I am interested to know if anyone has any first-hand experience with awardplanner.com. If they can really deliver, it would seem to be worth the annual fee. Any thoughts would be appreciated...

There have been a number of threads on this subject. A search under the keyword "awardplanner" revealed some fairly recent. Rather then start a new thread, I recommend reviewing (and annotating if necessary) one of the following:

http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/showt...t=awardplanner

http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/showt...t=awardplanner

http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/showt...t=awardplanner

I did a search and found several past threads discussing AwardPlanner.

This list of threads is by no means exhaustive.

http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/showthread.php?t=484859
http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/showthread.php?t=459833
http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/showthread.php?t=498348
http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/showthread.php?t=128423
http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/showthread.php?t=8785
http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/showthread.php?t=317688
http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/showthread.php?t=310759
http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/showthread.php?t=7591
http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/showthread.php?t=7471
http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/showthread.php?t=6483

Basic gift, IMHO, is:
* they don't have access to special/additional inventory. they just have experience in booking awards, know the partnerships, and will do the legwork for you.
* it's not a good value if you ENJOY the challenge and time spent fighting airlines for award space. It IS a good value if that doesn't sound like a fun way to spend your time or if you don't know all the possible routings and partnerships to query.

If you place a premium on your time and aren't an expert at award bookings, it's a great service. For those who get a high out of out-jousting airline inventory management gurus then you'd be selfish and wouldn't want to offload that thrill on someone else

The service is offered by one of the companies owned by our Flyertalk host, Randy Petersen.

I used them recently to get two different itineraries. Both times they delivered. The particular person I used both times did some minor fumbling and had some minor human interaction issues, but clearly they delivered as advertised, and in a timely way. Get their help, then check it out. And if you don't like it, ask for changes - they'll change it for you.

She also found partner flights I had NO IDEA existed. Basically, they have a broader range of knowledge than most of us have for a very narrow subset of flying. Since you don't book award travel very often, and if you don't have time to keep track of all the program changes and all the partner changes, it just seems smart to try them out.

In one case, I just didn't have enough experience booking award travel on my favorite airline for me to get it right the first time on an important flight for me. The other case was international, and they found helpful paths I didn't know about.

They probably are not much better - and certainly no worse - than any travel agent relationship, except that they specialize in award tickets, not money tickets. A very narrow niche, and I am very glad they are there.

I will continue to use them.