Not to throw water on this fire but my experiences with award planner have not been that great. I signed up for a 1 year membership as the endorsement here on FT was amazing (99% positive or a forum... when does that happen
).
I tried two bookings with them, both to europe, last year and both times they came up with not being able to find anything. Both times, my dates were not flexible but I had miles in 5 different programs spanning all three major alliances and I was looking for a business or first ticket so there was some flexibility.
While i most certainly found the person i was working with to be quite knowledgeable about airlines/partners etc. I found that two things were missing. 1) i had to go on this trip or else I was flying coach (12 hrs overnight) and going straight to work. In other words, in the end, they just could not be as motivated to make it work as I could
2) They were not as creative to find things as I was, and still lacked a full breath of understanding of the possibilities of partners etc. Specifically, using my KLM miles as an example, if I want to leave from the New York area and nothing is available out of New York, then PHL, BOS, DTW, ORD, YYZ all may be possibilities (with a cheap ticket from NY RT or as an open jaw back to NY). Often, I've found people within the airlines themselves who are willing and passionate to make this type of stuff work. Most recently at AA EXP desk, i found someone who spent 1 hr. with me on the phone hammering out an award ticket for my wife to Europe that was an open jaw from YUL connecting in LHR on BA and return to NY with a cheap 1 way to YUL from EWR.
In the end, for both of these trips, I found routings myself and even found a direct EWR-AMS-xx flight for the exact times I wanted. This opened up miraculously. When awardplanner got back to me saying they could not find anything I thought all is lost. Just as an exercise in futility, thinking that it might be fun to bang my head on the wall for a while, I call both BA and KLM myself again to see if I could get them to open up a seat (no status on either airline…. Had status but expired). BOTH airlines had possibilities with KLM having the direct flights I mentions. Just left me with the feeling that they just did not try often/hard enough.
Still, i have yearly membership so I will definitely give them a shot again.