Most airlines don’t show availability of awards on all of their partners on their own websites. You’d think you could type in where you’re flying from and where you’re going and get a list of available flights, but that’s often not the case.
If you searched flights from Los Angeles to Hong Kong on the American Airlines website, it will tell you only if you can fly American Airlines (using American’s own Los Angeles – Hong Kong non-stop or their Dallas to Hong Kong flight). It won’t ever tell you about the four flights a day Los Angeles – Hong Kong non-stop on oneworld partner Cathay Pacific, because Cathay’s award space isn’t supported by AA.com. And it won’t show you connections on Japan Airlines, either.
That’s why:
- It pays to call in addition to searching online
- The best thing is to find award space yourself and then call, asking for exactly the flights you already know are available.
In other to do this you need to know where to search.
Since I search for a lot of award availability, I use several paid sites and tools but for the most part they’re accessing publicly available information, you just need to know where to look for it.
- KVS Tool is a downloadable software program, you enter your search in a simple box and it queries the relevant airline sites for you. You can have multiple copies of the program open at a time to do concurrent searches. And you can have it search a month at a time, stopping when it comes up with available space.
- Award Nexus is a site that lets you search many of these same data sources as much as a month at a time and gives you results on a calendar. It’s the most expensive (you essentially pay per-search) but probably the most powerful. You can automate searches and get emailed results.
- Expert Flyer has the most limited coverage of airlines but it has American Airlines upgrade space (which no other source does) and can search for space and email you when it opens up. It also has revenue availability and can alert you when preferred seats open up.
- Pex+ is a new entrant, it has some great features (it’s fast and you can have it email you went award prices drop), but when I first blogged about it their servers couldn’t handle the deluge. They seem to be improving and it’s worth giving them a short, I hope site performance stays strong.
Very few people use all of these, and most will only use the free airline websites that give you the underlying data — paid services are for power users.
But what websites do you go to? Here are some that I use, for different airlines.
Star Alliance airlines: I use Aeroplan.com most, because it’s fast and finds plenty of routings even I might not have thought of. United.com is likely the easiest but it isn’t totally comprehensive and it’s about to get worse when they roll out the updated website. The ANA website is another place to check availability on airlines across the alliance. See: How to Book Star Alliance Awards
oneworld airlines: I find the Qantas frequent flyer website to be the quickest and easiest, but it doesn’t include all oneworld airlines. For Malaysia Airlines and Japan Airlines I search the British Airways ba.com website. While BA.com will occasionally give ‘false positives’ for space (especially on LAN) it does so less frequently than the Qantas website. See: The Ultimate Guide to Booking Award Tickets Using American Miles
Skyteam: Delta.com is getting better, but it doesn’t support as many airlines as AirFrance.us. Air France’s website will sometimes show phantom space you can’t actually book, especially on Kenya Airways. Air France has been known to close down accounts of members who don’t have any miles and don’t use their accounts for anything other than award searches.
Emirates: You can find Emirates award space using the Qantas website. It’s available also on the Alaska Airlines website, but only for routes that Alaska lets you redeem miles for (and sometimes shows false positives). If you search Dubai – Bangkok you won’t get results from Alaska’s website but you will get results from Qantas.
Virgin Australia: I use Delta.com most frequently, rather than the Virgin Australia website (anyone can join and search, but you need to use an address from an eligible country). The interesting thing about Virgin Australia is that their site shows Singapore Airlines award availability and has access to much more space than most partners do.
Singapore Airlines: They’re a Star Alliance airline but they almost never make long haul premium cabin award space available to their partners so you won’t see much of it at Aeroplan.com. But if you’re using Singapore Airlines miles you have access to much better availability. Generally I’ll search the Singapore Airlines website to find the space but Virgin Australia is also an option.
Virgin Atlantic: This airline isn’t a member of a global alliance, but they’re 49% owned by Delta and so you can use either the Delta.com or Virgin Atlantic websites to search award space.
Etihad: You can search Etihad’s website and don’t even need an account with them to do so. You want to look only at the lowest level “Guest” award space and that’s what you can use American miles for, or miles from other partner airlines. See: How to Snag Etihad First Class Awards and if American Airlines agents don’t see the award space you want call their Australia number.
Although I bookmark many of these posts, I like to print out some of these articles from time to time and file them for future reference. I don’t see a condensed article print option anywhere. If I print manually then the pictures take up too much space. It would be nice to be able to print the font only.
@TJ
Bit more work, but you can copy and paste the whole thing into MS Word or some other editing software and just delete the content you don’t want before printing.
@TJ
Or print to a PDF and file electronically on your computer or dropbox or whatever even with the pictures.
Extremely helpful. Thank you.
I have never been able to use PEX+ for Australia-Europe route. It also does not seem to like my email address (it keeps telling me my gmail address is invalid). Oh well, I guess kudos is due to their beta testers (not!).
Do you have registration code for KVS Tool?
Thanks!
Good info, bookmarked!
Pex+ has NEVER worked for me. I tried it when you first wrote about, and again today.
I have tried numerous city pairs, tried fixed dates and flexible dates, used three different browsers, etc. and all it does is refresh the page which wipes out my input fields.
What is the secret to getting ANY results from this Not-Ready-for-Prime-Time option?
“Japan Airlines I search the British Airways ba.com website”
Why not search the JL website?
@foosion i haven’t found match of what JL offers their own members vs what partners see to be perfect
United’s new website? Are they changing their website again???
Hi Gary, thanks for your great sharing and info. I have the trouble finding award thicket for Lufthansa F class. Do you have any suggestion?
@Gary, agreed, but ba.com isn’t perfect either, at least for AA availability. In my limited experience, JL and ba.com are about equal accuracy. Worth checking both and then calling AA. I’ve never had an AAgent find something that wasn’t listed on either JL or BA.
YMMV.
@ Martin
Same here. I have tried Pex+ numerous times without success after Gary’s first post. Gary might be using some trick that we do not know about? 😉
@b award search – yes – alongside today’s other changes
KVS tool, hands down, is the most robust of them all. Their mobile site has been indispensable when half-way around the world trying to find the quickest award home. And being able to run multiple copies of the app at a time to search various engines in the same (or different) alliances until it stops with the exact filter you have set is a huge (yuge!) time saver.
@Hossein This is bizarre as there are other users successfully creating PEX+ accounts. If you don’t mind, please send your email address to info [[at]] pexportal.com so we can get to the bottom this and you can get to searching.
@Martin Sorry to hear you’re having these issues using PEX+. There are numerous users successfully performing searches and we’d like to figure out why it’s not working for you (I just did another one, LAX-SYD, and here’s my screenshot: https://i.imgur.com/U9oEDoe.png). Could you please send us an email at info [[at]] pexportal.com with some of the searches you’ve tried?
@Jessica,
Thanks for the follow up. Email sent as directed.
@Jon,
I have paid for KVS multiple times and I agree it is a great tool, but owner/programmer arrogance got to me and I did not renew my subscription.
For whatever reason they have decided to write KVS exclusively for Windows. That is a design decision and while I do not understand the logic but I can respect that. But the flat refusal of the programmer to concede there are people who may be happy to pay for KVS but are not happy to install a copy of Windows merely to use KVS really irks me.
In one occasion I mentioned that running KVS under VMware causes my backup (TimeMachine) to take hours instead of minutes. The suggested solution: stop using TimeMachine for the VMware!! I had to pick up my jaw from the floor at the suggestion that I should stop backing up my computer simply because I want to use KVS!! It cannot be explained in any other way by pure arrogance. If he does not wish to acknowledge there is a market outside Windows, I’m happy to hold on to my money…
Excuse my sentence composition above; I am not sure if I can edit my post 🙁
@Hossein: It is unfortunate that you feel that way.
In reality, from the inception of the KVS Tool back in 2004, we have invested considerable resources to support Mac/Linux environments and there are is a considerable number of KVS Tool users, who run it on their Macs.
Furthermore, there are solutions available that do not require one to install a copy of Windows at all.
Further information can be found in the Mac section of the KVS Tool User Guide:
http://Help.KVSTool.com/#Mac