I have never booked an award 330 days out. I have never failed to get the award I needed.

If you're looking for a basic roundtrip award with a year's notice and you have miles in one program to use, why outsource the redemption?

It seems to me that the value in a service like AwardPlanner is that they will be familiar with all the potential partners that an airline program has, helping you figure out how to piece together different carriers for a complex itinerary... and that they'll do the searching when there are several different routings only some of which are likely to have space.

I haven't used awardplanner because I personally enjoy the challenge of finding seats and piecing together itineraries.

But the vast majority of folks out there aren't experts in partners, routings, stopover rules, etc. and Awardplanner can help those folks.

The person who will stay up until midnight to book a straight return award probably isn't the target market for the service...