I may have found my new favorite award flight search engine. Meet seats.aero award booking engine—ideal for last-minute award bookings (free) or flights further out. The free version lets you look at last-minute flights (3 months out), but it is only $7.99/month or $79.99/year for the Pro version and completely worth it in my opinion (the price will go up to $9.99/month or $99.99/year on July 1). Let’s check out the seats.aero award flight search engine.

Here is what they say about their service:

 

How it Works

When you open the site, it will look like this. Note that an airline is listed in the top right corner. There is a dropdown menu that includes 9 airlines so far, with more to come. Filter for the airline miles you are hoping to use. I have a lot of AMEX, Capital One, and Chase points/miles, so I filtered for Air Canada, which is a transfer partner of all three of them.

 

You can see a small portion of award flight availability from different cities. It gets better because you can then filter it where it says “Show flights from” and the “search” area.

I already paid way too much in business class for a United flight to London in June, so I’m going to see if I can find a better redemption.  I will filter North America to Europe in the “Show flights from” field and then under search, I will put LHR (London Heathrow airport code).

It changes fields quickly (the speed really impressed me) and looks like this is where I can see last-minute availability in all the different classes from various airports that I could position to.

 

 

Looking Further

When I scrolled down, I could look further out and was able to find the dates I had booked. When I hovered over the few business class flights available, I found that I could book them with 118K Air Canada miles and save my diminishing United miles that I had booked for 155K miles (due to last-minute booking).

 

 

Once I hit the information icon on the far right, I got more details:

 

 

 

Honestly, that second flight looks pretty good, and I will probably switch to that one. I really didn’t want to use my United miles anyway and I have a lot of AMEX points to use.

 

Double Check with Air Canada

It is important to double-check with the airlines to make sure you find the same availability. Here is what I found. It worked!

 

 

Other Options

They also have a few other tools and will be adding more in the future. This includes a Delta One finder, a Lufthansa first-class finder, and a Qatar Qsuites finder with a special icon that lets you know if Qsuites are available—love it!

 

 

If you opt-in for the pro version (and I would), you can refer others to it and get a month of your subscription covered. Here’s my link if you decide to do it! (Shameless plug, I know but HONESTLY I am really excited about this site!)

 

Another Search

My husband and I loved our trip last winter to Australia, so I wanted to check that out. I moved my search from North America to Oceania and put in SYD, and found these winter dates. Tons of economy class seats and a few business class seats.

 

Create Alerts

You can create alerts for flights you are interested in. They will message you or email you when one becomes available.

 

 

Bottom Line

I found this site to work well for me and will continue to use it. The seats.aero award flight search engine is a winner in my book!