Are your rewards points burning a hole in your pocket? It’s natural to want to put something on the calendar, especially if your balances have grown from earning credit card points without a chance to spend them. Besides, the most satisfying vacation is the one that didn’t cost you anything out of pocket.
For a select group of miles and points nerds, learning the intricacies of credit card transfer partners and airline award charts is half the fun. For most folks, the extreme amount of necessary research can make you want to scream. If you fall into the second group, an award booking service can help you book the right flight at a good price, no hassle required.
As a specialized service, award booking doesn’t come cheap. You can expect to pay in the neighborhood of $200 per passenger for assistance. If you’re saving 40 hours of work (or snagging an award for 50,000 fewer miles than advertised), it’s worth every penny. On the other hand, some awards can be booked without too much trouble, even without an expert holding your hand. Here’s how to know whether an award booking service makes sense for you.
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It’s Important To Understand What an Award Booking Service Does
Before we get too far, you should understand that award booking agencies are highly specialized: They’re trained to look at your rewards balances and understand which airlines and booking avenues you can access. Then, they match that up with real-time pricing and availability to present options and reserve the best flight possible on your behalf.
Award bookers aren’t general travel agents, though. They aren’t there to help you decide between a safari in Kenya versus Tanzania and they won’t know if the weather in Brisbane is better in January or February. They also can’t help you decide if your Croatian road trip is too rushed or if it’s just the right pace for the activities you have planned.
In short, you’ll need to have the basic details of your trip worked out on your own (or with a travel agent) before you contact a booking service.
Award Bookers Can Only Help You If You Have Miles Available
To reiterate, award booking services book tickets—and that means you need to have miles available to cover the cost of your ticket. Contrary to some expectations, award booking services do use your miles to book tickets in your name (or for your family and friends). They do not sell or broker miles from other accounts. You’ll want to wait to make a request until you can afford it.
If you’re not sure if your balances are in the right ballpark, a quick email can confirm whether they can start on your request. If not, they’ll tell you to try again later or to realign expectations; maybe redeeming for three tickets instead of four or choosing business class instead of first class.
How To Get Your Money’s Worth from Award Booking Services
Don’t Bother With Economy Class Tickets
Nine times out of 10, an award booking service won’t be worth it if you’re flying coach. For one thing, these are usually solutions that you can find and book independently. An airplane simply has more economy seats on it than it does in business or first class, so there’s a higher chance you’ll stumble on an award without too much effort.
If you can’t find an award ticket in economy at the saver price, be honest with yourself. Would you really fly hours out of your way to save a few miles if an award booker found an awkward routing? Are you even saving anything if you pay a $200 booking fee to conserve a few miles? There’s always an exception to this rule, but in economy, it’s often not worth it.
Save your booking requests for business and first class trips, where the price gap between a saver award and a full-priced award is substantial. Then your booking fee can pay for itself since you’ll have enough left over for another ticket in the future.
Premium seats can also make indirect routings worth the extra time if your booking service has to get creative to find seat availability. A few hours in the air when you’re in a private suite with champagne and caviar isn’t so bad. A free massage at the first class lounge is a privilege, not a bother.
Make Sure There Isn’t an Obvious Solution First
If you only have one type of airline miles, you should start at the airline’s website. Many airlines have added search capabilities and partner airlines to their online booking engine over the past few years. A quick peek might yield a decent flight for a fair price.
Award booking services are worth the money when there isn’t an obvious answer. They know the minutiae of booking rules and how to avoid fuel surcharges. They know when airlines might release seats (far in advance or last-minute) and if you can stopover for no extra charge.
These services are also pros when it comes to using transferable credit card rewards to book flights. You might not know that you can move your Citi ThankYou points to Avianca Airlines to fly on Thai Airways but they know every permutation and will check them one-by-one.
They’ll also consider dozens of different routings that search engines might overlook. Your search for San Francisco to Sicily might come up empty-handed until they manually check new options. It would take you hours to research and search realistic options, but they have the knowledge (and software) to do it for you.
Provide Them Travel Flexibility
If your plans are 100% locked in stone—two first class tickets, nonstop on Singapore Airlines, departing on the 1st and returning on the 10th—there’s only so much they can do. Award seat inventory is either available or it isn’t (and the airline sets the price). In these cases, your best bet is to spend more points to lock in the flights you want, monitor prices in hope they fall or book a flight with cash. Monitoring software subscriptions will do this more cheaply than a personalized booking agent.
Award booking services excel when you provide some flexibility in your ultimate plans. Would you consider flying a day or two earlier? Can you accept an extra connection? Are there four or five airlines that would work for your plans?
The more flexibility you offer, the more likely it is that an award booking service can find an option that balances the best flights for the best price. In a best-case scenario, you’ll have multiple options that they can walk you through, provide recommendations, answer questions and book on your behalf.
Be Ready To Book
Just like the flights you book with cash, award prices and availability fluctuate. Your award booker will know when something is a good price and you need to move quickly. They look at flight prices all day, every day, and can assess when an offer will stick around for a while or when it’s likely to be booked by someone else if you don’t reserve it first.
Wanting to think through your booking option(s) is natural. In many cases, these are bucket list trips or special occasions. However, you should be firm enough with your plans that you’re only pondering the specifics of the flight itself. Before you work with a booking service, you should already have a plan in place for the big picture—like if you can get time off from work and whether or not you want to go to Argentina in the first place.
Most agencies won’t charge you if they can’t find a flight that meets your needs, but they will charge you if you simply change your mind about going altogether. It’s best to have your ducks in a row before reaching out.
Know Who Handles the Logistics
Different award booking agencies handle the reservations in different ways. Some will gladly do everything for you, which might include calling an international reservation office and feeding them inventory codes. Others will provide instructions for you to complete the reservation on your own.
While it’s obviously tempting to have them handle everything from start to finish (and this can ensure everything goes smoothly), be aware this often means sharing your frequent flyer passwords as well as a credit card number and billing address to handle tax payments.
Reputable booking agencies will safeguard your credentials so there’s no funny business. Still, if you want to truly get your money’s worth from start to finish, you’ll need to be comfortable handing over a lot of personal information.
Other booking services will feed all of the information to book the flights so you don’t need to hand over sensitive information, but that means you’ll have to spend the time to book the flight yourself, which can be a time-consuming process, especially if it requires a phone call.
Bottom Line
When used effectively, award booking services pay back dividends. They’ll save you the time you’d otherwise spend researching options and checking availability and can potentially save you miles or cold hard cash by booking strategically with the right routes and partners. The trick is being smart about when you request their services to ensure the help is worth the fee.
