Travel Tools - AwardSpy, a free hotel award stay availability notification service

Hey Flyertalk,

Over the last couple of months I've been working on AwardSpy (http://www.awardspy.com), a site that helps travelers know when and where they can use their hard-earned hotel points for award stays. AwardSpy lets you create an alert for award stay availability at a property (e.g. "Westin St. Francis, November 28 - 30, 2012, Cash & Points"), and AwardSpy will shoot you an email if and when that award becomes available for booking.

I initially planned to offer AwardSpy as a paid-only offering, but got lots of feedback made me change my position. The site is completely free, and my hope is to always keep it that way. Down the road, I may roll out a paid plan that gives some added benefits over the free plan, but the core service will remain free.

At this point, AwardSpy supports almost all Starwood and Hilton hotels, and I hope to roll out Marriott and Priority Club hotels in the coming month.

What I'm hoping to get back from Flyertalk: FEEDBACK!

If you're interested and have the time, sign up for AwardSpy and create an alert (those two steps should only take about a minute). Tell me what's great, what doesn't work at all, what was confusing, what you love, and what you hate. I'm hoping to get AwardSpy in front of as many frequent travelers as possible to get as much valuable feedback as I can. The goal is to continue improving and refining the service.

Get started at http://www.awardspy.com

Thanks, and looking forward to hearing back from FT!

Welcome to flytalk, mshafrir

Sounds awesome! I am going to check it out.
Thanks.

Hey guys, thanks for all the help beta testing AwardSpy. I was able to fix a ton of bugs/issues, especially for users of older versions of Internet Explorer.

More hotel support and new features coming down the road!

Looks good

Looks like only Hilton and SPG right now. I'd be interested in a site that would let you search among many brands for particular dates. So, not just an alert service.

Even better would be a site where you could enter different discount/corp codes and get the best price. So you could enter your AAA, Entertainment card, Costco, or a corp code and find the best prices through your interface.

IHG, Radisson, and Hyatt would be the hotels I'd like see added to available chains.

Hey Jamito, Marriott has been added in the last week, and IHG, Radisson, and Hyatt are certainly on the radar. Thanks for checking out AwardSpy and sharing your feedback!

I love this site! Besides the award alerts, it is super easy to see the categories. One request - add the state to the location details for US hotels. While searching for a hotel in Miami, FL, by simply typing in "Miami", I got excited to see Hampton Inn Miami, but soon found out via Google that it is in Miami, OK. :) Thanks for the resource!

I love this site! Besides the award alerts, it is super easy to see the categories. One request - add the state to the location details for US hotels. While searching for a hotel in Miami, FL, by simply typing in "Miami", I got excited to see Hampton Inn Miami, but soon found out via Google that it is in Miami, OK. :) Thanks for the resource!

Great suggestion! I've gone ahead and implemented it - the hotels screen now shows the state for hotels in the US.

Great suggestion! I've gone ahead and implemented it - the hotels screen now shows the state for hotels in the US.

Works great! Thanks again!

holy cow I have been looking for this!!!

what if you are willing to pay cash but hotel is sold out, can we use this program to search for ANY type of room availability, not just award nights?

congrats mshafir, great job!
I just started using the service and I noticed that when an alert has been created, you just come back to the main page while it may be interesting to let the option to set up a new alert for the same hotel on other dates?
Also, I am not sure if possible but will it be feasable to implement an option/field where we could mention the maximum number of points that we can spend on a night (e.g 60K instead 50K normal standard) and that the tool returns availability?

Great concept! I signed up for this forum just to be able to reply to this. I agree with Manish - would be great to get notification about availability in general in case we're willing to pay. Also, after an alert has been created, would be great to have the option to set alerts in other hotels in the same city for the same dates. Right now, it brings you back to the initial screen and you have to start the search all over.

Nice work. Very excited about this site.

Just wrote a review for AwardSpy.

Keep up the good work!

Hey guys, thanks for all the responses and feedback! onesweetworld, special thanks for the blog post! :)

I unfortunately have not had as much time as I'd hoped for to work on AwardSpy over the last few months, but things should open up for me soon. I think there's a lot of potential for the service, and I love the recommendations that have been contributed. Will keep you guys posted.

Is the site live??

Hi Ehud, my host was having issues which made AwardSpy inaccessible for 16 hours. AwardSpy is back up and running now!

It seems that the site is dead....
All my alerts are gone & no option to add new ones..

Hey guys, thanks for all the responses and feedback! onesweetworld, special thanks for the blog post! :)

I unfortunately have not had as much time as I'd hoped for to work on AwardSpy over the last few months, but things should open up for me soon. I think there's a lot of potential for the service, and I love the recommendations that have been contributed. Will keep you guys posted.

mshafrir,

Do you have any intentions of getting your website back up and running again? It looks like it has great potential!