ckpeter

Good questions. The simple answer is that Award Nexus was designed for power user first. The search experience is focused on power and maximum award visibility. Naturally, when the interface is designed for power use, there are elements that can seem overly complicated for a newbie, but is well-appreciated by power users.The signup restriction is also intentional. Award Nexus has limited capacity, and the free community membership is not intended as an open signup. That's why you cannot use your email, but have to provide your FT handle proving that you are a actively contributing FT member.

airgeekjx

Interesting. Since you mentioned power user, I assume that there are certain advanced elements that are generally missing from other more generic tools? Would love to hear some of those features so that I can focus on those when trying it out next time

ckpeter

Of course! Glad you asked.

One power feature is the multi-segment search capability. With Award Nexus, you are not limited to just searching one-way or roundtrip in a search. You can actually search for 4-10+ segments (depending on membership level, but even the basic community membership can search for 4+ segments).

This is very useful, for example, when you are focusing on award availability for long-haul flights, e.g., you can do a search for JFK/ORD/SFO/LAX-NRT, and you can find the long-haul awards.

Another power feature is the ability is to search multiple weeks at a time. Depending on membership level, a search can go from +7 days to +21 days, all in a single search.

This multi-segment and extended date range search then feed the award data into a viewer that's designed to displayed availabilities on up to dozens of segments, on weeks of availability, using a calendar-based view that gives you a good sense of the availabilities with just one look.

Ori Kuper

Hello, I only can see/find/search for - Star Alliance (AC) and (ANA). I can not find a way to search for available seats for other Star Alliance airline members. Is it possible to run also searches for usage of LH MM miles? Thanks.

IMH

Any availability Award Nexus finds for you on Star Alliance carriers is very, very likely to be bookable using M&M miles.

However, logging in to M&M and searching there will often find additional availibility on Lufthansa Group airlines, especially if you have M&M status.

Ori Kuper

Thanks. I'm trying to search for "milage-bargains seats" (as they are defined by the MM website). And since the search on the milage-bargains system (within MM website) is only very seldomly brings up results with the real bargain price (for example Europe to the US for 55K MM points - i was trying to focus my search only for specific LH metal flights... however it seems like none of the Nexus results shows any MM metal flights at all...

IMH

The list of theoretically available "Mileage Bargains" is here: https://www.meilenschnaeppchen.de/?lang=en

The only place you can search for actual availabilty -- which is often very scarce -- is M&M. Good luck!

ckpeter

The general partner award availabilities should show using Star Alliance (AC) or Star Alliance (ANA).

However, it sounds like you are looking for the special availability on LH metal that you can only book using M&M miles. For those, as IMH said, you will have to log into your M&M account to search for them. Award Nexus doesn't currently support the extra availability that LH gives to its own members. Sorry.

jerryhung

Peter
just realizing as I was searching, there is no "day of week" indicated anywhere, either in Summary page or in the Details pop-up
Is it possible to add it?

It's much easier to read Friday/Saturday/Sunday, then to reference against a calendar to figure it out, especially for Overnight or week-hours departure/arrivals
(e.g. below flight reads as = leaves Saturday night, arrive Sunday morning 5 am)

ckpeter

Sorry that I just saw that, but I think that's a great suggestion.

I added the day of the week display to the award flight display.

jerryhung

Thanks, saw that in the details page like below
Perhaps Summary part could use abbreviations also (M/T/W/T/F/Sa/Su)

jerryhung

I see AC is gone from AwardNexus as well, just like Cowtool and all other sites ......... bad move on AC's end really

LearningToFly

I contacted Peter about that issue after the cowtool shut down. He said he was not aware of anything and it was business as usual. Sadly, I still have a bunch of paid points remaining with ANX that I would have used had I known where it was going with AC.

ckpeter

Apologies for the confusion. I just started a maintenance cycle to address some backend capacity issue. This is a relatively broad maintenance, so you may see some airline sites rotating in/out of service in the next week or two.

ckpeter

I don't currently plan to enforce any expiration policy. Having said that, I do suggest you start using up your points, particularly if they were acquired back when Obama was the US president. After all, you do not earn interest by letting them sit there.