my experience
 

I tried out Gary's service and it didn't work out for me. I think the main problem was that award availability was limited but I had a lot of flexibility to work around this and hoped with Gary's routing knowledge and creativity, something could be found. I also wanted to book something relatively quickly (within 3-4 days) for travel in 3 weeks. This turned out to be too short of a window. To Gary's credit, he did not charge me anything after we cancelled the effort even though he spent a fair amount of time looking.

After flipping around some of the travel dates and changing the order of destinations, I was later able to find the award flights in classes that I wanted on my own. It did take a good amount of effort and I can see why it didn't come up quickly. If you are booking months in advance, I think Gary's service is a good option. In any case, since he only charges you if he finds something, it doesn't really hurt to try it.

+1 on Gary's service for me as well. What would take me days to do he can do in less than an hour because of his knowledge of the programs and familiarity with the tools. He got my father a last minute flight to Thailand over Christmas once.