Did you know that for $39 you can let someone else spend hours on the phone redeeming your frquent flyer miles for you?

Yvonne at Awartravel.com got us 3 round trip tickets in first class from Charleston, SC to Zurch, CH for February 2006.

My wife had spent six hours on the phone with US Air reservations, the day before, and eventually just gave up.

This is the best $39 you'll ever spend.

http://www.awardtravel.com/

I guess after booking 3 first class tickets, the company realized that they can not make money doing this, therefore, site is not available anymore.

One of the best shared under the radar secrets of FT and IF
Their whole team is outstanding in coordinating award travel.
I give my full endorsement too.
They know about lesser known partnerships and the more obvious alliances.
Their assistance can help you to hard to get destinations like Sydney,AU and others.
LaDonna too is a part of that expert team.
They have received awards in the industry for her work in this FF redemption area..........

Umm, like, it's awardplanner.com

For those new here, the award planner site is ran by our host, Randy Petersen.

um, run?

He owns it. Is that better?

Is it $39 before or after the award is booked? If it is after, I am interested.

It's before. I believe that only covers one trip, though (there's a different plan, that costs more, for booking multiple trips throughout the year). I used them in 2003 because I had some time deadlines to work with in booking tickets 330 days ahead for the Olympics, in both directions, and it was easier for them to track the deadlines and book for me. If you search here on FT, you'll see a post where a rep says they don't have access to any inventory you would not find on your own, but the initial post here would seem to contradict that.

I believe it is before. I recommended Awardplanner to my friends who paid but they weren't able to take advantage of service. Don't think they got a refund.

For the number of hours you can save, $39 is a great deal, but some of us like the chase involved as well, especially those that have a complicated routing request.

I was wondering why I had never heard of Awardtravel.com! When I first saw the thread title, I thought it might be commercial spam touting some brand-new website.

Turns out it is one of Randy's businesses, good old Award Planner, which has been around for many years and has been discussed on FT in the past.

I think the OP's experience just suggests that AwardPlanner folks know how to go about looking for seats -- something that an airline's CSRs may not know or care enough about.

Say that I call United and ask for 4 award C seats from IAD to VCE. United might just enter my cities into their computer and see what comes back. Now, United's International Awards folks are generally quite good. But I often point them in the direction of specific flights with availability, that they can't find. I assume that the hardest flights to find availability on will be the transatlantic sectors, so I start looking for seats on those flights... IAD-LHR, IAD-FRA, IAD-MUC, ORD-FRA, to VIE, EWR-FRA on SQ, etc... and build from there.

I am curious as to how AwardPlanner works. Fine, you pay the $39 up front. What kind of parameters do you have to provide them when you ask them to find award seats for you? If you give them exact days you want to travel, do they come back with alternative days if nothing is available on the specific days you want? Or do they keep checking? How often do they provide you updates of their progress? Do they book with/without confirming routing/flights with you or do they put on hold? How is their success ratio? Do they usually find what you want on the particular days you want to travel or do you usually end up going a few days before/after what you really want? Or do you end up doing the airport shuffle, taking four connections over three days to get to Europe?

I get pretty high success rates on my award bookings. For international tickets, I usually have to coach the reservation agents on alternate city pairs and partner airlines. Having school age children, my travel dates are fiexed. I usually get the dates and the routes I wanted. This summer is the first time I got only 2 out of 4 RT tickets to Asia with one-pass miles. I do enjoy the chase. I finally gave up when I realize that NW as selling UA tickets on one of the segements, a clear indication of full capacity for that segment.

How likely is it for Award Planner to get 2 more tickets for me in this situation?