Which award search tool is best?

It’s possible to fly economy class to Hawaii for 10,000 miles, or fly business class to Europe for as few as 34,000 miles, or fly business class to South Africa for 75,000 miles. It’s easy to dream about enjoying flights like these, but it’s often very difficult to find award availability. That’s where tools can help. Instead of searching day by day and from one airport to another, over and over, you can save a ton of time by letting award search tools do the work…

This post has been re-written since last publication (again!). Modern award search tools let you search for award flights across a wide range of loyalty programs. The best tools allow live searching a range of dates and multiple airports at once. They also offer a way to discover awards across entire regions and across time. By using pre-cached information, they can (for example) show business class awards available for a family of 4 to travel to Europe over summer break. The downside of this approach is that some of that pre-cached information will be out-of-date by the time you see it and so the best of these tools make it easy to refresh results. For more about this type of functionality, see: A new breed of award discovery tools. Finally, since award space comes and goes and comes again over time, the best tools let you create alerts so that you’ll be notified when awards of interest become available.

Award Search Tools

The following sections display information about tools which search across a number of award programs after you to specify an origin airport, destination airport, date of travel, and number of travelers. Tools that operate differently can be found later in this post under the heading “Specialty Award Search Tools”.

Overview

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Live Search Details

Here you’ll find more information about each tool’s live award search capabilities:

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Cached Discovery Details

Here you’ll find more information about each tool’s cached discovery capabilities. This is where tools allow the user to search broadly across cached data. For example, some of these tools allow you to show business class flight awards over the next two months departing from the United States and arriving in Europe.

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Notes about each search tool

AwardLogic

• Crazy expensive compared to the competition
• Does not offer award discovery
• I do not recommend this tool.

Award Tool

• Standout features include free multi-day search, free multi-airport search, free alerts, excellent discovery features, and fast results.
• Free version: In addition to offering 4 day search windows, AwardTool also offers “Mega” searches which can include ranges of up to 24 days when searching a single program. The catch is that you are limited to running these no more than 3 times per day.
• Paid version: gives you the flexibility to choose how you want to use your 24 degrees of freedom: you can do a 24 day date range; or list up to 24 airports with a single date; or search across 2 origin airports, 2 destination airports, and 6 dates; or any combination thereof.
• Panorama (Award Tool’s discovery feature) refreshes results live while you’re viewing them. This is great but also a little confusing since results you are looking at can disappear while you’re looking. The free version only lets you view results within the next 90 days.

pointhound

• Features a cute dog.
• It works well enough, but it doesn’t have as many useful features as some other tools (no alerts, for example).
• May be a good option for beginners.

point.me

• Searches more relevant airline programs than any other tool
• Offers the most detailed instructions for beginners.
• Neither date ranges nor alerts are supported
• Explore (point.me’s discovery feature) allows broad destination searches (e.g. “to Europe”) but requires the departure airport to be specified exactly (you can’t ask it to find all flights from the United States, for example).
• point.me’s searches are very slow, but we’ve been told that they’ll be rolling out dramatic speed improvements soon.

point.me (via Bilt)

• Bilt Rewards is a rewards program intended for people who pay rent, but anyone can join for free . Once you’ve joined and installed the Bilt app on your phone, you can use the free embedded version of point.me to search for flight awards (go to Travel… Flights… Transfer Partners). This version of point.me is limited to Bilt’s transfer partners (found here). See also: Bilt adds free Point.me integration for award searches with partners!
• Standout feature: detailed instructions for beginners.
• If you’d prefer to use this version of point.me on the web, you can log into your Bilt account here: www.biltrewards.com/rewards/travel.

point.me (via Amex)

• American Express and point.me have teamed up to offer a free version of point.me for American Express customers. This version of point.me includes only transfer partners that are available through Amex Membership Rewards.
• Standout feature: detailed instructions for beginners.
• Use this link to log-in: point.me/amex

Points Path

• Points Path is different from the other tools in this round-up in that it’s a Chrome plug-in that works automatically with Google Flights. See details here: Points Path – An easy “set and forget” award search tool.
• Standout feature: Set and forget. If you use Google Flights regularly, this tool will automatically show you point prices alongside cash prices.

PointsYeah

• Standout features include free multi-day search, free alerts, and fast results.
• The premium version offers an 8 day date range and up to two origin and two destination airports for a total of up to 32 degrees of freedom (more than Award Tool’s 24). Unfortunately it’s not as flexible as AwardTool in that you can’t do more than 2 airports or extend the date range beyond 8 days.
• Standout features include multi-day search, multi-airport search, alerts, excellent discovery capability, and fast results.

roame.travel

• Free version offers 3 day date range and paid version offers 7.
• SkyView (roame’s discovery feature) is well integrated with its search capability such that you can easily switch back and forth while looking for awards. This goes a long way towards making up for the fact that the search feature doesn’t allow choosing multiple airports at once.

Seats.aero

• This tool was initially designed purely as a special purpose award discovery tool (for finding cached results), but it now also offers live search for Pro users.
• This tool is extremely powerful for advanced users. It makes it super easy to find some of the toughest-to-find awards such as Qatar QSuites, Emirates first class, and more.
• More about Seats.aero can be found below under Specialty Award Search Tools.

Specialty Award Search Tools

Unlike general purpose award search tools, the specialty award search tools listed below are designed to help find awards for specific carriers or routes. For example, if your heart is set on flying a specific United Airlines route, one of the specialty award search tools may be the best option for you.

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Notes about each of the above programs:

Expert Flyer

Expert Flyer is a nerdy tool for finding award space, upgrade space, open seats and more.  Expert Flyer doesn’t do general award searches across airlines.  Instead, you tell it which specific airline you want to fly, which route and dates, and it will tell you if it can find saver level award availability.  It won’t tell you the award price or which program to use to book the awards.

Pros

• Identifies multi-leg awards, not just non-stop
• Provides many other flight features besides award searches

Cons

• Requires you to know which airline you want to fly
• Doesn’t display award prices
• Doesn’t help identify best points or miles to use to book a given award
• Setting alerts can be a painstaking process: You need to set up a separate alert for each and every flight + date of interest.  For example, if there are three flights per day that would work for you and you’re open to flying on any of 4 different days, then you would need to setup 12 different alerts.

SeatSpy

SeatSpy is unique in that it displays a full year of award availability all at once… and relatively quickly.  If you know which airline you want to fly, and if that airline is supported by SeatSpy, this is a great option.

Pros

• Displays an entire year of results at a time
• Fast results (especially considering that it shows an entire year at once)
• Displays award prices when you click on a date
• Alerts are easy to set up and can be set for an almost unlimited date range
• Inexpensive compared to the other tools

Cons

• Relatively few relevant airlines supported

Seats.Aero

Seats.Aero is a awesome nerdy tool that is mostly designed for finding last-minute hard-to-get awards. See my full review here: Seats.aero — a wonderfully nerdy tool for finding Unicorn flight awards.

Pros

• Lightning fast
• Free standard version
• Supports broad searches such as “North America” to “Asia”

Cons

• Not all airline routes are included
• Free version only searches 2 months into the future
• Not designed for novices

Which is Best?

If you’re looking for a free general purpose tool, AwardTool and PointsYeah offer similar capabilities. Both offer date range searches, award alerts, and capable discovery functions. PointsYeah has an edge because its discovery function (DayDream Explorer isn’t limited for free users). On the other hand, if you want to search multiple airports at once, you’ll need AwardTool. Of course, since the tools are free, you might as well use both! And, while you’re at it, if you regularly use Google Flights, you should consider installing Points Path so that you’ll automatically get award prices within your Google Flights search results.

For the paid tools, again my favorites are AwardTool and PointsYeah, but I slightly prefer AwardTool thanks to the fact that its possible to search up to 24 airports at once.

Among the specialty search tools, Seats.Aero is my go-to. I love that I can do things like find available Qatar QSuites awards or Emirates first class awards, anywhere in the world, in seconds.

Interested in hotel awards? See:

• Which hotel award search tool is best?

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