Travel Deal of the Day (August 6, 2008)

If you are searching for award availability on an airline’s website, you may be frustrated with the limited functionality of airline websites. I have found that the best way to search for frequent flyer seats online is to search "point-to-point."

The Deal:
When searching for frequent flyer award seats on an airline’s website, I highly advocate searching point-to-point. What does this mean? If you are flying from Palm Springs, California to Miami, Florida, your first inclination may be to enter Palm Springs (PSP) as your origin and Miami (MIA) as your destination. When I search online for award seats, I generally first find out all the possible connecting points, and then search point-to-point segments. For instance, if your airline connects through Chicago (ORD), you would search PSP to ORD and do a separate search for ORD to MIA. (You should be sure to check all possible connecting points.) If you had only searched PSP to MIA, you would only find availability for the optimal connections; but by searching point-to-point, you may find other connections that may have award availability (you often have to be quite flexible when trying to use miles, so finding all possible connections, including long connections, is often necessary).

As a caveat to all of this – be sure to remember that sometimes the airline websites are not capable of finding all possible connections. Flights on frequent flyer partners, itineraries involving stopovers and connections that involve multiple or extremely long connections often require a call to an airline agent. Sometimes, calling the airline, paying the fee to book via phone, and working with the agent to find connections that may be difficult or impossible to find online may be the best strategy.