Top 5 Award Travel Tools

Each one of us has our ways. Travel tools come in very handy not only in decision-making but also help us navigate the finer details of all things loyalty. I am forever grateful that smarter folks than I have invested their time, money and career, building tools that help us make better travel decisions. Here are my top five favourite award travel tools, with a few honourable mentions.

Seats.aero

It’s a chicken-or-egg problem: is award space hard to find, so we need travel tools to help, or do travel tools make it too easy and therefore award space is harder to find?

To be frank, regardless of the answer, you’re behind if you’re not using seats.aero. Seats.aero is the premier award tool for setting award space alerts (by text is awesome), exploring all award space between regions across 20+ frequent flyer programs, and built-in filters for popular awards like ANA first class. I’m also finding a lot of value in their alerts for hotel rooms available with points, rooms.aero.

That’s just the tip of the iceberg and I’d say seats.aero is essential for all award travelers.

Our affiliate link for seats.aero Pro

Thrifty Traveler

Think of Thrifty Traveler not like seats.aero where you can customize flight searches, but a general award email service where you’re notified of award space alerts.

Thrifty Traveler sends emails when it locates premium cabin award space for 2+ travelers across many dates for a certain airline and cabin class. One day, you’ll receive alerts for LATAM award space to Buenos Aires and Chile, while the next week you’ll receive Emirates business class award space to Dubai.

Thrifty Traveler takes this a step further and tells you how much it costs across various programs, as well as how to actually transfer points, log in, and make the booking.

It’s one of those things where most emails might not be relevant to you, but it only takes one solid award booking for the entire service to pay for itself.

Our affiliate link for Thrifty Traveler

ExpertFlyer

ExpertFlyer was the go-to award search program pre-pandemic and then fell off the map a little after dropping support for many frequent flyer programs.

However, ExpertFlyer’s other tools, like showing the minimum connection time (as a guideline for when I connect on separate tickets), seat map alerts, and searching for Air Canada e-upgrade space (“R” class), still kept it in my roster as a tool I’ve consistently paid for. In early March, ExpertFlyer rolled out extensive updates, including but not limited to enhanced visual seat maps, expanded AA systemwide upgrade search, and increased quick alert features.

Now, it’s easier and faster to set alerts for everything AvGeeks care about: aircraft changes, schedule changes, seat changes, and of course, award space alerts.

Two other underrated ExpertFlyer features are searching for revenue premium cabin space as an indicator of when and if award space will open and looking up the reason for a flight delay or cancellation to use for insurance and/or airline claims during irregular operations (IRROPs).

Award Hack

This is a lesser-known travel tool that I use for one specific, but incredibly useful, purpose: finding the best program to book a specific award. By entering an origin and destination, Award Hack will show all airlines flying this route, and after clicking a specific airline, you can see how much it costs to book through different programs and classes of service.

A while back, I needed to book Tashkent – Doha and I first grabbed it with American Airlines for 17,500 miles. Then I thought I can book this with Avios and save my AA. Finally, I realized it was just 7,500 Atmos Rewards in economy — what a deal.

H/T to my friend Richard for bringing Award Hack to my attention

In the above example, 4,500 Atmos Rewards points is a great redemption, but given how difficult it is to earn Atmos Rewards points, I would opt to book with Etihad Guest (transferable from Amex MR) as long as I’m certain about the trip, given Etihad’s punitive change and cancellation policy.

Note that Award Hack isn’t perfect. Occasionally, some programs are missed (such as showing Finnair Plus but not showing Qatar Avios price), and taxes/fees aren’t shown, which could definitely make a difference in terms of which program to use. However, it’s a fantastic starting point and a little familiarity with all these programs in combination with Award Hack makes optimizing award bookings that much easier.

CardPointers

Switching gears to the earning side, CardPointers is an app that lets you automatically enrol credit card offers on your cards. Picture logging into the Amex website and automatically adding 100+ offers to your account without having to manually click through each one.

When you’re browsing a website, you can simply check the CardPointers extension to see if you have any offers for that website and which credit card it’s attached to.

Another use case for me is when I’m out and about and I can quickly search the CardPointers app to see if I have an offer at the store or restaurant I’m visiting.

Our Affiliate Link for Cardpointers – CardPointers+ works with both U.S. and Canadian cards.

Honourable Mentions

FlightConnections

FlightConnections is a website that lets you filter by airline, alliance, and even aircraft to narrow down specific routes that meet those criteria. For example, you could be specifically wanting to fly Singapore first class suites and by filtering by airline and aircraft, you can quickly see which routes to target when searching for award space.

Great Circle Mapper

Undoubtedly, my most used travel tool ever, Great Circle Mapper (GCMap) lets you plot distances between cities and also add them up if you input a whole string of cities. For one, this makes it easy to price Aeroplan awards.

Another feature I love is checking flight ranges for distance-based award programs: if I have another X miles to work with in the distance band without increasing the price, I can use GCMap to see where I can fly.

Atmos Rewards on Starlux — 85K points for up to 10,000 miles in distance means going on to Hanoi is the same price as ending in Taipei

Google Flights

We’re all familiar with Google Flights, so I won’t go into the details of seeing calendar-wide pricing at once or setting alerts for price drops. My favourite Google Flights feature is being able to easily check which cabin configuration I’ll be sitting in if flying a premium cabin. It’s not an exact science, but Google Flights will differentiate between “lie-flat seat” and “individual suite”.

The difference between the two indicates whether there’s a door, and searching for your exact flight can signal whether you’re on Lufthansa Allegris or the old product, on British Airways club suites or their old product, and so on.

This is Lufthansa’s Allegris product

Takeaway

In my (humble) opinion, travel tools aren’t optional in today’s environment. To ensure you’re making the most of your points on both the earning and redeeming side, you need to be taking advantage of at least a few. These platforms give you a significant edge and using the right ones will dramatically improve how you plan and book your travel.

My favourites are Cardpointers to manage credit card offers, then seats.aero, Thrifty Traveler, and ExpertFlyer on the redemption side. To supplement, use free tools like Great Circle Mapper, FlightConnections, and Google Flights to dig into the minute details.