3 Ways To Find Award Flights Quickly
If you’ve ever spent time searching for award flights to spend your credit card points on, you’ll know it can be an exhausting process. There are so many airlines, so many flights, and so many permutations to get where you’re going. You could spend an eternity trying to find the absolute best deal for what you’re looking for. Fortunately , there are a few ways to simplify this process and save some time by finding award flights quickly using these tips.
How can I make this process easier?
As the demand for award flights grows, a few services and tools have emerged.These tools help to shorten the search and make the whole process a bit less strenuous. In the time I’ve spent doing my own searching, I have stumbled on a few examples of the following:
- Search Assistants
- Concierge Services
- AI-powered Chatbots
Each tool comes with advantages that help narrow your search. They’ll also limit time spent pilfering through hundreds of flights and routes on hundreds of airlines.
Search Assistants
Search assistants are sort of like Expedia or Priceline but built specifically for award flights. These platforms take your provided route and search a collection of airlines for award flights that satisfy your route choice. I’ve used several of these and for the most part, they all provide the same service with a few nuances.
Learn About My Top 3 Award Seat Search Assistants
These platforms allow you to search for award flights, but they do not provide the ability to book directly. Airlines to not allow third parties to book award seats like they do for normal tickets. So once you find the flight you’re looking for, you still need to contact the airline to complete the booking. They will usually tell you which loyalty programs or banks will allow you to book the seat, and in certain cases will provide detailed steps for how to book. Some of tools are better at this than others.
Each platform has a slight edge on the other, but generally speaking they all do the same. All of the tools I’ve listed in the article linked above provide some ability to use the tool for free (at the time of writing) so check them out and see which you like the best.
Concierge Services
Concierge services provide personalized full service search and booking packages. These are people who are experienced and essentially act as a travel agent for award flights. They know the best way to talk to the airlines to find seats that might not be advertised properly. As one service says “We can’t make seats appear, but we are very good at finding options that the airlines themselves don’t always present due to system limitations”.
If you’re not interested in going through the trouble yourself, this could be a cost-effective way of spending your points. Let’s look at the economics for a minute. From what I’ve seen, the going rate is about $200 – $300 per person to book. A one-way business class flight will start at around $2500 – $3000 on the low end at face value. Thats like an 6 – 8 hour flight from an east coast US city to, let’s say, London.
A quick expedia search will show you non-refundable economy seats for a similar flight for around $800 – $1000. So for two people, we’re at $1600 conservatively. But, I’ve got 100k MMR points with Amex to use. For about $500 I can pay someone to book me a business class flight? Even if the fees and/or emissions tax are high, thats gets us to $1000 – $1500 liberally, total.
The drawback is that you generally have to pay a fee upfront just to talk to one of these services. For example, one I looked at had a $50 consulting fee for a 30 minute call. Another had a $40 search fee just to fill out a form and have someone call you back.
An international trip could easily cost $3000 or more just for flights in economy. So if you have miles to spend, it might be worth looking into.
AI Chatbots
With the rise of LLM’s like ChatGPT every task in world now seems easier. In the case of award seat searching, these chatbots can help you narrow your search by giving you high level information about the routes and point value cost for airlines. Mostly these are going off of award charts (I think) and they aren’t able to access the real-time data to query availability, but they may be able to help you search the right airlines and shorted the amount of time it takes you to book.
There is at least one model that has been trained on top of openAi’s GPT model specifically to provide information about award travel. I haven’t compared the results of the trained model to the standard GPT results, but again, these models are inherently limited in what they’re able to provide. In my opinion these are best at helping you decide things like what airport to leave from for the best deal, or which airlines might have the best deals for the route you’re trying to take. Ai prompts are an art in and of themselves, so its worth playing around with and seeing what kind of results you get.
What works for you best?
When choosing, just keep in mind that these are all just different methods to get to the same result. They each cater to a different process or school of thought, so play around see what works best for you. If you’re new to the game, practice gets you closer to perfect (thats the saying right?). I’m not sure there is perfection in the world of points and award flights, but we’re trying to get you a little closer!
