AwardTool Review: The Award Search Engine We've Been Waiting For?

Anyone who's been in the award game for more than a few years remembers the burden of searching for airline award seats. First, you head to United to look for partner award space, then you check out British Airways since it's got a decent search engine, and then you weep as you attempt to open Flying Blue's website (the days before the calendar search). Over the last few years, however, new search engines have been cropping up. Seats.aero, Point.me, Roame, and PointsYeah are all on the scene, each doing its best to earn your business.

While it's certainly helped us find award seats, no one system has managed to do it all. Results are missed or gone by the time you go to book, which has necessitated using more than one of these tools. Now, another site has cropped up, and it's different than the rest. It even includes hotels. Does that mean AwardTool is better? Let's take a look.

What Is AwardTool?

AwardTool is the newest search tool for finding airline award seats. Like competitors, it allows you to search for seats with multiple airlines simultaneously. It also offers the ability to search multiple dates at a time.

Credit: AwardTool

If you're a free user, you have the flexibility to enter up to four different search parameters:

• One departure airport, one arrival airport, and four dates
• Two departure airports, two arrival airports, and one date
• One departure airport, two arrival airports, and two dates
• Two departure airport, one arrival airport, and two dates
• Four departure airpots, one arrival airport, and one date
• One departure airport, four arrival airports, and one date

If you're a paid member, those parameters jump to 16 at a time.

AwardTool also offers the ability to search for award rooms with hotels, though the capability is fairly limited in scope, especially when compared to MaxMyPoint or StayWithPoints.

AwardTool Pricing

While it's free to use AwardTool, there are paid versions. Here's what you get with each membership plan:

How To Use AwardTool For Flights

Searches

AwardTool isn't a super user-friendly website. It mostly looks like a tool built by a super points-and-miles-nerd for other super points-and-miles-nerds to use. That works just fine for some of us, but the casual peruser may have a little difficulty navigating.

That being said, the search bar is easy enough to use. You simply input your search info and click the search button.

Credit: AwardTool

The site will then pop out a bunch of results:

Credit: AwardTool

There is a huge amount of customization available here, including:

• Airline programs you want to search.
• Which transferable point currency you want to use.
• How many stops you want.
• Which airlines you want.
• The maximum number of points you're willing to spend.
• How much of your flight needs to be in a premium cabin (by percentage, for filtering mixed-cabin awards).
• The maximum amount of taxes and fees you're willing to pay.
• The maximum flight duration.
• The airports you're willing to arrive or depart from.
• When you want to depart.
• When you want to arrive.
• Maximum connection time.
• The aircraft you'll be flying.

You can sort the results by:

• Lowest points
• Quickest flights
• Lowest taxes/fees
• Departure time
• Arrival time

Maximizing your searches

What's confusing about this system is that it works on a four- or 16-entry option (depending on whether you're a paid user).

It gets complicated when you've got multiple airports or multiple dates that you'd like to search, especially if you're a Pro user. With 16 different iterations of input, figuring out how many airports can go where and for how many dates isn't simple.

It's easiest to think of this as an algebra problem, where your departure airport is A, your arrival airport is B, and your date of travel is C.

All together, your equation would look like this:

(A x B) x C = 16 (or 4 if you're a free user).

If you're a Pro user with four departure airports and two arrival airports, you'll be able to search just two dates, because:

(4 x 2) x 2 = 16

Note that you can't go over the 16-entry setting. The site will force you to use fewer than 16 entries if your equation will pass the limit. For example, if you're a Pro user with four departure airports and three arrival airports, you can only search one date. Searching two dates would put you at 24 entries. It's:

(4 x 3) x 1 = 12 versus (4 x 3) x 2 = 24

Compare this to Seats.aero, which lets you conduct massive searches while still providing real-time results.

Credit: Seats.aero

In case that looks like gibberish to you, this search includes approximately 40 departure airports, four arrival airports, and a window of six days for flights. Using the same logic AwardTool does, that's a grand total of 960 entries.

Panorama

If you're looking for a broader search, you can use the Panorama feature. This allows you to view cached results across huge swaths of regions and airports.

Credit: AwardTool

In this example, we're searching the entirety of North America to either Johannesburg (JNB) or Cape Town (CPT) across a 90-day window. That's super broad. Note that the 90-day window is a Pro feature; free members are more limited.

The downside here, as you can probably see, is that your results may be seriously outdated. A four-day-old search result likely doesn't exist anymore, and it's only after clicking and completing a real-time search that you'll know whether the seat's still available.

Credit: AwardTool

That's extra steps no one wants to take. And if it goes badly, you won't end up finding your flight anyway.

On the other hand, it's pretty cool that you can search for a flight to “Anywhere” and then filter out locations based on what type of vacation you're looking for.

Credit: AwardTool

Mega

The Mega search is a lot like the standard search, except you get 24 entries instead of four (for free members) or 16 (for paid members). However, you can only pick up to six programs to search at a time. This is true whether you max out that 24-entry limit or not.

Free members are only entitled to three Mega searches per day.

Credit: AwardTool

Alerts

You can set alerts with AwardTool. Free members get three alerts, while Pro members get 25. As you'll find with the 16-entry search, the 25 alerts you get are eaten up by your search parameters.

In practice, this means that free users can set an alert for a flight from a single airport to a single airport on a single date. Pro users have more freedom, but it's still limited.

Credit: AwardTool

Along with specifying the maximum number of points you're willing to pay, you can also:

• Select a specific flight number.
• Choose to exclude certain airlines.
• Limit the taxes you're willing to pay.
• Filter out arrival and departure times.

And most excitingly: You can make this alert infinite. This means that the alert will stay active even after it's sent you notice that there's availability. This is in contrast to other sites, which will delete your alert as soon as it finds award space.

However, note that the 25-alert limit for paid members is dismal compared to the unlimited alerts given to paid Seats.aero members, even if those alerts do delete themselves. Conversely, paid ExpertFlyer members can set up to 200 alerts.

Deals

Selecting the “Deals” tab will show you a variety of deals available for flights. This is a good way to explore what's out there if you're just in the mood to spend some points and flexible on your destination.

Credit: AwardTool

Supported airline programs

AwardTool currently supports 21 airline programs and shows their transfer partners, though the Wells Fargo transfer partners haven't been updated yet:

Credit: AwardTool

Related: What Flights Can I Book With Miles?

How To Use AwardTool for Hotels

Hotel searches

AwardTool also lets you check out a year of award space at a time for hotels. Free members can check three hotels per day, while paid members get unlimited use.

The system is fairly limited. You can search where you'd like to go, and the site will pull up applicable results from Marriott, Hilton, Hyatt, and IHG.

Credit: AwardTool

Once you've found a suitable property, click on it for a detailed view of award availability.

Credit: AwardTool

You can set alerts for award nights here, but they draw from your general pool of active alert capabilities (three for free members, 25 for Pro members).

Compared to MaxMyPoint, on of our favorite hotel award search programs, this comes out a wash. Even as a top-tier subscriber at MaxMyPoint, you get a maximum of 30 detailed views of hotels per day. Compare this to the unlimited views at AwardTool; those who like to click around a bunch will probably prefer the latter.

However, MaxMyPoint also offers a variety of alerts — up to 15 of them at a time. This includes alerts for when any day of award availablity opens up, when popular hotels get availability, when award pricing changes, and more.

How Does AwardTool Compare to Other Award Search Sites?

We said earlier that searching for flights on different award seat engines is an…adventure…and it certainly is. Here's what a search from Los Angeles (LAX) to New York (JFK, EWR, or LGA) in economy on a single date pops up for each popular award search engine:

Well, if that doesn't convince you to sign up for multiple subscriptions, we don't know what will. A few notes:

• No one engine included all the results returned by the others.
• Roame says it supports searches for Spirit but didn't return any results.
• Only AwardTool and Seats.aero allow you to search for multiple cabin classes at once.
• AwardTool and PointsYeah had nearly identical results.
• Point.me is way behind when it comes to competitors, with no way to conduct a multi-date or multi-airport search.
• AwardTool, PointsYeah, and Seats.aero include direct booking links to airlines; Point.me does not. Roame says it does, but the link was broken.
• AwardTool, Roame, and Point.me priced the same business-/first-class flight at different amounts.
  • Roame's pricing and booking strategy were correct.
  • Point.me overpriced incorrectly by 4,500 miles.
  • AwardTool bizarrely recommended using Qantas to book for 3,500 more miles.

Not a single search engine came back with a 28,000-mile business-/first-class flight immediately available by searching American's website.

Missing this seems like a glaring oversight. Credit: American Airlines

The Bottom Line

AwardTool is an intriguing search engine for those looking to use their points and miles. For a relatively low cost, it allows users to look for both hotel and airline seat awards, which is something that most other services aren't providing. However, its 4/16/24 entry system is unnecessarily limiting (and confusing). It makes sense to limit members on how much they're able to input at once, but when competitors likes Seats.aero can massively outstrip your search capabilities, it's a little concerning.

That being said, not a single one of the award search engines we put to the test came out with identical results. AwardTool and PointsYeah were the closest, though there's still the mystery behind AwardTool finding a spare flight PointsYeah missed — as well as AwardTool's bizarre recommendation to book flights with Qantas points at a higher cost.

Overall, AwardTool is a strong entry into the now-crowded award search engine field. Does it do anything better than anyone else? No. Seats.aero searches better and MaxMyPoint has better functionality than AwardTool's beta system. But AwardTool does a lot of things well, and it does more of those things with better quality (and at a better price) than anyone else.

Time to add another subscription to the list, I guess.

AwardWallet Tip of The Day

Are you overwhelmed by too many accounts appearing on your AwardWallet dashboard? You can now declutter by moving the accounts you no longer need into the "Archived Accounts" tab. Once an account is archived, it won't appear in your main "Active Accounts" list. Please note that this feature is not yet available on our mobile interface.
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