greenythebeast

Is there a site like Kayak.com that shows you all available award availability for flights from all airlines? Thanks for your help.

UA Fan

Expert flyer, awardnexus.com

wanaflyforless

There is no site that can show you everything with ease; this is by design. The airlines want to limit people's access to their award inventory.

ExpertFlyer, KVS Tool, and AwardNexus are the main options you have to search a large number of airlines. However if you really want to be able to go wherever you want at low level of miles, you will need to learn how to use those tools strategically; not just plug in origiin, destination, and prefered dates to get the magic answer.

worldtraveller2

WANNAFLYFORLESS: That is exactly right. That is the delima I find myself in now. Trying to figure out the best way to spend the million miles I have! I definitely need help in that arena.

worldtraveller2

I just did an award search on awardnexus.com for PHX to IST this summer and I don't even think I understand the results! It cost me 20 points to run the report

ckpeter

It is very true that no site can show you all possible options, but in addition to any individual policy of an airline, there is a more fundamental reason for that.

Non-stop flights are the easiest to search for, because that is just an inventory lookup. However, a 1-stop flight between two distant cities may have dozens of connection possibilities (for example, to travel JFK-NRT, an exhaustive search will need to search for JFK - LAX/YYZ/YVR/IAH/SFO/ORD/IAD..... - NRT). For a 2-stop connection, the possibilities go into the hundreds, if not thousands.

All the while, all the airline sites are designed to return results in a minute or two. No reservation system can perform with that kind of exhaustive search in under a minute, so they have to take shortcuts. Some of them only search a few connection points, others disregard connection that are less than ideal (e.g. some airline site won't show overnight connection, even though you could book it, if you know and call to book). One well-known example would be that the ANA site doesn't do 2-stop connection, so you will never see something like JFK-ORD-YYZ-NRT returned by ANA, even though individually, each of those flights may be available.

On Award Nexus, any available flights are displayed in the calendar or table. If you don't see any flight listed, it may be because there are no award flights available for the days that you searched.

I highly suggest reading the tips page. It includes a lot of information on how to drill down on additional options, if a simple search doesn't reveal any awards.

tassojunior

I really appreciate the concept of Award Nexus but it seems to have no way of indicating the mileage level of awards available.

mahasamatman

I think they make the assumption that you know something about your frequent flyer program.

ckpeter

There is no mileage price indication because that depends on what mileage program you use to redeem. The same round trip flights NA - Asia in business may cost 120K UA miles, or 90K US miles, or some other amounts in other programs.

The idea is that you can use Award Nexus to search for what's available, then you can call your own mileage program to book it, using whatever kind of mileage balance you have.

jphripjah

I just saw a mention of a new site on cnn. www.flybymiles.com

It hasn't launched yet.

It purports to be a site for booking frequent flyer award tickets.

I find the KVS tool to be very helpful and worth the fee.

tassojunior

Not what I mean.

There are levels of award redemption and that is what people are interested in. For example a coach domestic could be a 25K, a 45K, or a 60K depending on how many coach awards are available. I wouldn't be interested in a 60K for sure.
Same with J and F. There are levels of awards.

I can usually find an award, just not one at a mileage level I would want.

ckpeter

As far as I know, DL and US are the only two US-based airlines that have more than one capacity-controlled mileage level (not counting full-access award, such as AA's Anytime or UA Standard Award, where you get essentially unrestricted award availability by paying double price).

Generally, only "low/saver" level award are available for redemption by other partners mileage programs, so that is what Award Nexus displays. In practice, this isn't much of a problem. Medium or high awards are usually plentiful, so you don't need any advanced tool to find availability. It is the "low" awards that are tricky to find, and where advanced tools can really make a difference in your redemption.

wanaflyforless

As you explained elsewhere, just because the user did not get availability when he entered PHX-IST on Award Nexus does not mean that PHX-ORD-FRA-IST, PHX-DEN-ORD-IST, PHX-IAH-LHR-IST, PHX-ORD-BRU-IST, or any of the other ~50 double connection possiblities was not available. This is because of the limitions of the data provided by the airline sites Award Nexus is using to access award inventories. The only way to really know if there are no seats PHX-IST is to break down your search, looking at each part of a possibility separate.

worldtraveller2

Thanks! I will try a few of those options!

wanaflyforless

I use the Airline Route Mapper to understand all my options.

Use the top menu to filter to Star Alliance. Then click on IST to see all the cities one can fly from to IST non-stop. Then use ANA tool or Award Nexus to search for space to each of those cities that has a non-stop to IST. ANA Tool/Award Nexus nexus will usually pull up all the one-stop options, so doing the above will usually show you everything that is available.

Award Nexus advantages:
1) You can search several dates/a date range at a time. Improves efficiency a lot to search a date range for avaiable seats.
2) Award Nexus allows you to search three separate Star Alliace sources for award availablity. While results are often the same, sometimes one will find seats another does not show.
Minus: Each date you search takes Award Nexus points. If you are doing searches for different award tickets every month, Award Nexus will cost a LOT more than KVS tool will.

KVS Tool gives unlimitted easy access to ANA Star Alliance availability for a lower cost (if doing very many/very broad searches). It will however not also search CO's website and AC's website for a more complete listing of Star availability or search a large date range like Award Nexus will.

For the purpose of going to IST on Star Alliance, Expertflyer is not a best solution, as they do not have access to TK award inventory.

For free, Continetnal.com searches do the best of any single airline website at showing the most availalbe options, including ones that requite a double connection. Continental.com does not however show availabiilty on 100% of Star, leaving some options (like LX flights) out of the search results.