Mileage and redemption

Before, redeeming mileage tickets required a somewhat tedious learning process to understand mileage charts and redemption logic. But even after you figured out a route, you could still run into the frustrating “no seats available” situation. Now, with mileage-search websites, you can search for award tickets across multiple airlines with one click, and even surface tickets that can be redeemed immediately. Sort from low to high and pick the best option directly. Today, we’ll introduce one excellent site: Seats.aero

This post includes some content from the Knowledge Planet veterans.

What is Seats.aero?

Seats.aero is an award-ticket search tool with many features that can simplify mileage planning. In short, it mainly helps you with three things:

  • One-click search for award tickets from 23 airlines and check whether redemption seats are available between selected regions.
  • Search for mileage tickets on specific routes; Pro subscribers can check availability in real time.
  • Create route/date/airport-specific mileage-ticket alerts.

Seats.aero sign-up and membership

You can sign up for Seats.aero Pro with our referral link. We get one month of Pro membership from it, which helps support our work.

Seats.aero can also be used without registration, with these two core free features:

  • Search award tickets for 23 airlines, limited to real-time award inventory within 60 days of future travel.
  • Create flight-availability alerts (email only).

If you need more, you can upgrade to Pro. The price is $9.99 per month, or $99.99 per year. As a paid user, you can:

  • Search 23 frequent-flyer programs and see award availability for a full year (it stores search results, including others’ results, so you can review them later).
  • Create flight-availability alerts that can be delivered by SMS and/or email.
  • Use richer filters.
  • Have Seats.aero track specific routes.
  • Join their private Discord channel.
  • Use beta features such as the new seat map viewer and fare-class finder.

If you regularly book award travel, you may want to subscribe to Pro. Getting year-round availability information is very practical.

Scope

Seats.aero includes 23 airline loyalty programs for searching award tickets. These programs are:

This already covers most commonly used award currencies, though there are a few not on the list, such as ANA, Cathay, and JL. You can solve some of that with alliance redemption knowledge. ANA is in Star Alliance, and some seats can be found through UA since it is also in Star Alliance. So if you can find Star Alliance space on Seats.aero and ANA requires fewer miles, you can choose to issue through ANA. Likewise, JL, Cathay, and BA are in oneworld; if you find space through AA, you can use their search engines to search and book using their own miles.

Of course, most award-seat pools are shared within the same alliance, but some seats are released only by a specific carrier or elite-status tier. Those require separate checks on the carrier’s official website.

Also, if you click Explore, you can see each airline and its transfer partners at a glance, so you can quickly tell whether there are bank points you can transfer.

Search and alert features

On the search page, enter the airport codes and departure date you need, then search. If you only have a basic account, you can only search for award tickets within 60 days from today. After finding seats, you can check them on the Aeroplan website; if you have enough points, you can ticket. The result also shows that it was last checked one hour ago, so there is a real chance that someone else has already taken that seat by the time you go.

You can also do a much broader search. For example, in this search you can enter multiple departure airports and multiple destinations, choose AAA routes around next year’s New Year’s travel, and set a +/- 3-day window. Even though there are no business/first seats available yet (or they’re already fully booked), you can still see many AA top-value economy seats at only 45,000 points. In my experience, I usually hold this ticket first, then wait for a premium-cabin alert; once the better cabin opens, I rebook and cancel the original. This is one big advantage of award travel: flexible changes and free rebooking/cancellation can be done anytime. (UA/AA is full refunds, no penalty, which is fantastic.)

In the example above, there are no two-cabin/premium tickets on the AA direction right now, so we move to the second feature: alerts. Once you choose the origin, destination, and time window, the system will automatically search and send you an alert when seats appear. Many features are marked in blue as Pro-only—these are member-only features that make hunting premium seats much easier and much more efficient. I personally think $100/year is very worthwhile and it saves a lot of time.

Seats.aero is constantly adding new features, mostly for serious award-travel enthusiasts, such as UA upgrade alerts, first-class alerts for Singapore Airlines and Emirates, and more. It’s quite interesting if you want to explore on your own. They are also rolling out rooms.aero, but based on my own testing, this beta product is still unstable and the data is not very accurate, so I’m not recommending it for now. I’ll share more once it matures.

Booking flow

Here we give a quick walkthrough of using Seats.aero to complete one full award booking. Suppose we need a ticket from Shanghai Pudong (PVG) to Chicago (ORD). We just enter both airports in Seats.aero and search, and the award tickets appear.

When booking, click the exclamation mark on the right, and it will list all possible award-flight options. At the bottom, you can choose which miles to use. You can use UA’s own miles, AC, or other miles from the same alliance.

Here we click “book via UA,” which automatically redirects to UA’s official site. A big plus is that you don’t have to re-enter origin, destination, or dates—the system pre-fills them, so you go straight to the page showing award fares. And you can see those seats there.

Of course, this is only the simplest booking flow. In real booking, you may run into cases where the seats you need are unavailable. You can use alerts to monitor availability directly. There are many tactics too, such as searching more routes, focusing on transoceanic segments, and widening date ranges. We won’t go into all of them here.

Registration link