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.
Sure.
Actually, just to clarify, Award Nexus has a free membership for FT members, which you can
sign up here, so not even a trial is needed. It comes with 100 points (about 15 weeks of availability search) and periodic refills.
Originally Posted by mattk2
I don't know if this qualifies as what you're terming research, but I was on the phone with a US Airways International Flights rep for 30 minutes going through various scheduling scenarios.
According to her, there are no seats available for purchase through Dividend Miles on flights out of Shanghai for the week of August 15th. (There are some available going LAX>PVG, but none PVG>US.)
...
I would absolutely not count on the airline agents to give you the full pictures. Without exception,
all the effective mileage redeemers that I know would do all their research themselves, using the various free and paid sites, before calling in and feeding specific flights to the phone agents to book.
On a daily basis, I see connecting flights that are only visible to some, but not all, of the various airline sites. That is why it is imperative to check all the resources.
ANX is a good start, and even if you only want to stay on the free membership,
check out the tips page. Anyone who do their searches manually on the various sites will find that page to be very helpful (it took me 9 months of research and hours of experiments to compile some of those data).