How to Find Award Flights on EXACT DATES | Seats.Aero

one of the best ways to maximize the value of your miles and points is snagging a last minute award seat but let's be honest as fun as that sounds most of us are not going to hop on a plane and fly around the world on one or 2 days notice so today I want to cover a few ways that you can find available award seats on specific dates well in advance and the main tool that I'm going to show you is my hidden secret that lets me travel hack like a pro despite having a regular 9 to-5 job okay so the first and most obvious way that you can use your miles of points for specific dates is booking directly through your credit card provider's travel site for example I can log into my American Express Travel site enter my desired departure and arrival airports and these specific dates that I want to fly on and pretty easily I find a ton of different available flights that I can book using my American Express membership reward points and the same applies for other major card providers as well this method is very convenient however you're usually only looking at one cent per point which is fine but especially if you're looking at a business or first class seat earning enough miles and points for those is honestly unrealistic now I don't want to discourage you from using that method because if you're just getting started with the miles and points game then I always say that it is better to book something than to sit around waiting to learn everything and get the maximum value out of your points my first flight ever to Europe was booked using the exact strategy that I just showed you and yes I burned well over 100,000 points for a flight that would have cost a lot less had I used some other methods that I now know but it's what opened the door to travel hacking for me and allowed me to fall in love with travel in the first place but the real question we want to answer in today's video is how can you find those coveted Sav award seats that give you higher Redemption values on your points of three five or even 10 cents per point but on specific dates and how can you book them well in advance that's where the secret tool that I mentioned earlier comes in it's a free site called seats. Aro and I want to be clear from the start that they are not sponsoring this video in any way this is genuinely just a tool that I personally use all the time as someone who loves the travel hack but can't always jump on a last minute award seat seats. Arrow Aggregates available sa award seats across tons of different award programs into one easy to view menu so that you don't have to waste hours of your life combing through different loyalty programs one day at a time and the available filters allow you to search for specific dates and specific departure and arrival airports and like I said this is showing us what's known as sa award seats and those are the award seats that are going to give you much better Redemption value on your miles and points meaning it will cost you fewer miles and points to book a sa award seat versus a normal award booking okay but enough about all of that let me show you how seats. Aro actually works so first of all this tool is completely free to use and they do have a paid version that allows you to create alerts and search 12 months in advance instead of the 2 months that the free version allows you and the paid version is $10 per month so despite the fact that I have the pro account all the features that I'm going to talk about in today's video are available with the free version there's a lot of different filters and search options that you can use so we'll start by clicking on the explore menu and you'll see this drop- down list of all of the different loyalty programs that you can search using seats. arrow and it's important to note that seats. arrow is going to search all of the partner Airlines for each of these programs so if we select air Canon for example they are not just showing US Air Canada flights they're also showing us the 52 partner airlines that Aeroplan has as well there isn't an easy way on here to see which airlines fall under which Alliance programs but one of these search options that we're going to cover in a second allows you to search through all of these programs at the same time so don't worry about that too much so this show flights from menu at the top allows you to filter your departure and arrival by region which Narrows things down a little bit but if you're looking for a specific airport and a specific date then we're going to have to narrow things down a bit more scrolling down from there we have by far the best part about seeds. Aro and that is this beautiful chart of available award seats that would quite literally take us hours to find on our own well this is a great starting point it is a bit of a chaotic mess with different departure and arrival airports and dates that are all over the map we can click on any of these column headers to sort by that column so I could sort by the dates or sort by a specific departure or arrival Airport s but if you want to get really specific which is kind of the whole point of today's video then you want to go up and use this search bar and we can use this in a number of different ways so since I'm currently filtering from North America to Europe if I type in JFK into the search bar it's actually going to bring up all of the available award flights departing from JFK I could then enter a second airport code like Frankfurt for example and I'm now seeing all of the available award seats through airoplan in the next 60 days specifically from JFK to Frankfurt and if I want want to filter even more I can then add on a specific date to that and I am now seeing all of the available award seats through aop plan Partners from JFK to Frankfurt on this specific date and what you may have noticed is these filters are instantaneous which if you've ever spent time searching on airline sites you know that some of these tools are painfully slow to use because they are pulling in so much data what makes seats. Arrow different is that they are constantly combing through these loyalty programs rather than just pulling this data once you actually submit your search and by looking at this last checked column it tells us when seats. Arrow last found that specific available award seat if I get rid of the date in the search bar to bring a larger chart back up I want to point out that the green bubbles are ideal since they are showing direct or non-stop flights and the blue bubbles mean that this particular flight has a connection of some kind and when you hover over these bubbles you can see the two-letter airline code which again if you don't have these memorized you can just do a quick Google search so LH is Lanza and you'll also see the number of available award seats which is really helpful if you're booking for yourself and a spouse for example you only bought one ticket the ability to find these available award seats is amazing on its own but what I can then do is click on this information button on the right hand side of the screen navigate to the class that I'm wanting to book and from here I can jump directly to this exact award seat on Aeroplan where I could then transfer my points and book this flight or it even shows me that this exact award seat is available to book through United's mile plus program so I could open up both of these and see which option is going to give me a better Redemption value on my points and if you're thinking that this doesn't apply to you because you don't have any Aeroplane points or United miles remember that you can transfer your Chase American Express Capital 1 and build points to Aeroplan for example if you've wasted hours of your life coming through multiple award programs looking for a needle and a hay stack you probably see the value of this especially considering it's completely free so the simplified flow that I follow is is find the available award seat using seats. Aro jump directly to the airlines website where I can then transfer my credit card points to book that flight and if you want to know which card providers can be transferred to which airline programs then you can learn everything you need to know using our free Transfer Partners cheat sheet which I'll link to down in the description so this explore page is fantastic but if you want to streamline things even further seats. Arrow also has a search menu which not only lets you input your departure and arrival airport or you can search multiple airports at once using the multi-airport codes feature but this Search tool is going to search through all of the airline programs at once rather than just searching one of them at a time if you know you have to fly on this specific date then you can just click on this blue search button but you can also search 3 days or 7 days before or after your entered departure date but when I do that search you can see that not only am I getting available award seats across a ton of different Airline programs but seats. arrow is actually working in the background to to refresh everything that it's currently showing me in order to verify whether or not that award seat is still available again you can sort by colum or search in the exact same way we did on the explore page but pulling up this amount of data without a tool like this would involve navigating to every single one of these sites in a lot of cases creating a free account with each of them and then patiently just sit around and wait until the information loads not to mention that as you can see back on the siege. Arrow screen a lot of the possible combination don't have any availability meaning you would just be spinning your wheels coming through all of these non-available bookings just to find the few premium award seats that can actually be booked with Miles and points that sounds terrible and if you are looking to be a bit more spontaneous and adventurous but you still have to travel on a specific date then what you can do is actually search from your local airport to a general region like Europe for example so this is going to give us the cheapest way to fly on a specific date somewhere in Europe up as long as you don't care about the specific location which I think is a lot of fun and honestly this is one of my favorite ways to use this tool lastly you can also search by routes using the 3let airport codes but given the flexibility of the first few options I showed you this particular tab is not one that I personally use very often so if you're like me and your travel is not typically flexible enough to hop on a last minute award seat or you're just looking to save yourself countless hours of searching then having a tool like seats. arrow in your travel hacking toolkit is going to save you so much time and help you maximize the value of your hard-earned miles and points and with this you can now answer questions like what is the cheapest way for me to get to Europe from my home airport what first class routes can I fly right now using as few points as possible what's the least points I need just to get away from the weekend even if that's just a domestic flight and how can I fly to the moon using points call us a space taxi okay maybe not that last one although Virgin Galactic is kind of moving in that direction again seats. Arrow paid us nothing to talk about them we just really love their tool and I wanted to share it with all of you so that you can get the most out of your hard-earned miles and points and save yourself a lot of time and if you do want to help support our ability to create these unbiased reviews then the easiest way to do that is by checking out our top travel credit cards page the next time you were looking to earn points by signing up for a credit card which supports our mission here at Daily drop without any additional cost to you but as always thank you so much for watching and until next time Happy Travel hacking

Channel: Daily Drop

Views: 35,739

Keywords: How to Find Award Flights on EXACT DATES, credit card points, How to redeem miles and points, travel hacking, Kara and Nate, miles and points, credit card, award travel, best credit cards, Best Award search tool, How to use credit card points, how to use credit card miles, travel rewards, travel hacks, points and miles, award flights, airline miles, credit card points 101, travel hacking credit cards, travel hacking for beginners, best credit cards 2023, travel hacking 101

Id: --wBo13Jyds

Length: 10min 34sec (634 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 09 2023