While trying to find the best deal for an award travel, I am having to try EACH of the several airlines I am searching.

Is there a website that allows one to search the best award option - one that requires minimum points/miles or allows better flexibility in schedualing the trip?

Wirelessly posted (probably driving while typing: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0) BlackBerry8830/4.2.2 Profile/MIDP-2.0 Configuration/CLDC-1.1 VendorID/105)

Check out the kvs tool which automates searching ow, st, and *a for a small donation.

I use this one: http://flyaow.com/classamex.htm.

That doesn't show award availability. It uses the same ITN backend as http://availability.publicbackup.com/ which a FTer set up with slightly different formatting. Those are great for looking for revenue buckets, but tell you absolutely nothing about award availability - which was the OP's request.

Seatcounter (www.seatcounter.com) can show award availability for most Star Alliance airlines (follow the directions to enter the airline code twice, and look at the legend at the bottom of the results for which booking codes are awards.)

Agree with the KVS tool suggestion - I've bought into that at the nominal requested fee for the Platinum level, and find it well worth it. The only pain about that is it needs to be updated every couple of weeks, because KVS often needs to change the back-end to deal with changes from the airlines, and due to some old-school Microsoft code used to write the tool, it always needs a reboot (how 1999!) afterwards. It will show availability for all three alliances. You do have to sign up for ANA Japan and Qantas FF#s on their websites, in order to enter them in the KVS tool, for Star Alliance and for oneworld carriers respectively.

Note that the ANA website can be used directly to find *A awards.

For details on any of this, URLs, procedures etc. search for any of the hundreds of threads about them.

For *A sign up to ANA and use their tool to search awards.

For OW sign up to QFF (fee if based in NZ/OZ but free elsewhere) and use their tool to search awards.

Pretty much the only reason you may be asked to reboot is because you forgot to exit the Tool before running the Setup (despite the instructions). And a user's failure to follow the instructions is not "1999", it's timeless .