Opportunistically checking award flight availability
 

Spring break plans fell through and I am looking for a fun destination to fly to non-stop from Chicago this Friday with award availability. Is there any app (eg expertflyer) that can automatically search for award availability on multiple routes for a specific date?

If not, a more general question: is there any app/site that can generate a list of all direct flights departing a specific airport? Sometimes I use Wikipedia to get such a list for various airports, but perhaps there is a better one?

Not that I know.

Wikipedia sounds like the only winner.

I found a couple sites including http://star-alliance.innosked.com/ that allow one to search for destinations, but I'd love if some website provided the ability to find all saver award destinations available on a specific date - or at least make it easier.

ExpertFlyer Premium can certainly do the second one. It's has flight timetables by city. You can filter by airline and by direct flights.

You can also set it up to automatically search for award availability on a route + airline and alert you when it opens. Unfortunately I think you'd have to build a separate alert for each airline award program on the route and each date individually to achieve what you're getting at here. For example: if I wanted to fly LAX-NRT, I'd have to set up separate LAX-NRT searches for UA, AA, DL, etc etc etc. I couldn't just have it look for an award on any airline from LAX-NRT.

Not specifically what you want, but perhaps a start - UA has a page on .bomb thath has a list of destinations that is supposed to have good saver availability. Saw a ad-size thing down the right side of a page for it yesterday, but don't remember which page exactly, but I'm pretty sure it was one of the MP pages. I'll see if I can figure out which one.

I didnt click on it, so don't know if it can filter by departure city too. Also don't know how often it's updated, maybe not more than monthly - however, several years ago, UA used to email the list out based on MP settings.

if you're looking for a typical spring break destination (I.e., FL, Carribean), I wouldn't hold my breath - these are mostly probably sold out long ago, or the few remaining seats are probably waiting for UA to pick up last minute planners who are willing to pay $. Especially if you insist on non-stop, particularly Carribean which is much better served on UA from EWR and to a lesser extent, IAH.

I think that the page which emcampbe might be referring to is:

https://www.united.com/web/en-US/con...averaward.aspx

although it doesn't provide a whole lot of specificity.

As far as destinations go, perhaps a ski town in the mountains is a consideration? It's not a non-stop flight on UA at this point (UX connection in Denver), but ski season is mostly over, so perhaps there is award availability, and a place like Aspen is always fun (you didn't say anything about $$$$)....

Google Flights can be useful for this. For example, here is a link that visually depicts all JFK-XXX nonstop flights available.

https://www.google.com/flights/#sear...04-25;s=0;mc=m

You can zoom in on a market to get detailed pricing. Hope this helps.

How many miles and where do you want to go?

Close-in tends to be good for LH F. Looks like NH F is open for LAX - NRT and IAD - NRT on Friday with availability to connect from ORD. Some options I found with a quick few searches

1) 1230am (Saturday morning) BR flight ex-ORD is open in J as a jumping off point to Asia.

2) ORD - IST TK flight on Friday is open in partner J for connections into Europe.

3) ORD - BRU flight on Friday is open in saver J (57.5) with a few connection options (e.g., LHR) for cheaper UA Saver J to Europe price.

4) IAH - SCL flight on Friday is open in Saver J with Y connections from ORD for South America. IAD - GRU and IAH - GIG also open in Saver J for Brazil again with Y connections from ORD.

Basically no real list just go onto UA.com and do some random searches - you should be able to ID opportunities based on trunk routes that show availability (such as the above) and then try and build through that (say you decide Europe but don't want to do BRU or LHR, see if you can get something that goes ORD - BRU - XYZ).