Locating Award seats for International flights
 

Hi. I am new and need a little help.

I am looking for a list of online tools to help find award flights on International flights.

I stumbled on CO "Make award reservation" which is a great resource and am looking for other similar sites with different Partners, etc.

I have a ton of miles on AMX and Delta and trying to use them. It seems on Delta you just have to call and wait and wait and wait some more to be presented a not so great route and I would perfer to do it myself and make choices.

I am trying to go to China in August and can adjust my trip to use what is available not what I want. Open to various city's etc. like PEK, CAN, SHA or HKG.

I can currently get there on CO with First Class but can't find a return from anyone I am aware of.

Any input appreciated. Be kind....


This is the one I am reffering to:

http://www.continental.com/web/en-US...rchReward.aspx

www.expertflyer.com is a great service. There is a fee but it's very cheap.

If you are talking about finding seats for this August, you've left it a bit late. Most of the popular dates/airlines book at the 330 days out. Still you might get lucky if you are flexible. Many airlines open up addition seats as it get closer to the flying date. Of course, some of the airlines also require more miles to book at a late date.

FInd who partners with the airlines you have miles with. Then check expertflyer for all the award seats on the airlines you can use. Make sure you read the instructions on how to fine award seats. They are often "hidden" codes that need to be manually selected.

Does any one of the Skyteam members have a decent website? By "decent" I mean the ability to run a query that looks up award inventory across the alliance.

For example, within Star Alliance, ANA has some decent tools. I've never flown ANA, but I'm a member of their FF program for the simple reason that it gives me a login to look up *A flight. Yesterday, I used their site to look for LH flights. I'm not sure whether it's as perfect as calling an actual LH phone rep, but within a few minutes I was able to look at pretty much all of the LH flights that crossed the Atlantic on a given day and see which ones had F, J, and Y award seats available.

It sounds like that's what you might be looking for. What I don't know is if any one Skyteam airline has a similar online toolset. You might not be able to book with it, but at least you'd have the information at hand when you call your airline's phone service.

Most airlines allow you to book award flights online. For example, use this link for Delta...

https://www.delta.com/awards/skymile...Info/index.jsp

To my knowledge this will only show availability on Delta's own flights, not on Continental, Northwest or any of their other redemption partners.

The NW Japan site is pretty good for that:
http://asiares.nwa.com/?siteCode=JP&...rdtravelsearch
It's missing some SkyTeam airlines (OK for sure, maybe others, I don't remember)

There's a nice sticky in the DL forum about Skyteam awards:
http://www.flyertalk.com/forums/showthread.php?t=501991

NW is decent about showing some of the availability on partners if you look on their site. I booked some DL tickets on nwa.com using NW miles -- the problem is that you may not get the same availability with someone else in SkyTeam even though it should all be the same.

That's the catch: I'd want to be able to easily view the entire alliance. The referenced sticky thread probably has the most information...