Tools I Use for Award Travel - Finding Award Fares - Part 2

In its purest form, the points and miles hustle can be distilled into two pillars - 1) amassing points to redeem for travel and 2) finding availability to redeem those points. Finding fares for flights - particularly premium cabin space - can be very competitive, so justifiably, there's been a lot of investment in the space to make it easier for the lay traveler to quickly and efficiently find seats available for point redemptions by mining live inventory. Two tools stand out to me, so let's examine how and why I enjoy using them. 

Tools to Help You Find Available Award Seats

Seats.Aero

Seats.aero - If I could only pick one tool to help me find premium cabin award fares, it would be Seats.aero - and the reason is simple. Seats.aero feels like it was built by someone who travels as I do, rarely needing to go anywhere on a specific day/time, but instead, wanted to explore all of the intriguing destinations one could feasibly get to, on points and preferably in business or first. It's efficient too - Seats.aero answers the most questions while requiring me to put in the fewest inputs. While Seats.aero is accessible for newbies (not a sharp learning curve), with even the slightest bit of knowledge about airlines alliances and routes, you can quickly become dangerous with this tool. Here are a few of my favorite features.

1. Explore

Seats.aero's Explore feature is the best tool for anyone who finds themself saying, 'Gee whiz, I've got all these airline miles, and I have no idea what to do with them.' Explore allows you to visualize award availability across 16 (at the time of this writing) different loyalty programs sorted by region. With its table-like format, one can quickly ascertain what sorts of redemptions are possible without having to redo individual searches. Individual flights are displayed as rows in a table where you can see the origin and destination airports and indications of which cabins (if any) are available to be booked by points and how many points it'll cost. The 'information' icon to the right of each fare reveals more about each flight, such as the departure and arrival times and the taxes and fees associated with the award ticket. 

Let's take it for a spin. I have a stash of Alaska miles I'm hoping to use to fly somewhere fun and flat. I'll start my investigation by exploring Alaska Mileage Plan's availability. 

The real power to seats.aero? The filtering tools. Seats.aero pulls a database of (near-)live inventory on award tickets - it'd be helpful to mine this information for routes, destinations, and dates you're interested in. Right?

Above, I've updated the results to reflect North America to Asia (from the default of 'N.A. -> Anywhere.' Then, I sorted by both 'Date' and 'Business' class (hold down shift to sort a second category) to get an ascending list of flights that have open nonstop (green means nonstop, blue indicates there's a connection) business class award fares. Finally, I decided to filter for Taipei by putting TPE in the search box. This floats two results to the top of the table - a flight leaving in just a few hours and a flight scheduled for October 9, 2025. Click to view more information, and you'll see this flight is operated by the newish-buzzy-Taiwanese carrier Starlux (indicated by the 'JX1' code). How does 75,000 Alaska miles (and $18.10 in taxes and fees) sound to enjoy some delicious gua bao? 

Explore makes it easy (and fun) to go from 'no idea what to do with these points' to 'wow, let's go for it.' It helps me ideate and encourages me to plan more ambitious journeys. I'm a fan.

2. Search

Seats.aero search functionality is elite, and its strength comes primarily from two features - multi-city codes and a 180-day date range. Using these features, you can return results from some pretty lavish searches - say for example you wanted to search for business class fares from any major airport in Europe (coded as EUR) to any major airport in Asia (ASA) - wild I know. I'll run this search below:

Then, filter down the results for flights departing from Zurich and sort them by business class availability. 

What do you know!—there's a whole block of availability to fly lay-flat business class to Bangkok from winter to early spring of 2025. Again, peak flexibility.

3. Specialized Tools 

When you check out the specialized tools, you'll find more evidence that Seats.aero was built by true points and miles enthusiasts. You'll find prebuilt searches for tracking seats and upgrades, like the Qatar QSuite Finder, ANA First Class Finder, Lufthansa First Class Finder, and an Air Canada eUpgrade Finder. These tools eliminate the guesswork of finding some of the most sought-after award fares.

Seats.aero recently also launched a few tools allowing you to visualize live seating charts. As it's still in beta, you won't find these on every route tracked by the site.

4. Areas of Improvement for Seats.aero:

Support for Multi-leg, Mixed-Cabin Itineraries and Route Coverage - While seat.aero supports connections, the platform excels at (and is likely built on) tracking and sourcing results for direct routes. As a result, there have been instances when I've found results for itineraries with one or more connections on other award search tools that Seats.aero didn't produce. The same goes for mixed cabin fares - when searching for a multi-leg fare where the legs are in economy and different classes (your first flight is business and the next is premium economy), Seats.aero will in, some cases, display results but more often than not you'll get an error message like this one: 

For what it's worth, it's rare that I open a search with a specific date in mind. When I do have a set date, I'm most often interested in nonstop/direct fares, so I don't consider this to be too strong a drawback.

Additionally, I've noticed Seats.aero does not cover as many routes as some other award search sites as it seems each additional route the site tracks is added manually.

A quick note on pricing: Much of seat.aero's functionality is free - you can search, explore availability, and create alerts for flights departing up to two months out, which is a reasonably robust offering. You'll likely want a pro account for any power usage or folks looking into award fares for flights more than two months out. A while back, I took the pro plunge and upgraded at the cost of $7.99/month. Presently, new subscriptions cost $9.99. That's still worth it - especially since you can cancel anytime. 

PointsYeah

PointsYeah - PointsYeah is my go-to award fare search engine when I have a focused idea of when I'm hoping to fly. Running a search on PointsYeah will return results similar to those you'd find on traditional travel search engines, such as Expedia or Kayak, so there's a lot of familiarity - you'll find it's very easy to use. The platform excels in two areas: program coverage and mixed itineraries. Let's take a look:

Above, I ran a search for award fares for one seat from Bogota, Colombia, to Frankfurt Germany in business or first class, departing anytime over a three-day range - 3/12/2025-3/15/2025. There are no nonstop flights but there are a number of one-stop itineraries.

I use some of PointsYeah's great filtering tools to sort through them:

Above, I filter using premium cabin percentage, a gadget that allows you to select what portion of your journey is service in upper cabins - such as premium economy, business class or first class. If you were keen on saving some points and flying some portion of your journey in economy, you could toggle these options to your preference. Additionally, as I'm only interested in connecting in Europe before continuing to Frankfurt, I'll select AMS (Amsterdam Schiphol) and CDG (Charles De Gaulle) as the limit for my connecting options.

I'm left with several options on either Air France or KLM - it'll cost me at least 77,000 FlyingBlue points (excluding taxes and fees). In addition to tracking 25 loyalty programs, PointsYeah tracks major bank partner currencies. Search results will reflect any available bank transfer opportunities (bonuses or otherwise) helping you strategize and ensure you see the lowest possible redemption cost for any award fare.

PointsYeah core functionality is free - search covering 3-day ranges (or less) can be done by anyone who simply registers an account. Upgrading to a premium plan will allow you to search up to 8 days at a time but I haven't seen much value to do this, particularly as PointsYeah only offers annual memberships at this time. 

As for areas of improvement? There isn't an option to limit results for 100% business and first class out the gate. Instead, performing a search with business and first as selected criteria may (and often will) still deliver results with itineraries that offer some portion of the journey in non premium cabins. From there you'll need to filter the results for itineraries that are wholly served in business or first. Additionally, PointsYeah could benefit from an upfront option to select the number of stops you're willing to make. Again, this is a post result filter option but I find that far too often I'm given 2 or 3 stop itineraries at the top of my results and then having to filter through for a direct or 1-stop itinerary.

Conclusion

Finding award ability has never been easier due to many of the catered, thoughtful in the market. Seats.aero and PointsYeah are my favorite tools for determining where your points and miles can take you and locating those precious lay-flat redemption fares!