immediately captivated by it. This is not a polished end-user tool like point.me or PointsYeah. Instead, it is very much a geeky travel-hacker playground. Every few hours the tool searches for award space across a large number of routes and award programs. The results then are available to instantly search, filter, and sort. If you want to fly a particular product like Lufthansa first class, Qatar QSuites, Singapore first class, etc., this tool makes it super easy… if you know what you’re doing.

Overview

Every few hours, Seats.aero searches a wide variety of routes for award space within the next two months and provides the results in a format that is fast to search and filter. This makes it easy to find many of the usually most impossible to find award flights. The Pro version is even better because it includes search results much farther into the future; plus it offers live searching on large date ranges, extra filtering capabilities, and better alert capabilities.

Free vs Pro features

The base version of Seats.aero is free, but if you sign up for Seats.aero Pro for $9.99/month or $99.99 per year*, you get to search routes as far out as a year. Plus you get unlimited alerts on extended availability, the ability to receive SMS notifications, and select Discord threads. After playing around with this tool a little I instantly saw how powerful it was and so I signed up for the Pro version mainly to help support the developers, but I quickly found that it was well worth the price.

* Use code FREQUENTMILER to save 20% off your first payment. Note that Frequent Miler will earn a commission if you sign up through our link.

Supported Mileage Programs

Seats.Aero searches the following mileage programs. Search results include not just flights flown by each mileage program’s airline, but also all partner flights bookable with that mileage program. Here are the included programs:

• Aeromexico Club Premier
• Air Canada Aeroplan: Useful for finding star alliance awards and other Air Canada partners. Note that Seats.Aero doesn’t monitor all routes and so it may have limited value for finding flights on partners like Oman Air, Air Mauritius, Bamboo Airways, etc.
• Air France/KLM Flying Blue: In addition to being great for finding actual Air France/KLM flights, it opens up additional SkyTeam and other partner awards.
• Alaska Mileage Plan: Useful for finding OneWorld awards as well as awards on Alaska’s non-alliance partners (such as Condor or Aer Lingus).
• American Airlines: Useful for finding OneWorld awards as well as awards on AA’s non-alliance partners (such as Etihad).
• Azul TudoAzul
• Delta SkyMiles
• Emirates Skywards: Useful for finding Emirates awards
• Etihad Guest: Useful for finding Etihad awards
• GOL Smiles
• JetBlue TrueBlue: Great for finding awards on JetBlue and partners like Hawaiian, Etihad, Qatar, and TAP Air
• Qantas Frequent Flyer: Great for finding oneworld awards
• Singapore Airlines KrisFlyer (Beta): Fantastic for finding Singapore’s own first class awards (since partner awards can’t be used to book Singapore first class).
• Turkish Miles&Smiles: Useful for finding awards flying Turkish Airlines
• United MileagePlus: Useful for finding Star Alliance awards and select non-alliance partners like Aer Lingus
• Virgin Atlantic Flying Club: Great for finding SkyTeam saver awards (Delta, Air France, KLM, Korean Air, etc.)
• Virgin Australia Velocity

Not for beginners

This tool is not for the average Joe*. To use this tool effectively you need to understand things like two-letter carrier codes, partner award availability, flights worth positioning for, tool limitations (i.e. not all routes are covered and many are only searched for 60 days into the future), etc. If you’re comfortable with all that, and if you care about finding great award flights, I expect that you’ll be as enthusiastic about this tool as I am.

Example: Finding Etihad First Apartments

In order to illustrate Seats.aero’s power, I’ll step you through how the tool can be used to find Etihad First Apartment awards. Etihad First Apartments is one of the world’s most luxurious ways to fly using miles. The physical space, catering, and service are all amazing.

American Airlines miles are the cheapest option for booking these flights, but through AA these flights are only available within a few weeks of departure. Award flights from London or Paris to Abu Dhabi cost only 62,500 AA miles one-way.

Here’s how to use Seats.Aero to find Etihad First Apartments bookable with AA miles followed by Etihad miles…

AA Miles

American Airlines miles are the cheapest option for booking these flights, but through AA these flights are only available within a few weeks of departure. Here’s a technique that can be used with the free or pro version of Seats.Aero to find Etihad First Apartment awards:

1) Select Explore… American Airlines

2) Show flights from Europe to Anywhere

Lets assume that we’re looking for flights from either London or Paris to Abu Dhabi since those are two of the routes in which Eithad flies their A380 aircraft which features Etihad First Apartments.

3) Search “AUH” and sort by “First”

Pro users could set the destination to AUH and filter to Airlines = Etihad, but a nearly as effective option here is to put AUH into the Search box. Since AUH (Abu Dhabi airport) is Etihad’s hub, the majority of flights going into AUH from Europe are Etihad flights.

Sorting by “First” puts the available nonstop flights on top, in green. You can see in the image above that flights from CDG or LHR to AUH in first class cost 62,500 AA miles. You can also see when this tool last saw that award space by looking at the “Last Seen” column.

To see details about a flight and to check if award space is still available, simply click on the information box on the right (the “i” inside a circle) and wait for the tool to refresh.

After clicking the information box for the CDG-AUH flight on 03-01, the display shown above appeared. As you can see, the award is still available at two different times: 9:45am and 8:45pm (20:45).

The next step is to expand the flight details by clicking on the arrows next to the word “Direct” in the green boxes. In my example, that resulted in this:

As you can see above, the 9:45am flight is on an Airbus A380-800 aircraft while the 20:45 flight is on a Boeing 787-9. Only the A380 features Etihad First Apartments, so that’s the one you’d want to book.

Etihad Miles

Etihad charges many more miles than AA, but they also have far more award space available for their own members. If you want to book a flight out farther in time or if you want to book flights from or to JFK (which are nearly impossible to find with AA miles on Etihad First Apartments), then you’ll need to book with Etihad miles.

Etihad charges 200,000 miles for Etihad First Apartment awards between JFK and Abu Dhabi vs. 160,000 miles for Etihad’s regular first class. This makes it easy to find Etihad First Apartments by filtering to “200,000”:

1. Explore Etihad Guest
2. Show Flights from North America to Asia
3. Search “200,000”
4. Sort by First

Each of the 200,000 results, in green above, are available Etihad First Apartment awards.

Example: find award space from a specific airport

My home airport is Detroit (DTW). This FlightConnections map shows flights available from/to Detroit:

Most of the flights shown above are operated by Delta. The only long distance flights served by other carriers are: Royal Jordanian to Amman, Air France to Paris, Lufthansa to Frankfurt, and Turkish to Istanbul. Sometimes Lufthansa also flies to Munich.

Seats.aero can be used to find great award flights from a specific city like Detroit. Below are examples of using the tool’s major functions to do so…

Seats.aero Explore

Look for Royal Jordanian business class…

I selected Explore… American Airlines (a Royal Jordanian partner) and then clicked to show flights from North America to Asia, and in the Search box I put “DTW”. I then sorted by Business class and found 5 available flights within the next 60 days (pro users can expand the “60 days” drop-down to “Full year”:

Look for Lufthansa and Turkish business class…

I selected Explore… Air Canada Aeroplan (a partner with both Lufthansa and Turkish) and then clicked to show flights from North America to Europe, and in the Search box I put “DTW”. There were plenty of options for flying Lufthansa to Frankfurt (FRA), but no non-stop business class awards to Istanbul on Turkish:

Seats.aero Search

The Search functionality is probably the ideal way to find awards from or to a specific airport. Unlike most other functions, here you don’t have to pick a specific program to search. This screen searches all of them. Even though it looks like you have to enter a single airport in the origin and destination fields, you can actually use some codes like “USA” to mean major US airports, “EUR” to mean major European airports, and more. A list is available by clicking on the button labelled “Multi-City Codes.” Additionally, Pro users can create their own multi-city codes via Settings!

As shown above, I searched from “DTW” to Europe (“EUR”). With the Pro version I was able to search a full year by searching plus or minus 180 days. I further limited my search to only direct flights and I filtered cabin to “Business”.

The results included many Turkish flights to Istanbul and quite a few Lufthansa flights to Frankfurt, but only a few flights to Paris and none to London, Amsterdam or Rome.

I wasn’t sure whether the lack of flights to Amsterdam, London, and Rome was due to there not being awards available or Seats.Aero not having cached those routes. Because my earlier search was so broad, Seats.Aero didn’t supplement the cached results with live searches. The tool showed ” Your search was too broad to live search, but cached data will still be updated. Try to narrow down your search for more live results.”

I tried limiting the search to DTW to AMS to see what would happen, but that still only used cached results. I then narrowed my date range to September 1 plus or minus 14 days. That caused a live search to run but it still didn’t find any results. I then tried to London, but again that produced no results. And finally I tried changing the dates. I set the mid-point to a date approximately 14 days away and searched plus or minus 14 days for flights from DTW to LHR. Still nothing. Oh well.

Alerts

Seats.Aero lets you set flight alerts so that you’ll be alerted when matching award flights become available. Free users can setup email alerts for a specific date and class of service whereas Pro users can optionally receive alerts via SMS and can choose specific dates, a date range, or “any date”. Pro users can further filter to direct flights only, minimum number of seats, maximum point cost, maximum taxes & fees, maximum number of stops, a specific fare class, a specific flight number, and can exclude selected carriers.

Tools

Seats.Aero has a ton of useful tools:

• Award Finders:
  • ANA First Class
  • Delta One
  • JAL First Class
  • Lufthansa First Class
  • Qatar QSuites
  • CPM Explorer: Find award flights that offer the best cents per mile value
• Upgrade Finders:
  • Air Canada eUpgrade Finder (not currently functional)
  • United PlusPoints Finder
• ChatGPT Plugin: Use AI to find awards
• Fare Class Viewer: View available fare classes for specific flights
• Seat Map Viewer
• Great Circle Map: Plot your route on a 3d globe
• Points or Cash Calculator: Helps you decide whether points or cash is the better deal.

Hotels

Use the tool’s sister site, Rooms.Aero to find hotel awards. I may like this hotel search tool even better than the flight search tool! See this post for more: Which hotel award search tool is best?

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