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 someone flew there for free, you read a couple of blog posts about credit cards and welcome bonuses, and before you know it, you’re hooked.

As you dream about that trip you want to take, you read about earning points and sign up for a couple of credit cards. You start earning points and soon enough, you’ve built your loyalty account balances 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 to build balances in your loyalty accounts is the easy part. Actually using those points to book flights can be 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 SkyMiles or American AAdvantage miles, there are details you need to know as well as rules and restrictions you must follow for award tickets.

Once you get some practice searching for open award seats on the routes you want to fly, you’ll 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 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, or 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. Fortunately, there are tools that simplify things and get you out from behind your computer and into the air.

Straight To The Points

Just a small amount of the detailed information contained in a Straight To The Points Award Alert.

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 began in 2018 as a newsletter, and a Premium membership level was added in early 2021 that includes text alerts, exact dates flight experience expectations 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 makes 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 it finds 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 weeks to several months.

Straight To The Points alerts not only include the routes and dates that are available for these awards, but it also includes 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, your multiple loyalty accounts are high 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 you receive it on a 72-hour delay compared to the Premium membership. If you want to receive all the information and booking details it offers and be the first to hear about the award space it finds, Straight To The Points Premium will cost you $9.99 per month or $99 per year.

ExpertFlyer

An example of the search results from an ExpertFlyer Award Availability query.

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 ExpertFlyer shines is finding the available award seats for the specific dates and destinations you want to travel to.

According to ExpertFlyer, 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 to find all of the available award seats on a specific day. 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 subscription. ExpertFlyer has two tiers of Pro subscriptions 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 plus or minus three days, you need to go with the $9.99 per month or $99 per year Premium Pro level. Otherwise, the limited basic version is $4.99 per month but does not include any availability alert capabilities or flexible searching.

AwardHacker

An example of the routing parameters and results for an Award Hacker search.

AwardHacker 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 and how many stops you will allow. 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 and what airlines will operate the flights. It even lets 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 AwardHacker 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, especially 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 AwardHacker 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. AwardHacker 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.

AwardHacker remains a useful tool for finding the number of miles required for each airline program for a given route. Although we found the free site to sometimes be a bit glitchy, it is still a handy place to start an award search and help you to decide which loyalty programs you want to look at first.

Point.me

Point.me is an evolved iteration of the former Juicy Miles service. It joined forces with the Points Pros team from One Mile at a Time to take things a step further.

When using its service, you can run a single specific search with dates and destinations and it will search over 30 programs and 100-plus airlines to find as much of the award availability as it can. It’s limited in that it can’t show extended availability for things like United cardholders or elite members of some airlines, but being able to run a search like this can save a ton of time when you are looking for flights.

Not only will Point.me show you the available awards and how much they cost with each program, but it will also show you how to get those points—where they can be transferred from—and walk you through the entire process from transfer to booking.

Point.me offers a variety of services and price points, ranging from single day searches to full concierge booking, so you are likely to find one that works for your situation.

• $5—Starter Pass allowing Standard plan access for 24 hours
• $129/year or $12 monthly—Standard Plan
  • Unlimited searches
  • Customized results tailored to your rewards
  • Step-by-step booking instructions
  • Exclusive tips for destinations
• $260/year—Premium Plan
  • Everything in the Standard plan
  • 10% discount on all Concierge services
  • Personalized miles and points “checkup” annually
  • Five 24-hour Starter Passes to gift to friends and family annually
• $200/passenger—Full-service booking
  • A Point.me expert handles every aspect of your award booking experience in a service akin to a traditional award booking service

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 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. These four companies make it easier for you to find and book your award flights while helping you to learn the process.

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. AwardHacker will give you an idea of how many miles it should cost you for low-level award flights wherever you want to go, while ExpertFlyer streamlines the award flight search process for your specific dates and locations. Finally, Point.me will show you what is actually available, in real time, on your dates and the rates for booking with each airline program.

Each of these tools may be the best for different travelers, but no matter which you choose to use, once you’re relaxing in a business-class suite as you fly to the other side of the world, you’ll likely think it was well worth the investment.