4 Tools That Help You Find Free Award Flights

Author: Jason Steele / Source: Wise Bread

Earned a nice stash of points using travel rewards credit cards? Now comes the fun part. Or at least, it should be fun. You’ve got the potential to save thousands of dollars on airfare. But in reality, booking award travel can be a challenge.

The airlines don’t make it easy to search for available awards at the lowest mileage levels.

Award searches on their websites are often slow, incomplete, and inaccurate, as they have little incentive to improve your chances of finding a free flight. And if you have points that transfer to miles with several different airlines, it can be difficult to search all of the possible options.

Thankfully, there are third-party tools that can help you use your miles to reach your destination. Each provides functionality that’s missing from the airlines’ websites. First, we’ll tell you about four tools, then we’ll give you some tips for making award booking easier.

Expert Flyer

Expert Flyer is a very powerful tool that can help you search award space across many different airlines. It’s meant for travelers who want access to the data that the airlines conceal behind their clunky interfaces.

You can set up a free account and get seat alerts that let you know when a particular type of seat is available on a flight for which you’re already booked. This service can help if you’re trying to move from a middle seat to a window or aisle on a full flight, but it doesn’t go beyond that.

Expert Flyer’s real value comes with its pro subscriptions. For $4.99 per month, a basic subscription allows you 250 queries per month across 400 different airlines.

You can search for award seats, upgrades, and revenue flights.

The premium version is available for $9.99 per month or $99.99 per year and includes unlimited searches, and flight availability alerts that notify you when award space becomes available. It will also allow you to search for flights during a six-day period and to save queries for repeated use. You’ll get access to a mobile app, too.

Award Nexus

Award Nexus specializes in finding business and first class seats, or awards with complex routings. A free account is available for members of the online forums Flyer Talk and Inside Flyer (previously Milepoint), but it offers limited access.

For more extensive access, the website offers three memberships, including premium basic for $59, premium advanced for $129, and premium expert for $249. Each level buys you a certain number of points. Each point is worth one search on one airline website for one day in one class of service.

The tool allows you to specify which airline websites or alliances you’d like to search. You can search up to plus or minus seven days from a specific flight date. And you can get notifications when award seats become available. The main advantage of Award Nexus over Expert Flyer is that it includes more airlines, such as Cathay Pacific, which isn’t included in Expert Flyer.