ckpeter

Thanks a lot, IMH.

Welcome, controlz! It's great to have you.

Let me explain - new community account members get immediate access up to 200 search points. This consists of the 100 points on sign up, plus the 100 points available for immediate refill, when you use up the points, for a total of 200 points.

It's ok to experiment and try out searches, even if you use up a bunch of points. This is the reason for the immediate refill. When you use up your initial 100 points for testing and experimentation, you can immediately get another 100 points in your account. This basically wipes out any mistakes you may have made with your first 100 points.

So, don't feel like you've made a mistakes if you have done a few searches. If you had hoarded the points and not used them, you wouldn't have access to the next 100 points refill (the site only lets you refill if you have used up your points first, it's not meant for "saving up").

Try it some more, and let me know if you have more questions.

HSR1234

Sorry, this is probably a very stupid question! The tips say to include Oneworld BA and Oneworld QF when searching. What is the difference? I have Avios with BAEC and am seeing Oneworld QF availability for the routes I am interested in (internal in the USA) but not with BA. Does this mean I won't be able to book them?

ckpeter

No problem!

The difference is that each airline site tends to return something a little different. Sometimes one would include certain connection airports that the other would exclude, or sometimes they have differences in the set of airlines that they will return. By picking all the applicable sites, especially for your initial searches, you ensure that you have maximum visibility into what's available.

If you see QF availability for an option that you like, try to search segment-by-segment with BA, this should allow you to book the flight with BA. Alternatively, you can also phone BA, and tell the agents the individual flights that you found, and see if they can book it that way for you (beware that phone ticketing fee may apply).

Give it a try and let me know if it works.

smilesjr

Just signed up for AwardNexus using my new FlyerTalk account, and for first search did IAH-DOH to see the lowest award availability for First and Biz over the next couple months.
- Then, Award Nexus said to uncheck CX because CX does not fly to IAH. Excuse me, but Qatar award flights can be booked through CX and Qatar flies to IAH.
- Then Award Nexus says to uncheck more because I only have 25 points. Strange for just 1 seach, but ok, I uncheck Star Alliance, since Qatar is OneWorld.
For results, Award Nexus shows no availability at all, in addition to giving an error that Qantas does not fly to Doha. Again, I know Qatar award flights can be booked through Qantas, so it should not matter if Qantas does not fly to Doha (although that also surprises me, but ok, not going to question it, does not matter).
Yet, Alaska Airlines own web site shows business award availability on Qatar on almost every day for the next couple of months for IAH-DOH.
What am I missing here? Does AwardNexus not show partner availability? if not, it seems to be a really really severely limited tool compared to Award Hacker, Point.me , and even many airlines own award search tools. Yet, there are tons of raving reviews here for AwardNexus.

ckpeter

Hi smilesjr. Thanks for signing up. Some clarifications for you:

- The reason you got that message is because the CX option is searching for CX metal only. It is not a generic Asia Miles search option. Therefore, while Asia Miles may partner with QR, which flies from Doha, CX itself doesn't, and when you pick CX checkbox, the site is telling you that CX metal doesn't fly to/from Doha. Note also how the airline sites are named: Oneworld (BA) means it is searching oneworld availability using BA, but CX means it is just CX metal. No other partners.

- You hit the 25 points limit because your search, while conceptually is one search, actually spans many dates, so it is really more like 25 searches in one. This is part of the power of Award Nexus. You can very easily construct a huge search that spans many dates, many routes, and many options, but at some point. to avoid the backend dealing with a huge search that takes hours to run, there are limits set on each individual search. The solution, as you discovered, is to break down your searches into a few smaller chunks (in your case, 25 points at a time, but premium members can go up to more points at a time).

Basically, the points system gives you the flexibility to construct the searches that you want, subject to some safety and membership level constraints.

- Award Nexus passes your requests to the underlying airline site options that you pick, and that's the results you get. It's a little hard to troubleshoot these kinds of differentiates between different airline sites, and I don't want to dig into this if you are not actually wanting to book this trip.

If you are still looking to book this trip, I suggest using the "contact for help" link on the upper left corner of the search result, which will send me a link to your search, and I can look into it further.

To answer your question about what you are missing: Yes, Award Nexus does cover partner availability. It also returns live availability, as opposed to just static airline schedule, which some other sites only return.

You may find it useful to review the Tips page, which has a section on the various airline sites. The information is a little old, but most of it is still accurate:

https://awardnexus.com/tips

Your experience is basically the law of large number at play. Every month, hundred of travelers use Award Nexus, and it works well for most of them, but with large enough number of users, at some point someone will get a string of error messages or some results that seem unexpected. I encourage you read to Tips page above to do a few more searches, and if you are still having trouble with specific search results, use the "contact for help" link as mentioned above.

smilesjr

ckpeter, thank you for the tips. So just now decided to repeat the search on Alaska Air at same time as AwardNexus just to make sure I was looking at a date with availability, using only BA and QF to be sure that partners (Qatar) would be included in results, without exceeding the allowed 25 points. Got time out error message again when clicking on results, but decided to hit my browser reload button, and this time clicking the date with the result brought up the BA results in the side bar, and they matched what Alaska Air's site brought up. There was a message at the top saying that the QF search was only 12% done. About 5 minutes later the QF result showed up in the side bar, matched the BA result - and also brought up additional itineraries that did not show up on the Alaska Air results. So now I see that AwardNexus is indeed showing the results of multiple award programs simultaneously, but with the tradeoff that will not get instantaneous results for, say, an entire month, like one airline would give for only its own award program. Furthermore, have to go to the airline website to find out the exact amount of miles required, as AwardNexus only indicates "saver". Also noticed that on a date showing no availability on AwardNexus but for which Alaska shows availability - the Alaska availability was "Standard" (much more miles required to redeem). Looks like I will need to practice and strategize a bit to see if AwardNexus will truly help me versus just hitting the airlines own sites one after another (which is what I am used to doing).

HariOm

What's the QuickSelect syntax to search for only business class seats? I thought "only biz" used to work but that's not recognized.

ckpeter

You are very close.

Try "only business" or "only first"

HariOm

Ah, thanks Peter.

SanDiego1K

This tool doesn't seem to get a lot of chatter, yet I find it a stalwart in my tool kit. I've had it running BKK-LAX for a day I need this winter. I've got lots of miles in different programs, but all I'd been able to find were 200 and 250K award seats per person x 2. Um, no. I set up an Award Nexus search that reports daily to me as to whether there is award space. Today, SQ opened up seats on a day I could use. I was able to get 2 x 107K seats. I transferred points from Membership Rewards that moved over instantaneously and I grabbed my award seats. Very happy.

fckrabi

This tool doesn't get a lot of chatter, but honestly it doesn't seem worth it. I was very excited few days ago when I discovered it. I like to profit of layovers, so my trips looks like AAA-BBB-CCC-DDD-EEE(stopover)-FFF-GGG, where I try to have 10-24hr layovers depending on the city. So I thought I would just be able to search from AAA to GGG and put for example 1-2 city I want to connect at absolutely, and then the tool would show all the available complex segments available . For example AAA-CCC-ZZZ-EEE(stop)-FFF-GGG, AAA-BBB-CCC-YYY-PPP-EEE-GGG, etc and then I can chose the most interesting one to me. But no, you need to explore the routes by yourself, and then you search only by segments AAA-BBB, BBB-CCC, CCC-DDD,etc. So its just an award availability checker, but there are many others free tools that can be used for that purpose. Not worth putting money for that in my case.

And the route explore dosn't seem to work well. For example I put AAA-GGG with a stop in EEE. First it would not let me include an airport, it will tell me that I need to put an actual segment such as CCC-EEE as a stop, or like BBB-EEE. Well for me its not that useful since I would like to see all the possibles segments that goes from AAA to GGG stopping at EEE weither its BBB-EEE or CCC-EEE or DDD-EEE. And even if I put a segment, it will show me result that dosnt include my stop. So useless.

Maybe I misunderstood the tool and anyway Im happy that there hundred of users happy with the tool, but for me I find very confusing and not worth it when you consider all the points needed for a complete search, when you can just use flightsfrom,cowtool,seatsaero,united.com, expertflyer,etc and do it yourself.

ckpeter

Hi fckrabi, good to have you, and thanks for your comments!

I have read your post several times, and I am confused by the difficulties that you described. Some of the limitations that you describe don't seem to correspond with the actual features. For example, the Route Explorer most definitely accept airport codes.

Also, Award Nexus supports multi-segment searches, and per your description, you can search for two segments, AAA-XXX and XXX-GGG, and you can see the results returned for both segments by the airline site(s) that you picked. If you are wanting to explicitly look for connection at XXX and YYY, then do a four segments search: AAA-XXX, AAA-YYY, and XXX-GGG, YYY-GGG.

I also see that you have only done one search, which is not enough to familiarize with the features. I suggest you do at least 5-7 searches to get a better feel of how the tool works. Also, once you have done some searches, feel free to email me at the support email of your specific itinerary and what you are trying to accomplish, and I am happy to advise further.

Safe travel and good hunting for awards!

airgeekjx

Compared to other search tools, I found the search experience to be overly complicated for a new user
First, signing up is weird. Why can't I just use normal email address/password to sign up?
Then, I only got to search a few programs in the beginning, and should I expect to see more if I move to higher tier? Other tools don't require me to do so, thus I can't think of an advantage of this tool over the others. Perhaps it has better functionality in other ways which I hope you can enlighten me, thanks!

SanDiego1K

I've already mentioned it but will say it again. I appreciate the opportunity to set up searches to run daily. The space might not be there today but perhaps it will be next week. The results come by email each day. Look at my August 3 space where I report success in a search I had been running a couple weeks.

cheltzel

It looks to me that your OP is looking for stopovers "AAA-BBB-CCC-DDD-EEE(stopover)-FFF-GGG". I can't speak for all carriers but neither UA nor AA allow stopovers on a single award ticket. And UA moved to only booking flights you can see on the UA award search site several years ago.