Originally Posted by
moondog
While I agree that it can be annoying to use (especially that new first step), it provides the exact same results as Award Nexus.
Speaking of Award Nexus, if the OP were to PM Peter explaining his situation, I'm pretty sure Peter would hook him up with a trial account.
I use the AC and CO sites because they have month based availability calendars for specific award types. It makes finding the cheapo award dates very easy. Then, when you know the dates for the critical flight segments, you can use ANA to fine tune the flight search.
As far as the first step on ANA ...
If you use FireFox, there is a GreaseMonkey script floating around on the boards here somewhere to bypass the initial ANA only search.