Easier Award Search Using Premium Award Searching Tools
There are several premium tools designed to help you search for award space. The three main premium options are 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.
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.
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Award Nexus
Award Nexus is a handy tool that makes it easier to search multiple dates and websites for award availability.
- Award Nexus makes it faster for you to search for award availability. 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 use 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 having 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 user 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 premiums 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.
