Award Flights Made Easy: My Simple Research Process

That's why , on Points for Normal People , I share the tips and tricks that my family has been using for over a decade to help you use your everyday expenses and credit card welcome offers to supercharge your travel points so that you can pay for entire vacations every year . Season three is starting off .

All about booking domestic flights with points , but , as I mentioned last week , most of the same principles will apply to international flights as well . As we go through this season , I'm going to also try to add a lot of videos to my course , and possibly YouTube as well , to show examples of using this process to find specific flights .

A lot of people have told me they learn best with these very specific examples and I want to show more of those . If you want to be sure you don't miss those videos as I add them , be sure to sign up for my newsletter , because I'll always post new links to videos in there .

Today I want to talk about the general process I follow pretty much every time I go to book a flight .

As we go through this season , and I talk about specific sweet spots , I'll share even more details that are relevant to those , but the general process , the beginning of that process , is largely the same , and the very first place I usually start when I'm thinking about flights anywhere or when someone asks me to help them , is to go to flightconnectionscom

. I just use the free version . I don't use the paid version . What I like about this site is that it shows non-stop routes between destinations . You can also filter by airline . This can be really helpful for trip planning in a few different ways . Let's say you have a Southwest companion pass .

You can go on and look for all the non-stop Southwest routes from your home airport and that might give you some ideas of places that you want to go visit . I personally am highly invested in booking non-stop flights . I plan so many trips around where we can go non-stop . It's why our family goes to Cancun a lot .

There are a lot of non-stops from Chicago to Cancun . We've also been to Jamaica and the DR a few times because , you guessed it there are non-stops from Chicago . We have not been to the Bahamas or Aruba because there aren't Southwest non-stops from Chicago .

Now sometimes we suck it up and fly connecting flights , but I have to really want to go somewhere to do that . I broke my own rule to always book a non-stop flight for our flights to Hawaii .

This year , when this episode airs , we'll be a few days away from heading to Maui and there is one non-stop a day from Chicago to Maui and it's on United , but it cost a bajillion points on the day we wanted to go and we didn't have flexibility due to spring break .

Since we couldn't be flexible with our dates , we had to be flexible with our routing , which meant taking a connecting flight on Southwest . We'll be fine . We get to check out two new airport lounges in Las Vegas and Phoenix . But the reason the step of going to flightconnectionscom is really important is not just because nonstop flights are inherently better .

It's because knowing the nonstop flights from your airport is going to help you determine which sweet spots to look into first . Last episode I mentioned that what's overwhelming about using points for flights is that there are so many decisions and so many options . But once you know your routes you can immediately focus in on certain parts of a search .

Now , it's not always possible to book every flight that's out there with points . Just because a flight exists doesn't mean it's always possible or practical to book it with all your points , but it's still good to know what your best possible routes are .

Flight Connections also is a helpful tool because you might see oh , I can fly nonstop on a Sunday , but not on a Tuesday , so that might help inform which days you're trying to find flights . Again , first step is just going to flight connections , entering in your home airport and where you want to go and seeing what you see .

It's pretty accurate , but it's not 100% accurate , like any tool . I was just on there looking for the non-stops from Chicago to Honolulu to research an article and I happen to know , because I saw an American Airlines press release , that they are restarting non-stop service on that route , but Flight Connections wasn't showing that route as a non-stop option yet .

If you're at a smaller airport you might not have many non-stop routes , but that's okay because you'll still be able to see which airline hubs your airport can easily get you to and you might be occasionally surprised by a non-stop route that you didn't know about .

So after I go to Flight Connections and make a note of the non-stop routes or other option routings that interest me , I go to Google Flights .

Now , google Flights is for searching cash fares , not award flights , but I think it's really important to gauge the cash prices for your flights .

If you're just searching on one specific day , you don't really know about the fluctuations yet , but I think it's at least worth putting in your departure and arrival cities and then clicking through the calendar even beyond your specific dates , to just get a feel for pricing .

Cash prices are , of course , volatile and fair sales are somewhat unpredictable , but also common , and with Google Flights you could even start tracking cash prices for the route you're looking at , in case prices go way down .

It's important to have a gauge of flight prices in cash because there are many times when you can use fewer points and also take advantage of these cash rates , even sales , but if you don't check them , you can't compare .

Google Flights also allows you to filter for nonstop routes , so it's a good way , a secondary way , to confirm that you aren't missing any nonstop routes , and if you're really flexible , you can go to the Explore tab at the top of the Google Flights page and search for whole regions and very flexible dates .

So I went in , for an example , and searched Chicago to California for all of July . Then I filtered it down just to non-stops and this told me that there are prices to San Francisco for $197 round trip and Los Angeles for $178 round trip . If I wanted to fly to San Diego , the cheapest price was $471 .

Now when I actually click on those flights , it showed me that the 178 round trip is on Frontier and maybe I don't want to fly Frontier , but again , I think it's good to have a gauge to compare . We'll even spend an episode talking about ways to save or make your experience better when you book on budget airlines like Frontier or Allegiant .

Before we get into next steps on award searches , I need to address some outdated advice I often see repeated

. One of those pieces of outdated advice is that you need to book a year in advance to get the best prices . This is generally not true for domestic flights anymore .

This is true for some international routes , but the reason it isn't true for US domestic flights is that , as I explained last episode , all of the US airlines use dynamic pricing for award flights that means they don't automatically open a flight schedule a year in advance and earmark a select number of seats , like five seats , that can be booked with points .

It used to work like that , but it doesn't for domestic flights really anymore . Instead , the airlines are trying to maximize their revenue , both for cash and award flights . This means that deals will pop up throughout the year .

Now , the earlier you search , the better chance you have of snagging a deal , and that's because you're giving yourself more time to search and find a deal .

So , especially if you have a certain trip you're really trying to take for spring break or Christmas break at those peak seasons , it can help to start searching a year in advance or even a little bit before that , to keep tabs on what's out there . But you might never see a really cheap price for peak seasons .

It's also become harder to tell if a flight is bookable by a partner airline in some ways , because it's a little bit more convoluted . But we're going to show you how to do that during this season , don't worry .

It used to be back in the days of zone-based award charts that if an airline was showing flights bookable with points , it was pretty much always also bookable by their partners .

And if you remember from last week , the reason you might want to book a United flight in a roundabout way , like to book a United flight , but really book it through one of United's Star Alliance partners like Air Canada , is that sometimes it will cost fewer points . When US Airlines started adding more levels of pricing , the flights bookable by partner shifted .

United , for instance , made almost all of their flights bookable with United miles , but for those flights that were costing more they were no longer available to be booked by partners . But some flights cost a lot more than others .

Some are still available , some United flights at that low saver level of award , as they call it now and it always used to be that those saver level awards were also bookable by United's partners .

So if I wanted to use Air Canada miles to book United flight to save points versus booking directly with United , I could look for United flights that were available at those SAVR award levels and then I could use that information and book instead on Aeroplan Air Canada . Now this is generally still true .

If I'm searching on United site and I see a flight that's marked as Sabre , there's a really good chance it will be bookable with partners , and if I see a flight on United that's priced pretty high with United miles that's way above Sabre levels , I will not find that United flight bookable with Star Alliance partners like Air Canada or Turkish Airways .

That's because United is trying to maximize their revenue and they only let their partner airlines book people onto their flights if they have plenty of space , and usually that overlaps with when they have released saver level pricing to their own Mileage Plus members too .

But not all Star Alliance partners seem to be able to see all United saver flights anymore and book them . So it's not a universal truth anymore , more of a guiding principle . Now Delta is even more unpredictable .

Delta flights do sometimes show up and are bookable with SkyTeam partners like Virgin Atlantic and Flying Blue , and sometimes booking this way means you can save a lot of points .

But with Delta it isn't even a direct correlation between how Delta prices that flight and whether it's available with a partner Like I pulled up as an example in research where there was a Delta flight that cost 80,000 points from Atlanta to Hawaii on a certain day and that same flight was also available to book via Delta's partner , air France , for less than half

the points , but then another day that Delta flight cost only 25,000 points via Delta , and that one that was 25,000 points wasn't available to book via Air France at all . As we go through sweet spots in this season , I'll show you , though , the easiest ways to find availability for any of these methods that I talk about .

I just want you to know that it's not always true that every saver award is bookable by a partner . Now that you have some background information , your direct routes and your gauge of cash prices , you'll be able to start your next stage of information gathering , because , yes , we're still in information gathering .

A lot of people want to go straight to one of the points aggregator sites like pointme or pointscom or seatsarrow to start their search . These are sites that search a lot of award programs all at once .

They can be very efficient , but if you go straight to them without stopping to understand sweet spots , you're going to miss some of the best opportunities to maximize and I don't just mean how to navigate them and plug in info and sort it , I mean how to use the info that they spit out .

See , the problem with every single aggregator out there is that they all have limitations . They only show awards that are available on certain sites of certain airline programs . Now , it's not because they're trying to gatekeep , it's just because they have limitations as to which airline programs let them scrape their award flight data .

Specifically , when it comes to domestic sweet spots , they miss a lot of them . None of the points aggregator sites currently show obvious redemptions . For instance and we'll start talking about obvious redemptions next week there's a big sweet spot there with thin air even , but it has to be booked via chat , so those flight options don't get returned ever .

When you do a search on any of those points sites , now you can use and I'll show you how to use the points aggregators to help you find Finnair options , because if you know where to look and how to use the data it returns to you , you can still use those tools .

This is also true of Turkish Airways , which overall , is the biggest sweet spot for booking United flights . It's also a pain to book with Turkish , since their website isn't the best and you usually have to call in or email to book , but the price is great and a lot of people find that to be worth the hassle to save a lot of points .

There are also some sweet spots , for instance , for using Singapore Chris Flyer Miles to book on Alaska flights , but again , these have to be booked through chat .

The silver lining here one thing I found over time is that the good news about these bookings that are great deals but they're a pain to book is that they seem to last longer because they are a pain to book . Anytime lots and lots of people start taking advantage of a deal , it goes away more quickly .

So because these deals are a pain to book , fewer people know about them or fewer people are willing to do them and they last longer .

This season is going to be teaching you about the sweet spots you should know for US domestic flights so you can use these point aggregators as a tool to help you find availability and then go on from that to book the best option with the best pricing or the best routing or the best benefit to you .

Now , sweet spots are different for different regions , so US domestic flights will have different sweet spots for booking than flights from the US to Europe . We do our best to consolidate and track these all on our website and we have very detailed guides to booking flights to every major region of the world . If we don't have it yet , it's on our research list .

So we're trying to do the legwork of this , the tedious legwork of comparing all the different options , and then we're doing that work and then boiling it down to sweet spots , and my goal is that my website can be the third place you go .

After you get your routes from Flight Connections , after you look at cash prices and at Google Flights , then you'd go to my flight guide for any given region and start to look at the sweet spots that overlap with the points that you have or the routes that you want .

Then you'd take that information and cross-reference it and start searching for actual available award seats . So this season we'll talk about domestic flights , but all of this knowledge can be applied to international flights as well .

For domestic US flights , you do need to be aware that the sweet spots are going to be different sometimes for nonstop versus connecting flights . That's another reason you need to know your nonstop and connecting options . You also need to pay attention to the length of your flight , because there are some specific sweet spots for shorter distance routes .

So you can see there's a lot of legwork . Before you actually move on to searching for award flights , you need to check your routing options through flight connections . You need to look at Google flights to gauge cash prices and see common connecting routes . You need to look at if you have multiple options for different airlines .

You need to pay attention to the length of your flight . You also need to know what points you have available to you . Then you'll need to take stock of sweet spots . Usually there will be a few that come to the top .

That will be somewhat obvious with all the information that you've gathered and again throughout the season I'll go through each of these domestic US sweet spots and by the end of the season we'll also have a flow chart published to help you walk through the process of picking a sweet spot strategy for domestic flights .

So after you've done all that legwork , that's when you're going to actually start physically searching for flights , and the good news is , if you've done all that legwork , the actual searching becomes a lot easier . I want to end by talking a little bit about mindset , specifically when it comes to award flight

deals . There is no perfect deal , but a lot of people in the points world end up overemphasizing certain ways to value a deal . That's usually by calculating cents per point , and people like to brag about the cost of their plane ticket in points versus what that exact flight would have cost in cash . But this really isn't a fair or helpful comparison .

Most of the time You'll see as we go through these sweet spots that there are pros and cons to every method . That's why you have to know yourself and you have to know what you value . Your goal might be to go to a specific place on a specific date .

Your goal might be to go to a specific place on a specific date , so your measure might just be comparing the cost in points and how many points do you use with different methods and what's the way to use the least points ?

Or your goal might be to search with flexible dates and find any time you can go to this specific place but you really want a nonstop flight . Then that's your measure of success . You might find it more important to have flexible cancellation policies , so you might choose to pay more in points to do that .

You might not care about destination , but are flexible and want the cheapest random route , and there are ways that you can use tools to find cheap flights that you can book with your points .

The point is that , once again , I don't think cents per point is a very helpful metric and , I hope , in this season , to give you ways to make your own decisions for domestic award flights that align with what matters to you . If you're eager to start practicing , I'd encourage you to do a test run of the first part of this process

for a route that you might want to fly someday . It can be any domestic route or even an international route .

I'm going to link a video in the show notes of me just walking through how I could do this process for a domestic flight , because I want to show you how I use the tools and if you're listening to this in podcast form and not watching on YouTube like most people do , the video will be easier to see what I'm doing .

So , as an action step , you can do the same for any city pair . Go to flight connections and find the non-stop routes . Go to Google flights to gauge cash prices On Google flights . You should also look at connecting flights and double check non-stop routes in case you missed some . Make notes on what you find . Check the distance of your flight .

Then save that information for when we delve into specific sweet spots this season . Thanks so much for being here with me today . I look forward to seeing you next time where we will continue to unlock these secrets of travel points together .