Earning points is relatively easy. Finding seats to buy with your points is somewhat trickier. This guide will help you learn how to find and book your trips.
Where are they?
It’s spring and you try to book some flights for an upcoming vacation this summer. You have a nice pile of points and everyone has been saying how they fly for free so you look for flights on points and there’s nothing there except flights that hop all over the place and cost way more points than you actually have. What gives?
Well, first off, if you want to fly on points in summer, the ideal time to be looking is actually last summer, not this spring. The easiest way to book the flights you want is to book them the moment they are released, about a year in advance.
Most airlines will initially release just 1 or 2 business class seats per flight on the sought after long-haul routes. The more sought after the route, the faster they disappear. The most popular routes will get snapped up within the first 10 minutes following their release. While that may seem daunting, it is one of the best ways to get the flights you want, when you want them. It just takes planning.
There are other ways, at other times, but I’m going to talk a bit more about this method first.
When are they released?
The answer to this isn’t as clear as you’d think it should be. A seat on a given flight is often made available to different booking platforms at different times. It’s possible, for example, to book a reward seat on the Japanese airline ANA through their Star Alliance partner Air Canada’s Aeroplan website several days before ANA’s own loyalty customers can book it through ANA’s website. ANA’s own customers though have access to additional reward seats which are unavailable to Aeroplan. ANA has partnerships outside of Star Alliance as well, such as with Virgin Atlantic. These partners will have their own timetables for how soon a flight reward can be booked.
Depending on what platform you’re using to do the booking from, and which airline you’re planning to book, you will find the earliest you can book something is between 330 and 361 days prior to the flight.
It’s easy to figure out which airline releases on which day on a particular platform (such as Aeroplan) by going to the search function within that program and looking for reward seats on a common short-haul route (not the popular long-haul route you actually want to book). For example, let’s say you want to book the popular route from Seattle to Singapore on Singapore Airlines. Do a reward search instead for Singapore to Bangkok, a route that has several flights each day and would never sell out all their award seats a year in advance. Start at 365 days out, or however far in advance your points search page allows, and then go backwards a day at a time (or look at a calendar view if your rewards program offers that) until you see available seats. Now you know how far in advance Singapore Airlines releases their seats.
Once you find the date, you’ll know that that airline released at least 24 hours prior to the moment you looked. You just need to narrow down the exact time. Take a look 12 hours later to see if the next day’s flight has been released? That’ll narrow the window to 12 hours. Just two more “halving’s” an you’ll have narrowed the time to within 3 hours. Looking just once a day, each day for a week and you’ll be able to pinpoint the exact hour, and likely exact second, the airline releases their seats. Now you’ll know exactly when to look for that Seattle-Singapore flight.
Now, a word of warning, doing this can involve waking up at unnatural hours of the night to check. This is something I’ve done many, many times over the years. The good news is, if you’re somewhat tech savvy, there’s lots of extensions now you can load onto your web browser and other programs that will automate mouse movements and clicks so you can set up your searches to run automatically and save screen shots of the results. Once you find the time, put it into a spreadsheet.
The bad news is, airlines and loyalty platforms are constantly changing their systems, so your spreadsheet will be a good starting point for next year’s vacation, but should be re-investigated prior to a planned “first opportunity” booking.
To complicate things a little, understand that not every flight operates every day of the week. That Seattle-Singapore flight is only on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. Before you attempt to book the flight you want, you should know the schedule and do a test at the designated time on each “day of week” a couple weeks prior to see if any of the scheduled days are ones where no seats are released. It’s not uncommon for high-demand days like Fridays and Saturdays to have less (or no) seats released.
Lastly, understand you’re competing with potentially thousands of other people looking to snag these high demand routes. Even if you do everything right, someone else could beat you to it. You’ll want to ensure you’ve saved your personal details and credit card info into the loyalty program’s system so just have to click a button instead of typing all those numbers in. Seconds count! You should also have backup plans should you miss out.
How to find seats beyond the initial release date
Some airlines don’t release their seats on a set schedule far in advance. Even ones that do will often release more seats later and some people who snagged the seats early on will give them up later when they change their mind (I am famously guilty of this. I probably book and then later release a dozen or more trips each year). There are several ways to snag seats beyond the initial release date.
The more flexible you are with your itinerary, the better. If you’re able to travel mid-week, you’ll find many more options available to you. Tuesdays and Wednesdays tend to be the hardest for airlines to sell, so consequently they are the days that get the most reward seats. With that in mind, here are some strategies.
Just like some airlines release seats far in advance like clockwork, so some airlines release close to the flight if there are unsold seats. By “close in” I generally mean 2 months prior or less, with some airlines being consistent at 21 days prior, 14 days prior and 7 days prior.
If you have a specific few dates in mind, there are tools on the internet where you can setup an “alert” that will check every day for award seat availability on given days and email you when one pops up. One such tool is called ExpertFlyer. There are several. ExpertFlyer allows up to 100 alerts to be set at a time.
Another option is to find another way to your destination and/or another points program or airline alliance. For example: I wanted to book a trip to Australia from Canada to take a cruise vacation out of Sydney. The obvious first choice is the direct flights from Vancouver to Sydney on Air Canada. These are generally too expensive on Air Canada for any sane person to book, so I looked at other options. Using just the Aeroplan program, I could fly from Vancouver to Sydney via Tokyo on ANA airlines. I could fly from Vancouver to Sydney via Taipei and Brisbane on Eva Airlines and Virgin Australia. I could fly from any major airport in Canada to London, UK, then to Singapore then to Sydney. and on and on. There are numerous ways to get anywhere. In the end, I transferred some points from my Amex account into British Airways’ points program which is part of the OneWorld alliance which allowed me to book Vancouver to Sydney via Fiji on Fiji Airways. Coming home, we’re booked through Tokyo on ANA airlines. I have alerts setup should more direct options come up for a reasonable price.
A good tool to find direct flights to/from various airports is Flight Connections.
Aside from far in advance and last minute, there are reward seats that pop up in between all the time. Airlines are always finding ways to maximize revenue and fill seats and whenever something doesn’t look like they’ll sell out, they will use those opportunities to release reward seats. It never hurts just to look at what’s available periodically. There are tools for that too. Tools that can search a range of airports and multiple dates at once. The best tool for this on the Aeroplan side of things currently is the oddly named CowTool. This fellow’s pet project became so popular he had to limit access. It’s free and worth the time to register and/or jump through whatever hoops he’s instituted to get access if it’s waitlisted. With a few keystrokes you can get thousands of results over many days and possible combinations of airports and then filter and sort the results with just about any way you can think of to instantly find the needles in the haystack that would otherwise take hours. American Airlines points program has a nice calendar feature for the OneWorld alliance if you’re looking on that end of things too.
Additional tricks of the trade
I’ve been doing this for over a quarter of a century and have picked up some tricks along the way. I don’t share all my tricks, but I’ll pass on a few here.
Searching and booking 1 seat when 2 are travelling
Even though I travel with my partner I always do my initial searching for just 1 passenger. There are a number of reasons I do this. First, some airlines will release 2 business class seats, but release them one at a time. Air Canada used to release only one seat far in advance and would never release the second seat until someone bought the first one. They’d release the second seat the day after the first seat sold. At that time the booking was released in the middle of the night so I’d set an alarm, wake up at 3am and buy a seat, and do the same thing the next night for the second seat. They don’t do this now, but it’s a strategy that they or any airline could employ and you’d miss it if you only search for 2 seats.
Another reason to search for just one seat is because it will often show flights through cities you had no idea were even an option and lead you to finding new ways to get where you want. With stopover rules, it can also expand your trip into two trips on the same fare!
Sometimes an airline will release just one business class seat far in advance, but will release unsold business class seats a few weeks before the flight. So we often will book a refundable points flight with each of us travelling on consecutive days. Closer to the flight we’ll keep an eye out for extra seats released and change onto the same flight.
Even if the airline isn’t in the habit of releasing extra seats later on, it’s still a reasonable strategy to book flights on consecutive days if 2 seats aren’t available, because flight schedules booked a year in advance often change and when they change they let you choose alternate flights. One long haul flights that operate once a day, that means you can change one of your flights onto the same flight as the other person. This is allowed without additional cost and can be offered even when there’s no reward seats left. Worst case scenario, one person gets an extra day vacation. Oh darn.
There’s more than meets the eye
I’ve written about this before, but it’s worth mentioning again here. The possible combinations to get from point A to point B are astronomical and no reward platform’s search engine is capable of providing all possible solutions. Instead, they will have some formula that displays options that are a)profitable for them and b)focus on their network.
Those solutions presented in the search results are generally not the only options available to you. You can usually call in and dictate exactly what flights you want to be on and an agent can piece those together into an itinerary manually. As long as the itinerary follows the rules for min/max connection times, distance bands, stopovers, etc.. that are dictated by the program, then you can buy a ticket.
This, more than anything else, is what frustrates the average traveler and causes them to give up and spend their points recklessly on short haul travel, or worse, gift cards and toasters. Understand, this is by design. The airline wants you to spend your points at a reduced value. Remember, just because you can’t see a flight solution, doesn’t mean there isn’t one.
Re-read that last sentence. Then re-read it again. The best options are very often not presented online.
Finding possible solutions will require searching for individual flights. It stands to reason that if you can find reward availability from A to B and B to C and C to D, you should be able to call in and book A-B-C-D even though that’s not an option they serve up to you online when you search for flights between A and D.
A knowledge of the basic booking rules is required but most of that is common sense. A flight arriving at B at noon and the next flight departing at 1pm might not be a valid connection at a busy airport, but you wouldn’t want to book that anyway as there’s a good chance you’d miss your flight if the inbound was delayed. If A and D are both in North America but B is in Asia and C is in Europe, that’s probably violates routing rules, but you’re likely not going to want to spend a day and a half to fly to a destination 4 hours away. You don’t need to know all the details of the booking rules to find valid solutions, but researching those rules will help.
Catch and release
To explain this trick I’ll use a common points flight conundrum. North America to Australia is one of the most lucrative routes for any airline because the direct flights are upwards of 15 – 16 hours and many people are willing to pay big money for that lie-flat business class seat. If people are willing to pay, the airlines won’t give seats away. Consequently, the very few award seats offered on these routes, if they’re offered at all, are snapped up almost instantly. Finding a circuitous route is often the only option. The individual flights on that itinerary are also going to be in high demand such as North America to Asia and Asia to Australia. A good option is to fly from Vancouver or Seattle to Tokyo and Tokyo to Sydney, or from Vancouver or Seattle to Taipei and Taipei to Brisbane. (There are other options too, such as starting from LAX, SFO, ORD, NYC, etc.) This creates a unique problem though. Asia is on the other side of the international dateline so if you’re in North America its already tomorrow there now. Herein lies the problem.
If flights are released x days in advance, and that date happens to be a Monday in Asia for example, the Asia-Australia flight is going to be released Sunday if you’re in North America, but your flight to Asia to catch that flight won’t be released for another day when it’s Monday for you. By the time you can book the first outbound flight, the second leg of the flight has been sitting there for a day already and has probably already been snapped up.
The solution is to “catch” the 2nd flight first. Then “catch” the 1st flight the next day, and book both using a refundable fare or on a platform that doesn’t charge very much to cancel. This will result in two bookings that each cost as much as the combined flight should cost, so you need lots of points to do this trick. Sadly, the airlines and award programs will not merge them together and give you half your points back. But now that you have all the flights in hand, you can “release” them by cancelling both and rebook the whole itinerary in order on one ticket.
There is a risk that someone will grab your flight when you release it before you can rebook, so part of the trick is to wait a few days before the “release” because your competitors are looking at release day x and not a few days later, their eyes are less likely to notice when you release them. Do the release at a time of day when most people aren’t likely to be looking for flights. I usually aim for a Tuesday morning when most people in North America are heading to work. When I use Aeroplan, to do this, the points are usually instantly returned to my account so the whole process to cancel both flights and rebook takes just a couple minutes, so the risk is low. If the itinerary is one that requires calling in to book, I will wait until I’m on the phone with the agent and get them to cancel and rebook. Note, some airlines will not return the seats to inventory instantly, which will cause you considerable distress, but on the upside, no one else will be able to book them either. In those cases, keep looking until they reappear. It shouldn’t take longer than 2 or 3 hours.
Another version of this trick is when the reward program requires you to book a round trip instead of two one-way trips. By the time your return date rolls around, the outbound flights are long gone, so you book the flight somewhat in reverse using a dummy outbound flight and the “return” flight will be your actual outbound. This way you can book your outbound flight on the first day it becomes available. Then a week or so later when your actual return flight is released you can call in and change your flight by dropping your dummy “outbound” and adding the new return, while your original return now becomes your outbound flight.
Confused? If your round trip is from A-B-A, you’d book B-A-B and you wouldn’t care if the B-A flight is economy or included layovers because you’re going to drop it later, so long as the A-B was the outbound business class seat you want. When the return B-A you want comes available you drop the first leg from your B-A-B and replace it with the new flight at the end so you have the A-B-A you want.
If the route is high demand and you suspect it’ll disappear while you’re waiting for the agent to answer the phone to make the change, you may want to “catch” that flight using a separate booking first, using another dummy outbound and waiting a few days before calling in to “release” and piece it all together.
Think beyond point-to-point when booking
Most reward flight programs use zone pricing or distance band based pricing. If your multi flight itinerary crosses zones on the first (or last) leg or ends up in a higher distance band by just a small amount, the price could be reduced by breaking the ticket and booking some short flights separately.
Conversely, sometimes adding in extra flights will make the flight cheaper too. If the main long-haul flight is between two hubs (typical) often adding in a connection before or after from another city will drastically reduce the cost of the flight. For example, flying Calgary to Frankfurt costs more than flying Calgary to Warsaw via Frankfurt even though the latter uses the exact same flight between Calgary and Frankfurt.
Incidentally, the process of booking the longer flight even though you just want to go to Frankfurt, and abandoning the last leg to save money (or points) is called “Skiplagging” and has it’s pros and cons. I don’t recommend it, but if you’re interested in that, there’s a ton of information about Skiplagging on the Internet you can research.
What I will do, however, is use stopovers to take advantage of the lower connection fares. So using the example above, I’d book Calgary to Frankfurt, add in a stopover of 14 days in Frankfurt (just 5000 points with Aeroplan) before the connection to Warsaw. Whether I stay in Frankfurt for that 14 days is irrelevant, as long as I’m back there 14 days later to fly to Warsaw. I could then book my return flight Warsaw-Frankfurt-Calgary, saving points on the way back. I’d probably set it up to have a couple days in Warsaw, but it’s not necessary. You could easily fly from Frankfurt to Warsaw (or some closer destination) and back to Frankfurt and then onward to Calgary in the same day.
There’s more than one Tokyo
There’s only one Tokyo, but there are 2 Tokyo airports, Tokyo Narita (NRT) and Tokyo Haneda (HND). New York City has 3 airports (JFK, LGA and EWR). London has six! This is common among several cities around the world. It is often possible to book tickets that arrive at one airport and depart from the other as a valid connection on a single ticket and could certainly be used when booking a trip piecemeal.
Some tools, airlines and award programs allow you to search for all the airports using special codes such as LON for London, NYC for New York, TYO for Tokyo, OSA for the 3 airports of the Osaka/Kyoto/Kobe metro area etc.. Some tools, airlines and reward programs do not support this, so you need to know all the codes for the cities you’re using and take this into account when researching, searching and booking. If you can’t find a flight from NRT to LAX, trying HND to LAX could work, for example. If the reward program does support it, then you should always search using the code that encompasses all the airports or you might miss some flight options.
There’s a nice list you can refer to here: Metropolitan area airport codes – Travel guide at Wikivoyage . If you’re just looking for a single airport code or want to know what city belongs to a specific code, a quick google search for “yyc airport” or “maui airport code” is the fastest way.
Sometimes the best flight is a train
If you’re travelling to or through Europe or Japan you can easily and quickly move around by high speed trains. So if you’re having trouble finding flights, you could fly into a nearby city and take the train to your destination (or next flight). For example, you can find a seat from Canada to Rome, but not from Canada to Venice (your desired destination). Book the flight to Rome and take the high speed train to Venice. It takes under 4 hours and costs like $20. For all things trains, there is only one source you’ll ever need; The Man in Seat 61.
Summary
The process of finding and booking reward flights can be cumbersome, but it’s a skill like any other that you can learn. I’ve been travelling on points for over 20 years and have visited about 50 different countries. I have never flown a long haul flight in any class other than business class or first class and I’ve done it entirely on points that I’ve earned through credit cards. You can do this too.
It admittedly is more difficult at times than simply booking a cash flight, but when you’re reclined in your lie-flat bed in the sky, sipping $1000-a-bottle whiskey, and the whole trip cost you less than a couple hundred bucks while the guy next to you paid over $20,000, you’ll find that the extra effort is worth it.