Searching for Award Availability

Ok, you’ve opened up some credit cards and now have lots of miles. Hooray! Now what? They say that collecting miles is only half the battle – actually using them can possibly be even harder! So, how do you use those miles? How do you know if you’re using them in the best way?

Let’s start with some background and then we’ll get into the actual steps of searching for award availability.

Assuming you know where you want to travel, the first step is to figure out what airlines fly the route. Google flights is really helpful here. Checking off the “non-stop” option will limit your results to only the airlines that fly directly between 2 cities. (As an aside, if you’re ever curious what airlines fly from and what destinations are served by a particular airport, Wikipedia is a great resource for that, just search for the airport name or airport IATA code (e.g., JFK, DFW). If you don’t know the code, you can Google, “Buenos Aires airport code” to find out that it’s EZE.) Another option to help with routing that I recently learned about is FlightConnections, which is described really well in this Travel Codex article.

Now that you know what airline you want to fly, you need to find out if you have the right miles to fly them. If you have miles with a specific airline (aka “airline/miles currency”), then you know what you have to work with. But, if you have transferrable currencies – like Chase, Amex, Citi, SPG points – then your points can be sent to many different airline programs, expanding your possibilities. Here is an awesome chart to show you which bank points transfer to which airlines. It’s important to note that you don’t necessarily want to transfer your points to the actual airline that you want to fly with, as sometimes it can be cheaper to book the flight using a partner airline's miles. The idea is that you need to think about your trip as 2 separate airlines: One, the airline “metal” (as it’s called) that you’re actually flying on (i.e. you are sitting on a United airplane); Two, the airline that you are paying for the ticket (that’s whose miles you need to use). Sometimes, it will be the same airline for both, but many times it can be cheaper to use a partner airline to pay. For example, if you want to fly on American Airlines from New York to Miami, it will cost 12,500 American miles for one way in economy. However, you can fly on that same flight and pay with British Airways miles for only 7,500 miles. In that case, you’d want to transfer your points to British Airways instead of American. It’s not simple to always know the cheapest program to book with. The more you do it, the better you’ll get. AwardHacker is a good site to price out which program would be cheapest to book a specific flight. It’s not perfect – doesn’t always list all options – but it’s pretty good. A more manual process would be to first find all airlines that are partners with the one you want to fly and then Google each airline’s “award chart”. Most airlines have award charts that list the prices for flying from any region in the world to any other region. Sometimes they have separate charts for using miles to fly on their own airline metal and another chart for flying on their partners’ metals. FYI – this is not an easy step until you get familiar with all the programs and even then, airlines regularly devalue their programs, so there is a lot of research and information to stay on top of.

Now you know what airline(s) fly the route, and you know the cheapest airline currency to pay with, so how do you actually find award availability?

As opposed to cash prices, which fluctuate seemingly every day, most airlines have fixed award prices, meaning that there either is availability to use miles, or there isn’t. Availability can also change quite often depending on whether people cancel award tickets so those seats are back in inventory or the airline decides to release more seats to award inventory (perhaps if it’s close to departure and there are still a lot of seats unsold), so you need to be prepared to search often – even several times a day! While I have essentially explained availability as a “Yes/No” scenario, it does get a bit deeper. Basically every airline has a few different levels of fares that can be purchased with miles. Colloquially, they are referred to as “Saver” and “Standard” award prices. Saver is the cheapest price level that an airline offers and where you’ll get the most bang for your buck. You need the Saver level to be available on the airline you want to fly with in order to use partner miles to book the flight. Some airlines will even have several levels of Saver and Standard, but usually, only the lowest level of Saver provides a value that makes using miles worthwhile to pay for your flight, so that’s what you’re looking for. Saver prices are usually the ones you’ll see listed on those award charts described above. The tricky part with most airlines is that they don’t always differentiate between Saver and Standard (because they want consumers to just book at whatever price they see), so you have to know if the price your seeing is the lowest level or not (that takes us back to studying the award charts to get familiar with Saver prices, or using AwardHacker to verify).

How do you practically search for award space?

For US airlines, you can search directly on their websites. Fill out the departure and arrival cities and your dates and be sure to check off the box that says something like “Use Miles”. That will show you results for award space only and not any cash prices. I also usually search just “one way” at a time, since as opposed to cash prices, miles aren’t cheaper when booked as a roundtrip. I prefer to see if there is availability at least one way, because perhaps I can take a different airline on the return.

Here’s the “Miles” option on Delta.com

Let’s look at some search results from AA.com:

American shows 4 price levels, each indicated by the 4 colored boxes. The lowest level, called” Economy MileSAAver,” is what we called Saver until now and “Economy AAnytime” is what we called Standard. You can see that there are 2 dates that have Saver availability for 12.5K. The greyed out dates are all Standard prices and look at that range – all the way from 30K to 50K just for the one way flight! The blue boxes are for business class and work the same way as economy. While the United and Delta websites look different visually, searching and finding award space follows the same concept. However, they are a bit trickier as you can see on United’s website here:

United only shows 1 column for economy flights and says “lowest” which makes you think you’re getting the best deal. However as you can see, in that same column you have a flight for 12.5K and a flight for 25K. This is a recent change to the United website, and it’s showing both Saver and Standard prices/availability in the same column. Delta.com works in a similar way. If the first flight wasn’t available, you would only see the second one in your results, and you might think that 25K is the Saver level. Just another reason why it’s important to become familiar with Saver prices for different airlines/routes. To refresh something I mentioned above, if you wanted to use a partner’s miles for this flight, you could only use them for the first option since that one is Saver, but the partner would not be able to book the second option.

That covers the main US airlines: Search for availability on their own websites, but sometimes partners might be cheaper to book with.  In terms of searching for Saver availability on other airlines, it becomes important to learn where to best search for each one. The benefit of airline alliances and partnerships comes into play here as many partners can be searched for on these 3 main websites. Some airlines may show up on one of these sites, but may actually offer more availability on their own site to people who use their own miles to book, such as Lufthansa. Remember that if you’re trying to fly on Turkish, and you’ve found availability on United.com, that doesn’t mean the best way to book it is with either United or Turkish miles – it could be that a different partner, like Singapore, has the best rate! Some airlines’ availability can’t be searched for online at all, and you’ll have to call them up to see if there is space.

Finally, there are a few 3^rd party programs that can search for availability, most notably ExpertFlyer, which costs $100 a year. ExpertFlyer can’t search for every single airline, but it can handle a lot of them and most importantly, it can set alerts to email you if award space opens up! That feature is awesome and can save you time from having to repeatedly search for award space.

To finish this off, I’ll give some recommended airline websites that can search for more partners than the standard United, American and Delta:

•          Air Canada (Star Alliance)
•           British Airways (OneWorld Alliance)
•           Korean (SkyTeam Alliance)
•           Alaska (Not in an alliance, but partners with a lot of airlines)

      We covered a lot of sub topics here under "award availability," and there is much more that can be covered, but I hope you find this starter to be helpful!