AwardTool: a powerful new award search tool (British Airways added)

AwardTool is a powerful new flight award search tool with both a free and paid (Pro) version. This tool is very similar to PointsYeah. Both offer powerful search features for free; both allow searching for flight awards across a range of dates; both return results quickly; and both offer alerts. AwardTool, though, offers greater flexibility in searching multiple airports and multiple dates at once.

Flight Search

Search Multiple Airports & Dates at Once

Like other general purpose award search tools, AwardTool lets you pick your origin, destination, one-way vs round-trip, number of passengers, class of service, and date of travel. AwardTool, though, is very special in how it offers the freedom to select multiple airports and/or multiple dates at once.

The free version offers 4 simultaneous searches. You can use this to search any of the following combinations:

• 1 origin airport, 1 destination airport, a 4 day date range
• 1 origin airport, 2 destination airports, a 2 day date range
• 2 origin airports, 1 destination airport, a 2 day date range
• 2 origin airports, 2 destination airports, a single date

The Pro version offers 16 simultaneous searches. This allows much more flexibility. While I won’t list all the possibilities, here are some examples of what is possible:

• 1 origin airport, 1 destination airport, a 16 day date range
• 2 origin airports, 2 destination airports, a 4 day date range
• 4 origin airports, 4 destination airports, a single date
• 16 origin airports, 1 destination airport, a single date

This flexibility is awesome. When looking for international flights from Detroit, I often approach the search in two ways: first, I look for international flights departing Detroit and which will get me to the general area of my intended destination; and second I search from airports that I can easily get to: Chicago, DC, NYC, Toronto, etc. With other tools, this two-part approach can easily mean doing dozens of separate searches. With the Pro version of AwardTool, I can often achieve most of what I want with just a handful of searches. For example, when looking to fly to Europe, I can use AwardTool to search from Detroit to the destination I want, plus all of the destinations where I know there are nonstop flights to Europe: Paris (for flying Air France or Delta), Frankfurt (for Lufthansa or Delta), Istanbul (for Turkish), and Amsterdam, London, Munich, and Rome (for Delta). Iceland is another option but not if I’m looking for lie-flat seats. With AwardTool Pro, I can search Detroit to all of those destinations at once across a 2 day date range. Next, I can use AwardTool Pro to search to my specific intended destination from Chicago, DC, NYC, Boston to my intended destination across a 4 day date range.

Compared to PointsYeah:

• Free Version: PointsYeah allows selecting only 1 origin and 1 destination airport and up to a 4 day date range. AwardTool has the same limit of 4, but it allows much more flexibility in that you can choose whether to use your 4 searches through a 4 day date range or with multiple airports.
• Pro Version: PointsYeah allows selecting up to 2 origin and 2 destination airports and up to a 8 day date range. If you max out all of that, then that exceeds what AwardTool allows. With AwardTool, if you select 2 origin and 2 destination airports, you can then only pick a 4 day date range. That said, AwardTool is much more flexible since it allows picking more than 2 origin or destination airports.

Filters

After running a search, AwardTool lets you filter to specific points programs, number of stops, airlines, max number of points, max taxes, % premium cabin (it’s very important to set this when searching for business or first class), travel times, airports, specific aircraft types, and more.

Mega Search

AwardTool’s Mega search tool is like their regular search on steroids. Where the regular search lets you conduct up to 4 (free version) to 16 (Pro version) simultaneous searches, the Mega search will do up to 24 searches at once. This means that you can do a 24 day time window; or 24 different destination airports; or 3 origin airports + 2 destination airports + a 4 day time window; etc. And, amazingly, this option is available to the free version, but with a catch: free users only get three Mega searches per day.

Compared to PointsYeah: PointsYeah doesn’t have anything like this.

Alerts

AwardTool’s alert feature is similar to their search in that it allows a set number of degrees of freedom with which you can specify multiple airports and/or multiple dates. The free version only gets 3 degrees of freedom so you can create 3 separate single departure, single destination, single date alerts; or you can create 1 alert with a 3-date range; or 1 alert with 3 departure airports, 1 arrival airport, and 1 date; etc. The Pro version bumps the degrees of freedom up to 25.

Importantly, only Pro users can select “infinite mode”. When checked, AwardTool will keep the alert active even after emailing you with results. With the free mode, you’ll have to re-create the alert if the first one didn’t meet your needs.

Compared to PointsYeah: PointsYeah’s free version allows only 1 departure and destination airport and up to a 4 day date range. So, if you value date ranges over multiple airports, PointsYeah beats AwardTool with a 4 day range vs AwardTool’s 3. For the pro versions, PointsYeah offers up to 24 active alerts vs AwardTool’s 25. The main difference here is that AwardTool offers more flexibility by allowing more than 2 airport selections for both the departure and arrival.

Supported Miles

AwardTool searches across 20 different airline mileage programs. This is the exact same list that is supported by PointsYeah, except that PointsYeah also supports Frontier (for the three of you that have Frontier points). Here are AwardTool’s supported programs:

1. AeroMexico Club Premier
2. Air Canada Aeroplan
   (excellent for finding awards with Star Alliance and other select partners)
3. Air France / KLM Flying Blue
   (excellent for Air France, KLM, and SkyTeam awards)
4. Alaska Airlines Mileage Plan
   (Good for OneWorld awards)
5. American Airlines AAdvantage
   (Good for OneWorld awards and occasional great deals on AA itself)
6. Avianca Lifemiles
   (Another good option for finding Star Alliance awards — sometimes with better pricing than Air Canada or United)
7. British Airways Avios (Good for finding OneWorld awards and Qatar Qsuites availability that only appears on BA and Qatar)
8. Copa ConnectMiles
9. Delta SkyMiles
10. Emirates Skywards
11. Etihad Guest
12. Iberia Plus Avios
    (Good for finding OneWorld awards. It’s worth checking whether British Airways Avios or Qatar Avios offers same or better pricing since they have better change and cancellation policies)
13. Jetblue TrueBlue
14. Qantas Frequent Flyer
15. Spirit Airlines Miles
16. SAS EuroBonus
17. Tap Miles & Go
18. Turkish Airlines Miles & Smiles
19. United Airlines MileagePlus
20. Virgin Atlantic Flying Club
21. Virgin Australia Velocity

Extras

AwardTool offers additional features like Panorama and Deals (I think both of these use cached search results to show you options that might or might not still exist by the time you search for them), and Hotels (which lets you see award availability for popular chain hotels). I haven’t played around with these extra features enough yet to comment on them.

Pricing (Get $20 Off)

AwardTool’s basic version is free. Their Pro version is available as follows:

• $10.99 per month; or
• $84.99 per year (for comparison, PointsYeah Premium costs $89.99 per year)

Frequent Miler readers get $20 off their first year by using code FREQUENTMILER20:

1. First sign up for the free version using our affiliate link: frequentmiler.com/go/awardtool/ (thank you!)
2. Click the “Pro” button at the top of the AwardTool page and select the AwardTool Pro annual plan
3. On the check-out screen, you’ll see an option to “Add promotion code”. Click that and enter: FREQUENTMILER20

My Take

We seem to be in an arms race with award search tools one-upping each other left and right. For the past several months I’ve happily used a combination of PointsYeah and Seats.Aero for most of my flight search needs. Now AwardTool has come along and made me reconsider. Due to AwardTool’s greater flexibility compared to PointsYeah, I think I’ll turn to AwardTool first. But, keep in mind that both tools gave me free Pro memberships because they want me to write stuff like this. If I had paid for PointsYeah, I wouldn’t abandon it to go to AwardTool. They’re extremely similar and they both get the job done. And if I was a betting guy, I’d bet that the brains behind PointsYeah will read this post and make some changes to one-up their new competition. As I said, it’s an arms race, but one in which the consumer is the winner.

One other thing… AwardTool has a quirk or a feature that is worth mentioning. I found some FlyingBlue awards on AwardTool that weren’t available on other platforms, and they weren’t available on KLM.com or Airfrance.US. But the AwardTool folks tell me that they use FlyingBlue’s UK site for their searches because it seems to offer better award availability and that these awards can be booked over the phone. Unfortunately those results were gone by the time I learned that and so I didn’t get a chance to check whether that was true. Additionally, they say that they get better results via Aeroplan’s app than the website, so they use the app. I didn’t feature any of this in the main body of this post because I don’t really know what to make of it. If the tool really can find award space that other tools can’t, and if those awards are truly bookable, then that’s great. The downside is the frustration: I had found a great award flight, but couldn’t book it because I didn’t know that the secret was to check the UK site or to call in. And, of course, if the tool is finding award space that isn’t really there at all, that’s worst of all.

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