Watch Greg compare the top award search tools – which one is best? (Video)

At Frequent Miler, we often talk about great value awards that are possible to book with your points and miles, but searching for business class flights to popular destinations can be difficult. Luckily there are a lot of award search tools around right now to make this easier. In this video, Greg is going to experiment with a hypothetical trip and see which tool helps him the most. (You can also read about the different tools mentioned here in this post, Which award search tool is best?)

Watch Greg compare the top award search tools

(00:45) – The premise: A family of four is trying to get from their home of Denver to anywhere in Europe this summer. They’d like to fly in business class with as few stops as possible.

(01:28) – This video will compare 4 tools: AwardTool, PointsYeah, Roame.travel, and Seats.aero. These all offer the ability to set alerts, which we see as a necessity for any award search tool.

(02:20) – We’ll start with AwardTool…

(03:28) – To search our broad destination of anywhere in Europe, we’ll use AwardTool’s “Panorama” feature.

(05:53) – Don’t be afraid to look from other starting airports. (If you find a great award ticket, you can always book a separate positioning flight to get to the departing airport.)

(06:57) – Next, we’ll look at Roame.travel, using their “SkyView” option to include cached results

(08:39) – Next, we’ll look at Points.yeah using their “Flight Deals” option to include cached results

(16:46) – Next, we’ll look at Seats.aero, using their “Explore” feature. (With this tool, we’ll need to know which program we want to search ahead of time.)

(22:08) – Now that we’ve narrowed down a likely itinerary from Denver to Paris in early August, we’ll go back through the tools we tested at the beginning with this more specific route in mind

(22:28) – One of the benefits of AwardTool is an ability to search over a wide range of dates. If you know your departure and destination airports for example, you can search up to 32 dates.

(28:03)- We’ll go back to Roame.travel with our more specific trip idea from Denver to Paris, this time using the live search.

(29:35) – PointsYeah did the best job finding our outbound flight, so now we’ll see who can find us the best return flight.

(31:35) – If PointsYeah hadn’t shown any great options from Denver to Paris, you could always go back to the broad flight deal cached searches to experiment with changing the airports a bit. (For instance, departing Europe from a different city than Paris.) This might be appealing anyway, for a multi-destination trip.

(34:18) – Next we’ll see if Award Tool or Roame.travel find any different options from Europe back to Denver.

(35:50) – Finally, we’ll check Seats.aero to see what options it finds for homeward tickets.

Conclusion

What this highlights here for me is how useful PointsYeah’s cache search (called Travel Deals) is for starting with a broad and flexible idea and seeing what’s possible or likely based on availability. In this case for example, it was the only tool that found anything for us to start with. Then once we had a refined idea for our specific European destination (based on availability) those other tools were useful to drill further into that idea. Narrowing the search helped those tools perform a bit better and find more options for us.

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