4 Tools To Help You Book Your Own Award Tickets
It's easy to get excited about the potential of traveling with miles and points. You see a few pictures on Instagram with captions about how they flew there for free, you read a couple of blog posts about credit cards and welcome bonuses, and before you know it you are hooked.
As you dream about that trip you want to take, you read about earning points and you sign up for a couple of credit cards. You start earning points and soon enough, you've built your loyalty account balances up high enough that the flights you want to take are within reach. But how do you actually book them?
That's when you learn that there are two sides to maximizing credit card and loyalty program rewards. In many ways, earning miles and points and building up balances in your loyalty accounts is the easy part. Actually using those points to book flights can be quite a bit tougher.
Booking Award Flights
Just like when you were learning how to earn miles and points, you will be able to easily find plenty of references that will teach you how to use your rewards for flights. You just need to put in the time to learn about redemptions.
Whether you have transferable points like Chase Ultimate Rewards or American Express Membership Rewards or points that are tied to a single program like Delta miles or United miles, there are details that you need to know and rules and restrictions that you must follow for award tickets.
As time goes on and you've had a little practice searching for open award seats on the routes you want to fly, you will find that it becomes a bit easier. The same goes for deciding where to send your transferable points and how to book the flights you found.
But that doesn't mean you should overlook tools that are designed to make booking award flights even easier.
Tools to Make Award Flight Booking Easier
No matter how many times you search, transfer and book, and how comfortable you are with the process, even the most experienced miles and points nerds could use some help when it comes to loyalty program redemptions. We've put together this list of some of the best tools we've found to simplify things and get you out from behind your computer and up into the air.
Straight to the Points
If you're interested in booking premium cabin award flights, meaning seats in business or first class, and you want the process to be as straightforward as possible, you can't go wrong with the aptly named Straight To The Points.
Straight To The Points was started a couple of years ago as a newsletter, and a Premium Membership level was added in early 2021 that includes virtual meetups, text alerts, exact dates and instructions for booking your tickets. The site is run by Spencer Howard, who has long been known as one of the top experts for award redemptions in the travel rewards space.
"I started Straight To The Points after hearing from tons of people with airline miles and credit card points," says Howard. "They had the miles and points to book business and first class flights to places all over the world. They just couldn't find award space or figure out the best way to book. I decided to make all of that easy."
Making it easy is exactly what Straight To The Points does, and that's why it made the top spot on our list. Rather than searching for specific dates and times for each person, Straight To The Points concentrates on sending out alerts any time they find a cluster of award availability on a certain route. Most often, the flights shown are available for multiple award seats and over an extended period of time ranging from a couple of weeks to several months.
Straight To The Points alerts not only include the routings and dates that are available for these awards, but they also include several of the best program options for booking, what flexible currencies those program points can be transferred from, and what you need to do to actually book the seats. Everything is spelled out for you, all you have to do is book it.
If you have a bit of flexibility in your travel planning, you have high balances in multiple loyalty accounts and you can book soon after receiving an alert, Straight To The Points is a service that you must sign up for. There is a basic version of the alert newsletter that is available for free, but if you want to receive all of the information and booking details that we discussed above, and be the first to hear about the award space they find, Straight To The Points Premium will cost you $99 per year.
Expert Flyer
ExpertFlyer is another valuable tool for people who want to book their own award tickets. It doesn't tell you how to book the tickets or which programs to use like Straight To The Points does, but where Expert Flyer shines is finding the available award seats for the specific dates you destinations you want to travel to.
According to Expert Flyer, the service "was designed to meet the needs of the frequent flyer, the airline mileage program "elite tier" passengers, professional travel managers, and the occasional air traveler looking for the best values." We think it does just that.
There is a tremendous amount of information available on the ExpertFlyer site, from fare classes to on-time information for each flight. The most useful tool for booking award tickets is the powerful multi-day award seat search function. Once you enter your search parameters, you get results that show every flight available for that route and what the available seats are for each flight segment.
If there aren't seats available for when you want to fly, ExpertFlyer allows you to set an alert for the flights you want. If an award seat opens up, you will receive a notification and be able to book it. This is incredibly valuable for those harder to find awards to certain destinations.
You can search a route by airline or alliance and find all of the available award seats over up to a seven day stretch. This is especially helpful when piecing together award flights that may not come up in an airline website's search. You can find the availability for each flight segment on its own and then be fully prepared when you call the airline to book.
These are just a few of the many features that are offered with the paid Pro membership. ExpertFlyer has two tiers of Pro membership available, but if you want to take advantage of what we believe are some of the most valuable features, including award flight availability alerts and the ability to search +/- 3 days, you need to go with the $99 per year Premium Pro level.
Award Hacker
Award Hacker is a great place to begin your award searches and the only completely free tool on the list. For each route search, the site allows you to choose your origin and destination, your cabin class, how many stops you will allow and it even lets you limit the search to specific airline programs or flexible currency programs.
Your search then returns information based on the airline program you will be booking with. Results include the number of miles required, the airline program used, how many stops there will be, what airlines will be operating the flights. They even let you know which flexible currencies can be transferred into each airline program.
There are a couple of things that you need to remember when looking at the results for a search on Award Hacker though. First, the search results tell you the cost in miles, but they do not provide any information about taxes, fees and fuel surcharges. With some programs when flying in premium cabins, these charges can be several hundred dollars per ticket, so it is important to check those as well.
The second thing to know is what most often confuses new users: Results on Award Hacker are hypothetical. The results you are given when you complete a search have absolutely nothing to do with what seats may be available for booking on that particular route on the dates you want. Award Hacker simply provides the number of miles it would cost you to book a low-level award with each airline. Finding an available award seat at that low level on a date you can fly is up to you.
Those things being said, Award Hacker remains a useful tool for finding the number of miles required for each airline program for a given route. Although the free site can sometimes be a bit glitchy, it is still a great place to start an award search, helping you to decide which loyalty programs you will want to look at first.
Juicy Miles
If you like the simplicity of Award Hacker but don't want to see only hypothetical awards, Juicy Miles may be just your ticket. The site, which won our top spot as a full-service award booking service, offers a self-serve option. For just $9.99, you'll get five-day access to their powerful search engine, which includes real-time inventory.
If you are past the beginner stage but not quite ready to search program by program, Juicy Miles offers a bridge between those just starting out and the ones who can go it alone.
Bottom Line
Although there are plenty of businesses out there that will search and book your award flights for you, they can easily cost a couple of hundred dollars per person for each one-way flight. If you want to save your money, you are much better off learning to book award flights on your own. That's why we thought it was important to share with you these four companies that are not only making it easier for you to find and book your award flights but helping you to learn the process as well.
Award Hacker will give you an idea of how many miles it should cost you for low-level award flights wherever you want to go and Juicy Miles will show you what is actually available. Expert Flyer streamlines the award flight search process for your specific dates and locations. Finally, Straight To The Points makes redeeming your points as simple as possible, as long as you want to fly in an upper-class cabin and have some flexibility with your travels.
The four tools we've outlined in this article should be seriously considered by anyone wanting to up their miles and points redemption game. Each of the tools may be the best for different travelers, but no matter which you choose to use, once you are relaxing in a business class suite as you fly to the other side of the world, you will understand that it was well worth the investment.