Difference between revisions of "Premium award search tools"
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| − | With the exception of Juicy Miles, all these tools provide free trials. So you can you check them out for yourself and determine whether they provide enough value to justify their cost. Juicy Miles doesn't have a free trial | + | With the exception of Juicy Miles, all these tools provide free trials. So, you can you check them out for yourself and determine whether they provide enough value to justify their cost. Juicy Miles doesn't have a free trial but does allow you to sign up for 5-days for "only" $10. |
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| − | <li>'''Juicy Miles costs money to use'''. An ongoing membership is $30 per month! However, you can pay $10 to use the service for 5 days. If you are able to find award space and book right away, it can be affordable to | + | <li>'''Juicy Miles costs money to use'''. An ongoing membership is $30 per month! However, you can pay $10 to use the service for 5 days. If you are able to find award space and book right away, it can be affordable to sign up for $10 each time you are planning a trip. But, if you need to periodically check to see if award inventory is opening up, the ongoing membership rate is pretty expensive.</li> |
<li>'''Not only does Juicy Miles do a good job of finding award availability, it does a good job of helping you see the different award options for booking your ticket'''. When you do a search, it displays the various options for booking the reward on the left-side. It will even account for current transfer bonuses when calculating the number of points needed from different transferable point currencies. And it often, but not always, does a decent job of estimating additional fees and surcharges.</li> | <li>'''Not only does Juicy Miles do a good job of finding award availability, it does a good job of helping you see the different award options for booking your ticket'''. When you do a search, it displays the various options for booking the reward on the left-side. It will even account for current transfer bonuses when calculating the number of points needed from different transferable point currencies. And it often, but not always, does a decent job of estimating additional fees and surcharges.</li> | ||
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<li>'''ExpertFlyer’s premium service can notify you when new award space becomes available—which can be hugely valuable when you can’t immediately find availability for your trip'''. If someone cancels their reservation or the airline juggles the available inventory, you might be able to book an award routing that is not currently available. You will need to set up individual alerts for each specific flight you want to track.</li> | <li>'''ExpertFlyer’s premium service can notify you when new award space becomes available—which can be hugely valuable when you can’t immediately find availability for your trip'''. If someone cancels their reservation or the airline juggles the available inventory, you might be able to book an award routing that is not currently available. You will need to set up individual alerts for each specific flight you want to track.</li> | ||
| − | <li>'''Expert Flyer offers a free alert service that will let you know if a better seat becomes available for your flight'''. With the free version of the service, you can track one flight at a time. With the | + | <li>'''Expert Flyer offers a free alert service that will let you know if a better seat becomes available for your flight'''. With the free version of the service, you can track one flight at a time. With the premium version, you can track multiple flights.</li> |
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Revision as of 00:42, 14 May 2020
There are several premium tools designed to help you search for award space. The four main premium options are Juicy Flights, ExpertFlyer, the KVS Availability Tool, and Award Nexus.
While the award search features of these tools can sometimes be helpful, infrequent travelers may want to save their money and stick with free search tools. That said, some of these tools have free features that can be incredibly useful and paying a small fee can be worthwhile for planning some trips.
With the exception of Juicy Miles, all these tools provide free trials. So, you can you check them out for yourself and determine whether they provide enough value to justify their cost. Juicy Miles doesn't have a free trial but does allow you to sign up for 5-days for "only" $10.
Jump to
Juicy Miles
Juicy Miles is the best available tool for finding award space. It doesn't always find every possible award seat, but it is far easier than searching multiple sites. Many people are likely to find it "good enough" and decide not to bother with more complicated approaches.
- Juicy Miles costs money to use. An ongoing membership is $30 per month! However, you can pay $10 to use the service for 5 days. If you are able to find award space and book right away, it can be affordable to sign up for $10 each time you are planning a trip. But, if you need to periodically check to see if award inventory is opening up, the ongoing membership rate is pretty expensive.
- Not only does Juicy Miles do a good job of finding award availability, it does a good job of helping you see the different award options for booking your ticket. When you do a search, it displays the various options for booking the reward on the left-side. It will even account for current transfer bonuses when calculating the number of points needed from different transferable point currencies. And it often, but not always, does a decent job of estimating additional fees and surcharges.
- Unfortunately, the current version requires clicking through each of the programs see all your options. If you find a good flight, you'll need to click through every program and then see if you can re-find the flight to check that program's cost. Experienced users can guess which programs would be likely candidates for any given flight, but it would just be easier if Juicy Miles provided a list of award options for each flight, rather than a list of flight options for each award program.
- There is also no way to search all the flight options for each date. Since the results are always organized by the program being used, there is no way to simply see all your options. However, since the Marriott program has so many partners, it often includes every flight that Juicy Miles uncovers. You can compare the number of flights found with the number of departures listed under the Marriott program, to see if the Marriott program includes all the available options. If it does, you can see all your flight options by clicking on Marriott (and then browse around to find your lowest cost booking option). If it doesn't, you'll need to check each program and scan through the frequently duplicative listings to uncover the additional flight options.
- Juicy Miles only searches one day at a time. You can ask it to search a multi-day span, but the results for each day are always displayed individually. You'll need to click through each date using the controls at the top of the page.
- It also only searches one cabin class at a time. Most airline websites will show you availability for all classes simultaneously.
- If you are putting together a segment-by-segment routing, you can filter the results to just non-stop flights by clicking the "Refine" button.
- It is hard to understand what Juicy Miles is actually searching. As a result, it is hard to know which flights it might be missing. People who aren't just going to live with Juicy Miles's "good enough" approach will likely decide to not use it all, because it is hard to understand which sites you'd have to use to augment its results. At the very least, their FAQ suggests that you'll need to look for Cathay Pacific flights elsewhere and that they miss many American Airlines flight segments.
Award Nexus
Award Nexus is a handy tool that makes it easier to search multiple dates and websites for award availability.
- Award Nexus allows you to search faster. With Award Nexus, you enter your information once and their meta-search engine searches several different airline websites looking for award availability. It will search each day, individually, for up to a week at a time and can even search for multiple destinations at the same time.
- You can always search the same websites yourself. While Award Nexus will automatically run a bunch of searches for you, it is fundamentally just searching up to seven different airline websites (Air Canada, Air France, ANA, British Airways, Cathay Pacific, Japanese Airlines, and Qantas). You can search the same airlines websites yourself. In fact, these are generally the websites where we recommend that you do your searching. Award Nexus saves you the hassle of having to re-enter your information and manually search for each possible day, but it doesn’t provide access to any information you can’t get for free.
- Award Flights has similar functionality and doesn’t cost anything to use. Award Nexus has been a valuable tool for some time. However, recently a similar tool called “Award Flights” has become available. It works the same way as Award Nexus and is free to use. At least for now, Award Nexus is the more polished of the tools, so if you don’t mind spending a little bit of money, it is the better one to uses. But if you don’t want to spend any money, you can try Award Flights instead
- While Award Nexus makes searching more convenient, it can be expensive to use. There is no fixed subscription fee. Instead each search costs a certain number of points. You are charged one point for each website it searches, for each day, for each class of service. Want to search the 5 main supported airline sites for a week at a time? It will cost you 35 points. You’ll burn through points quickly if you are checking alternative airports, different segments, and different dates. At a cost of around $10 per 100 points, the more you use it, the more it costs, with no “cap” when you need to try lots of searches. You could easily spend tens of dollars searching for a flight. But you can also save a bunch of time.
- You can sign up for a free “community account” that will give you 100 free points every 3 months. That may be enough to plan a trip without needing to spend any money. You’ll need to join the FlyerTalk community (which is free) and then sign-up for an account with Award Nexus.
- Award Nexus provides a useful “Route Explorer” that can help you find alternative routes for an award trip. We highly recommend signing up for a free account just to take advantage of this tool. It doesn’t cost any points to use.
ExpertFlyer
- ExpertFlyer is sometimes the only, or often the most convenient way, to search online for award availability on many unaffiliated airlines. The best frequent flyer program websites do a good job of searching for award availability on the airlines that belong to the big three alliances. However, there is no convenient way to search for the dozens of other airlines that you can book with your credit card points.
- However, you'll need to search one airline at a time. While ExpertFlyer can search a larger number of different airlines, it forces you to search one airline at a time. This isn’t a big obstacle when you are searching a limited set of additional airlines that fly to your destination. But, when you want to search the bigger airlines, it is more convenient to use the best airline websites first, which will simultaneously search all the airlines in the alliance, uncover routes that use multiple airlines, and provide an easier-to-use experience.
- ExpertFlyer charges a monthly fee. It costs $5 per month, for a up to 250 queries (one query per airline) or $10 per month for unlimited queries plus the often invaluable availability alerts and the ability to search a week at a time. You can get started with a hassle-free 5-day trial.
- It is worth “temporarily” signing-up when you need to search hard-to-search airlines. While you may not want to spend $60 or $120 per year on a subscription, it can easily be worthwhile to sign up for a single month at a time, while you are planning a difficult trip. You can then cancel your subscription, until you need to use the tool again.
- ExpertFlyer’s premium service can notify you when new award space becomes available—which can be hugely valuable when you can’t immediately find availability for your trip. If someone cancels their reservation or the airline juggles the available inventory, you might be able to book an award routing that is not currently available. You will need to set up individual alerts for each specific flight you want to track.
- Expert Flyer offers a free alert service that will let you know if a better seat becomes available for your flight. With the free version of the service, you can track one flight at a time. With the premium version, you can track multiple flights.
Checking these other airlines takes time and effort. Calling in to various frequent flyer programs is time consuming and the phone representative might not search very exhaustively. You might be able to search online on the airline’s own website, but you’ll often need to sign up for an account first, you’ll always need to learn the quirks and unique user experiences of each site, and you’ll need to use a different site for each airline. In some cases, smaller airlines don’t provide online availability information, even for their own flights.
With Expert Flyer, you can search for availability on many of these airlines, using a single, consistent tool.
KVS Tool
The KVS Tool is the least useful of the premium services. It is harder to use, only runs on your PC, and doesn’t have Expert Flyer’s useful alerting feature. However, it does support a small set of airlines that ExpertFlyer does not.
