uela

Looking for an efficient method or tool to help searching for international award availability and prices, that will include all airlines/alliances and their points/miles transfer partners.
Suggestions?

Thanks,
UE

jadecocoa

Juicy Miles has a paid award search tool.

sdsearch

Award Nexus (www.awardnexus.com) can search all three alliances (each through one or two member airlines), plus a few independent airlines (who happen to partners of one of those airlines it searches), and it's free up to a point for FlyerTalk members (click "more signup options" under the green Purchase button to get to the place whee you can sign up for free using your FlyerTalk login).

But it doesn't show prices, since the prices depend on which of the alliance's member airlines you're booking with, and each alliance has lots of airlines, and every airline has different award pricing (in some cases dynamic award pricing, so you can't even use a chart).

uela

Thx.

uela

Is anyone familiar with Amadeus?
Is it a good tool to search for award availability and (hopefully) prices too?
Which of their offering is best?

Mwenenzi

Amadeus is one of the major global distribution systems for airline ticket
Sabre is another GDS

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amadeus_CRS

uela

Can a private party access these systems, directly or indirectly (via VAR, etc.), to search for award availability (regardless of program, alliance, or metal)?
Is there any system that I can access to get that info? ... the systems that I am familiar with provide an insight but do not allow "wide" queries.

flyguy6

awardhacker.com is the tool I use to see an overview of award pricing options and routes. Unfortunately it doesn't show availability or the taxes/fees.

Blueskyheaven

AWARDNEXUS only allows to search awards for 1 or 2 seats. What if you want to search award for 3 people?

sdsearch

I don't know. I never noticed that limitation, and have never heard anyone else mention it before, so apparently most people who use it don't need to do that. I just looked and they don't see to mention anything about that in their Help, except to say that some airlines only release 1 or 2 seats at a time anyway.

You may have to do it "the long way" if you need 3+ seats, ie, picking an airline in the alliance that Award Nexus uses and searching at that airline's site directly.

Any site that tries to work with a bunch of different airline sites may have to limit its options to only what every site they use supports, while if you go manually to every site, you have the downside of leaning a different user interface at each site, but each site's individual features will be available to you there, while they're unlikely to be found at an "aggregator" site. (The same goes for a lot of paid searches too, there are fine-tunings you can do at some airline sites on a paid search that aggregator sites don't offer.

LAXlocal

Is there a better one for just Sky Team ?
I have 120k miles I would like to use ,

At one time there was a site that showed all the Delta Sky Miles deals , but I lost the bookmark !

Thanks

Thunderroad

I use and like awardnexus. This is a good, useful summary, but I'll differ in one respect: For many airlines, the results do show the miles/$ cost.

Also, users should be aware that it is maybe 90-95 percent right. Occasionally, it will show false positives or not show all award availability for a given route. But it's still a valuable resource.

Finally, it's sometimes best to first search the long haul of a route (e.g., LAX-KHG), then add the shorter legs one has in mind. This occasionally turns up long-haul availability that otherwise wouldn't appear.

Not sure where you get this idea. It can search up to nine seats.

I assume you mean using Delta (or Flying Blue) miles. In that case, why not just go to the Delta (or Air France) site?

LAXlocal

yes Delta miles , before at least with United miles you found more available flights on other airlines in the same group , but that was years ago !

sdsearch

How?

Does it perhaps depend on the type of account?

I have a FlyerTalk-related acount (the kind that gives free points refills periodically). It says "Member" at the top.

When I go to do a regular search, or even click on Search Builder, either place the dropdown for days has +0 through +7, but the dropdown for Seats only has "1 seat" and "2 seats".

And I'm obviously not the only one seeing this, as I wasn't the one who originally brought it up in this thread..

Thunderroad

Oh, sorry, I stand corrected then. I bought a bunch of awardnexus credits for $100 or $200 (can't recall offhand), which I guess gave me status that accesses a search for more seats. My apologies for my misinformation.