These are the Ultimate Rewards airline transfer partners.

• Aer Lingus (EI)
• British Airways Executive Club (BA)
• Flying Blue (Air France/KLM) (AF)
• Iberia (IB)
• Singapore Airlines KrisFlyer (SQ)
• Southwest Rapid Rewards (WN)
• United Airlines MileagePlus (UA)
• Virgin Atlantic Flying Club (VS)

When you get your CSP account set up online, there will be a link to the UR portal which is where you will go to transfer points to your program(s) of choice once you have earned some UR points.

You will have to establish an account with the airline's frequent flyer program (FFP) before you can transfer UR points, as the UR page will need to know the FFP account number.

In order to search for award seat availability you must check through the website of the FFP you're thinking of using - or you can call their award reservation phone agents, though in most cases it's much faster and easier to do it online (there are certain partner airlines that may not show up on an airline FFP's web searches but let's just keep this simple for now and focus only on searching the website results). As you have discovered, you can't accomplish award seat searches through Orbitz, Expedia, etc. nor will the UR website show award seats in the airline programs.

Some FFP websites require you to have signed up for an account in order to log in and conduct an award seat search while others don't. To be honest I don't recall offhand what is required for the above airlines as I'm usually automatically logged in when I go to the site anyway. In any case you can find out by visiting the website and it only takes a few minutes to sign up if necessary so it's not a big deal. If you know which FFP you're most likely to use we can give you more specific tips for that program.

While the website designs vary, you will find the option to search for an award or use miles - either as an option to check off when using their regular booking page or separately as part of the FFP portion of the website. Once there, simply input the origin, destination, date(s), etc. and you will see the results for what, if any, award seats are available for those conditions. Some FFP websites make it easy to scroll through nearby dates and others don't, so the amount of work you need to do in researching will vary.

Don't transfer UR points until you see availability for what you want. Now this can be tricky as most FFPs no longer allow award holds (to reserve the space while you get miles moved in) - most or all of the UR partners do not allow holds - I think Flying Blue may have at one time but don't know if that's current. In any case, there can be times when you see a seat available, and by the time your UR points are transferred the seat is gone. UR points generally transfer fairly quickly but that is still an uncertainty.

Except for Southwest, airlines usually have partner airlines that are included in the award search results if available. However you must search using the FFP whose miles you will be redeeming, not the partner airline. For example you mentioned Turkish Airlines. They're not a UR transfer partner but are a redemption partner for United and Singapore airlines. Let's say you want to redeem United miles for a Turkish Airlines flight. You would search on United's award website and not on Turkish Airlines' site.

That's my take on the basics - there are nuances and advanced details beyond the above but didn't want to lose sight of the fundamentals of how it works. Hopefully this has helped. I'm sure others can fill in anything I overlooked, etc. as well.

Welcome to FT!