SeatSpy is a tool for finding awards on select airlines. The tool is quick and displays a full year of results all at once. Plus, if the awards you want aren’t currently available, you can set up alerts to be notified when they open up. That’s the good news. The bad news is that the tool only supports non-stop flights and only a limited collection of airlines (13 at the time of writing). Additionally, while the tool is awesome at finding award availability on some of these airlines, it falls short with others. This post includes details of best uses for the tool, by airline.
This post was last published in November 2022. At that time, SeatSpy’s support for Etihad wasn’t working at all. Now it works well and it’s great for finding awards flying Etihad that are bookable with partner miles (such as AA or Air Canada miles). I’ve updated the Etihad section of this post with a mini-guide showing how to find partner-bookable awards. Additionally, I’ve added information in the United section about how to use SeatSpy to find United partner awards, with a specific focus on finding ANA First Class.
What is SeatSpy good for?
SeatSpy works differently with each airline it supports and so I’ve covered each airline or combination of airlines separately below:
Air France & KLM
Air France & KLM dynamically prices awards. As a result, SeatSpy shows that awards are available almost every day. That’s not very useful since the awards will be overpriced on most of those days. Fortunately SeatSpy has added a slider bar that lets you set the maximum number of points of interest. Here, for example, I limited my search results to Air France business class awards that cost less than 84K one way. By doing so, I could quickly find the dates with reasonably priced business class awards between San Francisco and Paris:
Unfortunately, when setting up Air France or KLM alerts, you cannot specify the maximum points and so alerts are likely to return too many results.
Sometimes the best way to book Air France or KLM flights is with partner Virgin Atlantic miles. Unfortunately, Air France and KLM do not release the same award space to partners as they do for their own members and so you can’t rely on SeatSpy results to show you when you can book Air France or KLM with Virgin Atlantic miles.
Air France & KLM Summary:
- Use SeatSpy to find good award prices on Air France or KLM flights using Air France / KLM Flying Blue miles.
- Don’t use SeatSpy alerts with Air France or KLM flights because you cannot limit the maximum number of points of interest when setting up your alerts.
- Don’t use SeatSpy to find Air France or KLM awards bookable with partner airline miles (such as Virgin Atlantic miles).
American Airlines
Like Air France, American Airlines dynamically prices awards (these are called “Web Special awards”). As a result, SeatSpy shows that awards are available almost every day. That’s not very useful since the awards will be overpriced on most of those days. Fortunately SeatSpy the slider bar that lets you set the maximum number of points of interest, plus they’ve added a few checkboxes just for AA search results: Include MileSAAver; Include all Web Special; Only Web Specials cheaper than MileSAAver. If you really want to book your AA flight with partner miles (i.e. you want to book the AA flights with BA Avios, or Alaska miles, or Cathay Pacific miles, etc.), then you’ll want to look only for MileSAAver awards. I’ll warn you in advance: these are few and far between. If you plan to pay with AA miles, though, it’s fine to look for Web Specials. Use the max points slider to find reasonably priced awards.
One problem with AA award searches is that SeatSpy sometimes includes flights on partner airlines when they fly the same route. For example, if you search Chicago to London, you’ll find tons of SAAver award availability, but mostly on British Airways flights, not on AA. This is a problem because British Airways adds huge carrier imposed surcharges to these awards (even when booking with AA miles).
Another problem with using SeatSpy with AA is with alerts. When setting up AA alerts, you cannot specify the maximum points, nor are you able to specify that you’re only interested in MileSAAver awards. As a result, almost all dates and routes return results. I find AA alerts to be almost completely useless.
American Airlines Summary:
- Use SeatSpy to find good award prices on AA flights using AA miles.
- Use SeatSpy to find AA MileSAAver awards that are bookable with partner miles.
- Watch out for routes that are served by British Airways in addition to AA because SeatSpy won’t limit results to only AA (and British Airways flights usually incur large cash surcharges).
- Don’t use SeatSpy alerts with AA flights because you cannot limit the maximum number of points of interest or limit to MileSAAver awards when setting up your alerts.
British Airways
SeatSpy was originally made specifically for British Airways awards and it continues to work well for that purpose. With SeatSpy you can instantly see a year of award availability for any British Airways route and for all cabins of service. British Airways does not have dynamic award pricing and so the existence of an award is actually meaningful. Additionally, British Airways doesn’t differentiate between awards available to its own members and awards bookable with partner miles. That’s great because you can use SeatSpy to find these awards even if you plan to book with partner miles (FYI: Cathay Pacific Asia Miles sometimes charges less in surcharges for BA awards).
Another great thing is that British Airways doesn’t differentiate between award space and upgrade availability. As a result, SeatSpy can be used to find upgradeable flights. For example, suppose you want to buy a premium economy ticket and then use Avios to upgrade to business class. You can use SeatSpy to find business class award availability before buying your ticket (but I always recommend double checking availability with the carrier before you make any purchases).
British Airways Summary:
- Use SeatSpy to find award availability regardless of whether you plan to book with British Airways Avios or with partner miles.
- Use SeatSpy to find upgrade space (since it’s the same as award space with BA)
- Don’t forget that British Airways imposes very large surcharges on business and first class flights and so just because an award is available doesn’t mean that it’s a good deal!
Etihad Airways
SeatSpy is great for finding Etihad awards which can be booked with partner miles: Air Canada Aeroplan or American Airlines AAdvantage. The trick is to use Etihad’s Miles Calculator to identify the minimum miles that a flight can be booked for: 
As you can see above, the minimum price for first class from London to Abu Dhabi is 140,000 miles. If you can find award seats for that price, those seats should be bookable with partner miles.
Use SeatSpy to search for Etihad First Class from London to Abu Dhabi and then limit the display to awards priced at around 140,000 miles:
In the above example, I limited the search results to First class and reduced the slider bar to just a bit over 140,000 points (Etihad’s minimum price for this route and cabin). This left a lot of dates showing first class awards pricing at around 140,000 points per passenger. You can then book these through Aeroplan or AA for far less. Aeroplan charges 65,000 miles per passenger (see below) and AA charges 62,500 (but you have to call to book the latter).
Similarly, you can look for business class awards from the United States to Abu Dhabi. Etihad’s Miles Calculator says that the minimum price for business class from the U.S. (New York, Washington DC, or Chicago) to Abu Dhabi is 110,000 points. So, to find business class availability for these routes, limit SeatSpy to slightly over 110,000 points and uncheck the other cabins from the display:
In this case, your best bet would be to book with 70,000 AA miles. Aeroplan would charge 90,000 miles for the same flight.
Etihad Summary:
- Use SeatSpy plus Etihad’s Miles Calculator to find saver level awards on Etihad flights. Then use Etihad miles, Air Canada Aeroplan miles, or American Airlines AAdvantage miles to book the awards.
- Don’t use SeatSpy alerts with Etihad because you cannot limit the maximum number of points of interest when setting up your alerts.
Miles & More (Austrian, Brussels, Croatia, LOT Polish, Lufthansa, Swiss)
A number of airlines supported by SeatSpy share the Miles & More loyalty program. These include: Austrian, Brussels, Croatia, LOT Polish, Lufthansa, and Swiss. If you have Miles & More miles, then SeatSpy could be very useful for finding award space to use those miles. Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be a one to one correspondence between award availability to those with Miles & More miles and to partner airlines. So, for example, if you were hoping to book flights on these airlines with United, Avianca, or Air Canada miles, SeatSpy isn’t helpful for finding the required partner availability.
Miles & More Summary:
- Use SeatSpy to find award availability for any of these airlines as long as you plan to book with Miles & More miles.
- Don’t use SeatSpy to find awards bookable with partner airline miles (such as United, Air Canada, or Avianca)
United Airlines
In my opinion, United Airlines is the key to SeatSpy’s usefulness. With United, SeatSpy shows only saver awards. This is awesome because these are awards that are bookable with United’s partners, and some partners offer incredible bargains for booking United flights. For example, you can use Turkish Airlines miles to fly from anywhere in the U.S. to Hawaii for only 7,500 points one-way in economy or 12,500 miles in business class. Or you could use ANA miles to fly to South Africa in business class for only 104,000 miles round-trip. The problem is that United is very stingy with releasing business class awards. Fortunately, SeatSpy’s alerts can be used to help. For example, use SeatSpy to get alerted to business class availability on routes like these:
- Newark to Honolulu
- Newark or Washington DC to Cape Town, South Africa
- San Francisco to Auckland, New Zealand
- Houston to Sydney, Australia
An additional bonus is that SeatSpy shows United partner availability on routes that United flies as well. For example, both United and ANA fly between Tokyo and: Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, and Houston. When you search SeatSpy for these routes (such as San Francisco to Tokyo), it shows both United and ANA awards. You can even find ANA First Class with SeatSpy on these routes (except for Houston to Tokyo since ANA doesn’t currently offer First Class on that route). The trick is to use SeatSpy to look for business class only and then look for the slider to include prices above 100,000 points, like this:
As you can see above, the slider goes up to 121K. That means that SeatSpy found at least one day with a saver level award that costs 121,000 points. Since United charges less than that for business class, there must be at least one day with First Class award availability. And since United doesn’t fly international First Class, the flight must be on a United partner (in this case, ANA).
Unfortunately, there’s no easy way to limit the calendar display to only show prices above a certain threshold so it can still be difficult to find which days have first class availability. One way is to simply click around on all the dates that have business class availability and look for flights with prices above 100,000 points. Another option is to lower the slider to around 100,000 and then slide it back to the right and watch to see which dates suddenly light up that weren’t lit up at 100,000. If you find one, it should look something like this when you click on it:
You can then click through the United logo to get to United’s website to double check that the award is still available and to book it:
United Airlines Summary:
- Use SeatSpy to find award availability for flying United even if you want to book with a partner airline’s miles.
- Use SeatSpy to find partner award availability when partner’s fly the same routes as United.
- Use SeatSpy alerts to find and snag otherwise impossible to get United (and partner) award flights.
Virgin Atlantic
With SeatSpy you can quickly see a year of award availability for any Virgin Atlantic route and for all cabins of service. Like British Airways, Virgin Atlantic does not have dynamic award pricing and so the existence of an award is actually meaningful. Unfortunately, Virgin Atlantic makes more awards available to its own members than to partners and so SeatSpy can’t be relied upon to find Virgin Atlantic awards bookable with partners like Air France or Delta.
Like British Airways, Virgin Atlantic doesn’t differentiate between award space and upgrade availability. As a result, SeatSpy can be used to find upgradeable flights. For example, suppose you want to buy a premium economy ticket and then use Virgin Atlantic points to upgrade to business class. You can use SeatSpy to find business class award availability before buying your ticket (but I always recommend double checking availability with the carrier before you make any purchases).
Virgin Atlantic Summary:
- Use SeatSpy to find award availability for booking with Virgin Atlantic points.
- Use SeatSpy to find upgrade space (since it’s the same as award space with Virgin Atlantic)
- Don’t rely on SeatSpy to find Virgin Atlantic awards bookable with partner miles (such as Air France / KLM Flying Blue or Delta SkyMiles)
- Don’t forget that Virgin Atlantic imposes very large surcharges on business and first class flights and so just because an award is available doesn’t mean that it’s a good deal!
SeatSpy Pricing
SeatSpy offers a "Cancel Subscription" button within their website so it is very easy to cancel if you decide that it's not worth the cost.
Note: Frequent Miler has an affiliate relationship with SeatSpy. If you click through from our site to sign up, we will earn a small commission.
Using SeatSpy
Basic SeatSpy Search
Browse to SeatSpy.com, choose which airline you want to search, and then enter your search criteria. Once you click the Search button, a full year of results usually appears very quickly. I can’t stress enough how nice that is. Most other award search tools show at most 7 days of results, but a few tools do show a month at a time. With SeatSpy, you’ll see a full year’s results:
Modify SeatSpy Search Criteria
SeatSpy allows you to deselect cabin classes that you’re not interested in. You can also select the maximum number of points you’re interested in seeing. This is especially useful with AA, Air France, Etihad, and KLM where awards are dynamically priced. Additionally, with some airlines (British Airways and Virgin Atlantic), you can select whether to see only Peak or only Off-Peak awards.
View Seats Available
Within the search results, simply click on any date of interest to see how many seats are available in each cabin class. Note that if you see 9 seats available, there may actually be more than 9.
Example US to Africa award search
I was curious whether SeatSpy could help me find a desirable award flying 2 adults in business or first class from New York City to South Africa in October for a two-week trip. To make things more difficult, I decided that I would fly into Johannesburg but return from Cape Town.
All Virgin Atlantic and British Airways flights route through England, so with either airline we would be routed through London.
SeatSpy doesn’t allow searching for itineraries with connections, so I searched separately for each leg. For example, I searched NYC to London, London to Johannesburg, Cape Town to London, and London to NYC. I ran these searches with both Virgin Atlantic and British Airways.
For some reason SeatSpy allows searching from New York City area airports (JFK, EWR, LGA) all at once for British Airways, but requires separate searches with Virgin Atlantic. So, for Virgin Atlantic, I searched both JFK-LHR and EWR-LHR for both the outbound flights and the return.
Outbound: New York to London
SeatSpy shows that business class awards from New York to London are wide open in October for 2 adults. Plenty of Virgin Atlantic awards are available too, but not nearly as many as British Airways offers.
Outbound: London to Johannesburg
As you can see above, far fewer award flights are available from London to Johannesburg in October. Since Virgin Atlantic awards are only available at the end of the month and I want a two week trip within October, I knew at a glance that I’d have to rely on British Airways for the outbound flights.
Via multiple websites, I confirmed SeatSpy’s results: at least two business class seats were available departing New York on October 5th and departing London on October 6th.
- BA: 112.5K Avios + $ 1,027
- AA: 75K per person + $1,027
- Cathay: 90K per person + $606
Unfortunately, British Airways imposes ridiculous taxes and fees on their flights, especially in premium cabins. You can save points by booking these flights with AA miles, but you’ll still pay over $1,000 in taxes per person. A better option is to book with Cathay Pacific Asia Miles for 90,000 miles plus approximately $606 per person.
Important: there are better and cheaper ways to get from the US to Africa in business class than by flying Virgin Atlantic or British Airways. This experiment was really designed to see how easy it was to use SeatSpy on a real world example. It is not a tool for finding the best award deal available. For that you may want to check out Juicy Miles. Also check out our in-depth post: Best ways to get to Africa using miles.
Return: Cape Town to London
Return: London to New York
To keep things interesting, I decided to pick Virgin Atlantic for the return flights since there was a Virgin Atlantic flight conveniently available on October 26th to London and then from London to New York on October 27th.
To find this combination, I had to search for each flight separately on Virgin Atlantic’s website:
- Virgin: 105K plus $875
- Air France: 145.5K plus $713
- CPT-LHR: 86.5K plus $193
- LHR-JFK 59K plus $520
- Delta: 145K plus $378
Unfortunately, like British Airways, Virgin Atlantic imposes huge fuel surcharges on award flights, especially in Upper Class and especially on flights from or to London. Air France charges more miles for the same Virgin Atlantic flights, but slightly lower fuel surcharges. The sweet-spot is to pay 145,000 Delta miles with just $378 in taxes per person (Note that since this was originally written Delta has drastically increased partner award prices and so I expect that this result will no longer hold true).
Important: there are better and cheaper ways to get from the Africa to the US in business class than by flying Virgin Atlantic or British Airways. In fact, when I searched Delta for the above Virgin Atlantic awards, I came across cheaper options for flying Air France (not shown). This experiment was really designed to see how easy it was to use SeatSpy on a real world example. It is not a tool for finding the best award deal available. For that you may want to check out Point.me. Also check out our in-depth post: Best ways to get to Africa using miles.
Use SeatSpy to find suite seats
One reason to use SeatSpy is to try out British Airways and Virgin Atlantic’s new suites. These are business class seats that are marketed as suites due to having extra privacy. If you’ve been eager to try these out, SeatSpy makes it easy…
British Airways’ Club Suite
British Airways offers their Club Suites in business class on all of their A350 and 787-10 aircraft. Additionally, they have reconfigured some of their 777 aircraft with these new seats. This post is a good resource for finding the routes that offer the new Club Suites.
Once you’ve picked out a route, use SeatSpy to find award availability and then double check on BA.com that the specific flight numbers you’re looking for are available as awards. With that done, compare award prices across BA, AA, Cathay Pacific, and Iberia to try to find the award requiring the fewest points and lowest fees.
Virgin Atlantic’s Upper Class Suite
Virgin Atlantic’s new Upper Class Suites are available only on their A350 aircraft.
Using SeatSpy, I see that plenty of business class award space is available from JFK to London. Here’s just the next few months:
Using Virgin Atlantic’s website, I easily confirmed that award space was available on a date I randomly picked: March 9th.
As you can see above, the 10PM flight is available to book as an award in Upper Class (business class). Also, there’s a little indicator showing that this is a “New Plane” (e.g. A350). To double check, I clicked on the Details link and saw that it was indeed an A350. This means that Upper Class will feature the new suite.
47,500 miles is a great price for this flight, but $675 in fees is excessive. Delta charges far less in fees, but far more in miles: 160,000 miles + $5.60.
Air France strikes the best middle ground. For this flight, Air France currently charges 60K miles plus $205 in fees:
Greg’s take on SeatSpy
SeatSpy is NOT a general purpose award search tool. It only searches for awards with specific airlines and only for non-stop flights. Still, if you have a non-stop route you want to fly and if SeatSpy supports your preferred airline, then no other tool will show you results so quickly and completely. I love its full year display, its quick results, and its ability to set alerts. SeatSpy’s alert function is an awesome way to find hard to get awards, especially with United Airlines. Unfortunately, with some airlines like American Airlines, Air France, Etihad, and KLM, the alert function is useless because SeatSpy doesn’t differentiate between saver awards and much more expensive dynamically priced awards.
SeatSpy definitely isn’t for everybody, but if you have a need that it meets, it might be for you.
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[…] theory, the SeatSpy search tool (See: Seatspy: An amazing tool for finding nonstop awards) should be the best way to view a full year of United nonstop saver award availability with a […]
Hi Greg, can SeatSpy support Cathay Pacific? I’m eyeing their award availability from down under to Hong Kong next June.
Thanks
Your best bet for Cathay is Expert Flyer
Is anyone else having problems with Etihad on Seatspy? For example, business class on the AUH-JFK shows decent availability for 110,005 miles (maybe 20% of the calendar shows availability) yet I’m not finding the matching space on Aeroplan. I’m also not finding it on AA (although I know AA’s website has struggled with Etihad business availability for a while even when it was otherwise bookable).
I haven’t tested it recently, but I wonder if it has anything to do with the message on another tool, Seats.aero, which states “Due to a system change from Etihad, we are not updating Etihad availability at this time. We will resume updating availability once partner awards are available online.”
I don’t think the AA MileSAAver filter works. I’m trying to search DFW-ICN for Y seats available to partners. It shows me dates across several months, however when I check them at AA they are priced at 35k but they are web specials.
That doesn’t surprise me. I think all that filter does is limit results to where the point price is equal or less than the MileSAAver price.
Are you aware of any way to search for AA Mile Saver awards apart from checking each date that has awards at the Mile Saver rate? At present, I use the AA calendar and then find each date at 35k (DFW-ICN rate). However I have to check each date individually then to see if it’s a Web Special (which it almost alway is).
Actually ignore my most recent comment. It would appear that AA will sometimes display Mile Saver awards as Web Specials. For example, DFW-ICN on August 29th, AA says 35k Web Special or 105k.
However this date is bookable via BA and AS, and Expert Flyer also confirms that there is Mile Saver availability on this date.
Why don’t they have a slider so you can specify the maximum fees you are willing to pay? That will shut out the ridiculous BA flights using AA miles.
Great article Greg. To continue with where you left off with AA, what’s the best way to look up partner availability for AA-flights?
AA’s own search engine isn’t great for showing the flights it makes available to partners. Alaska and BA doesn’t seem to show AA availability either. And Qantas often shows phantom availability. What’s your strategy when searching AA partner award flights?
I haven’t found a great option outside of tools like Point.me and AwardLogic. Maybe try Alaska’s website?
I just signed up for the 14 day free trial. I wanted to search United for HND to JFK, but the only “New York” option is EWR. Anyone know why? Thanks
Yes that’s because United doesn’t fly from JFK. It only supports routes that United flies.
Hi Greg,
Great article! I’m considering SeatSpy subscription but already have Seats.aero and Point.me. I like Seats.aero from the perspective it provides a lot of information quickly but it doesn’t support my home airport which means I have to do positioning flights. Also, it doesn’t support domestic flights. Point.me supports my home airport but is slow and doesn’t have the advanced capability I’m seeing with SeatSpy such as pulling for a year in advance and alerts.
I’m thinking of replacing both with SeatSpy any downside on something I’d be missing for award availability? We don’t fly a ton about 4 times a year but hope to more as we go into retirement.
Thank you for any feedback,
Bret
I doubt Seatspy would meet your needs to replace the other tools since it only supports nonstop flights. I think of Seatspy as a very specialized tool that’s great for very specific things.
Thanks for the quick response.
This post might be more helpful: https://frequentmiler.com/which-award-search-tool-is-best/
Just another bottom-feeder scam artist reaching into your pocket. I don’t need or want some idiot charging me to redeem my awards. These kinds of “services” are a ripoff and they are bad for everyone (except the self-enriching scam artists themselves). Please stop enabling and promoting them.
I’ve been using Seat Spy since you first reported it. It’s a great tool. Thank you for highlighting it. One challenge is when trying to do a partner redemption and the partner airline doesn’t see the award availability or only sees certain flights on a route but not all. It might be that the award inventory is in fact not yet released to partners. Or, it might be the same old IT connectivity issue that we all know about. For example, the AA JFK to LAX Flagship route. Rarely does award inventory show up on BA. If it does, it’s the 6am flight or something like that.
Great info. Was hoping for the points slider (IT-wise seemed so simple)!
One observation I’ve made with SeatSpy AA searches for short haul domestic is Web Specials can “hide” SAAver awards (a given flight can be both).
You might say check the box for Web Specials cheaper than SAAver but some of these flights require less BA Avios (T or U inventory) than AA miles (Web Special). Confirmed this for same flights on AA and BA websites.
I’m not sure I fully understand. Are you saying that some web special awards are available to book with BA Avios? I thought only Saaver awards were.
Hi Greg. SeatSpy does not show SAAver availability for flights are but that also have Web Specials.
When on AA you can see in flight “Details” that it is both T (SAAver) and a Web Special. I can book this flight with BA Avios.
Sorry for typos. If an AA flight is BOTH SAAver and Web Special, SeatSpy will only display it as a Web Special. Therefore SeatSpy does not correctly show ALL SAAver flights.
I’m finding the same AA flight can cost less BA Avios (for a SAAver award) than AA Miles (at their Web Special rate).
Sorry if this is a dumb question but what search software does FM consider to be the best for award searches (top 3 best)?
Unfortunately there’s no single great tool for all needs. The two that come closest are point.me and AwardLogic. I really need to finish updating this post: https://frequentmiler.com/which-award-search-tool-is-best/ !
I just bought a subscription, first try was AA DFW-AMS, shows business class for 2 at $57K plus $12. Then I go to AA and it’s 300,000 miles for that trip !!
Next I tried a different date, same results on Seatspy but on AA it is 57.5K miles, but over $700 in fees, not the $12 SeatSpy says.
Is this a sick joke?
Of course there seems to be no support either. I will give them a day and then complain to AMEX.
Any idea what plans they have for experiences eg hotel rewards that’s supposedly coming soon?
Nope. No idea
SeatSpy was interesting to me with it search function for BA, Flying Club, and Flying Blue, as I occasionally book award flights with those three FF programs. But it was not worth paying for SeatSpy based only on those programs. The addition of award searches for United and American, however, potentially make SeatSpy a game-changing program! I checked out several routes on SeatSpy for both United and American, and then spotchecked the award availability dates on the United and American websites. All good! So I then I signed up for a paid subscription this morning. Many thanks for being the best travel blogger on the internet!
I went to upgrade (Had a trial account from last year) and it wants to charge me 2.50 GBP/mo, not 2.50 USD/mo.
Bummer.
This morning SeatSpy charged me in dollars, not pounds.
contacted SS…said was limitation of Stripe – payment processor. But they said I can resign up with new account/diff email. That’s what I’ll do.
Besides price what did seat sorry have on expert flyer?
from tpg
It’s a great complement to EF (which is owned by TPG’s parent company, Red Ventures), as it shows you real-time prices instead of just whether a flight is available.
—
Expert Flyer interface not as clean….but a lot more airlines/functionality. If SeatSpy can continue to add more airlines.. it’ll be awesome. Signed up last year for the trial, never used it — as the airlines in question I seldom to never fly. But now that AA & United are there.
I’d say AA does not work. Just searched DFW-GRU on Business. SeatSpy shows ZERO availability. AA.com shows plenty
Check the “include all web special” box
thanks. Got it. two lashings for my incompetence.
SeatSpy only shows either Web Special and Saaver awards. Standard (very high priced) awards aren’t shown because they’re almost always available anyway. Also keep in mind that AA.com will include routes with stops whereas SeatSpy shows nonstop only.
Thanks for the clarification. yes, I did read that non-stop part, but that didn’t translate in my brain. Got it to work now. Maybe I shall resubscribe. An extra two lashings on my back for my tomfoolery.
I’m assuming that their tool is looking for “C” availability on AA (standard business class awards), when AA is now regularly not making space available there while booking web specials into “J” at lower redemption levels… which makes this tool not so useful for AA.
Oops, I meant “U” (Saver Award inventory), not “C” (upgrade inventory). But same issue, if there are web specials, tools like this and Expert Flyer won’t find them.
It does find web specials, look at my comment above
That’s great then, didn’t see your comment before I posted. That makes this much more useful despite some other limitations.
I see in the example that they mark “peak” and “off-peak” pricing. What does this mean now that United got rid of their award chart? Also, how does this treat AA web specials?
Pass….until they work on fixing the bugs 🙂
Which bugs do you mean?
Oh wait…I thought I was responding to your comment earlier…and then I realized your comment is there from 11 months ago. Maybe they fixed it by now? 🙂
I assume though that AA’s use of married segments for awards isn’t addressed though with this site? I.e. AA is showing coach availability for DCA-ORD-LAX on the date in May I need to travel, but not for the same ORD-LAX nonstop. Thanks Greg 🙂
That’s right.
Any idea if the United availability is showing normal or assuming you have a cc?
I can’t imagine anyone would build an award search tool that assumes that all customers using the tool have a specific credit card (and I would be less likely yet to expect that in this case since SeatSpy is a European company). I think it’s just normal United availability.
It does not assume you have a United credit card
[…] But if you’re feeling more confident and/or Virgin Atlantic fits your needs or interest the best, it obviously makes more sense to book while rates are reduced. Keep in mind that Virgin Atlantic partners with most major transferable currencies, so it is very easy to put together the points for an award. Also keep in mind that you can use SeatSpy to look at an entire year of availability at a quick glance. […]
[…] free tool for finding awards on British Airways and Virgin Atlantic operated flights. See this post for full details.United.com: This one is pretty good for finding awards across most Star Alliance carriersBA.com: […]
After several warnings that “last chance to grab a Founder membership” last month, I finally “grabbed” a $3.63/month membership. Apparently, it’s no longer “Founder membership” but still $3.63/month. No biggie if it’s useful, right?
No flights can be searched or placed on alert that departs from my home airport (LAX) other that to or from LON, CDG, PPT, AMS and MAN. So how do you manage if you want to redeem to Asia? Do two redemptions? One to one of these cities and the second from there to your destination?
Any assistance will be greatly appreciated.
The particular airlines that they have included so far aren’t great for flying from LAX to Asia. I believe that in each case, you’d have to fly via Europe. If you wanted to do that, you would put in separate alerts for LAX to Europe and Europe to Asia. The booking process is completely separate. When booking the flights, you should be able to book it as a single trip (at least with some programs). Some programs might not let you route through Europe on a single award though.
It always amuses me to see that BA Club Suite picture because I know the woman in it, who works for the British Airways press office!
At least for airlines like AF, a binary true/false for availability isn’t useful. AF typically has some award space on most routes, but since they switched to dynamic pricing you could be looking at 200K miles each way. IMO to make this tool actually useful, they need to include a filter for the number of miles required for something to show up in the results.
I believe it only shows where awards are also available to partners. For example, I searched for business class from DTW to CDG and then ran the same search on Virgin Atlantic’s website for a particular month and found that Virgin Atlantic had access to the same exact dates to fly Air France as SeatSpy showed. For the record, Virgin Atlantic charges 48,500 one-way for this flight (+ ~$250 in fees) regardless of AF’s dynamic pricing.
[…] promising tool called SeatSpy, which instantly shows a year of award availability at a time (See: SeatSpy: An awesome tool for finding BA and Virgin award flights). The currently usefulness for US-based flyers has been limited because they began with award […]
Are there any situations with any mileage program that you can use either of these carriers without large surcharges? I’m not talking about short haul.
Hmmmm… I picked a random date, June 25.
SeatSpy is showing 9 BA F seats NYC-LON… but BA is not showing any, neither is AA.
What am i doing wrong?
Thanks
I’m guessing you found a bug. 9+ First Class seats seems unlikely to me. I tested a date that showed less than 9 (2 seats on August 29th) and found the same on BA.com EWR-LHR.
Yeah you’re right. It seems like if it shows 9 seats then it’s a glitch and nothing is available.
So not so useful after all sadly.
Hi, I look after the SeatSpy site and I can see on BAs results that they are reporting availability in First class on that date. Here is a link to a screengrab: https://imgur.com/a/5YPV6Yf
I appreciate that this is a review of the SeatSpy service, and it has merit for that reason, but as you note I too hope the concept will be expanded to focus on airlines a person might actually want to redeem tickets on. Because of the utterly insane carrier imposed surcharges, BA miles on BA flights are of very little value. Sometimes you can redeem with actual negative value.
One suggestion: Let’s all please stop referring to these scam fees as “fuel” surcharges. They are not connected to fuel. That was originally a euphemism the airlines invented to make the fees look palatable to the public, but the airlines themselves are not allowed to use the term anymore. I think a well regarded site like this one could take the lead in inventing a new term that will be immediately recognizable to readers and not play into the hands of the guilty airlines. “Carrier imposed surcharges” is a bit bulky and not terribly descriptive. My choice of “scam charges” may be too judgmental for general use. There has to be a better term.
I don’t care what they call anything homeless tax, poor people tax .HC helping tax .I look @ the total price then click . I paid to much on fees home from ATH but I wanted to use those points and save the other ones . I was shocked and the hotel was laughing I had to pay $16 taxes on $100 room fees in Hawaii . As in who’s running that state and pricing people OUT ?
CHEERs