A promising new award seat searching tool
One of the toughest parts of the points game is actually finding the
flights you want once you've gathered enough points. Most people end up
with a mix of points across several carriers and maybe a pile or two of
transferable points like American Express Membership Rewards or Chase
Ultimate Rewards.
AwardHacker is great for knowing all of the possible rewards and how many points they would cost, but the holy grail of doing a search for actual, available reward seats has remained elusive – in part because the airlines put up IT and legal roadblocks to 3rd party services to prevent their software from crawling through the airline websites and mining the resulting data. Awardex.io (based in the Baltics) tried this, but unfortunately their site has been completely hobbled recently and you're now greeted with a login message about "something new and exciting coming soon".
One of the other strategies for this problem is to let users download a software program to their desktops that can scrape the airline websites using the users' own mileage account logins. But if you're not experienced at downloading and compiling your own apps, this can be daunting.
Well, one of these desktop software makers has decided to launch a web-based version of their app. It's slick, it's easy, and it shows a whole YEAR of availability at a glance. At this point, though, it seems as if their fledgling site is using data that is many days old, and only works on a few thousand routes. Hopefully they can find a vector into performing these searches "legally" and we can all save ourselves heaps of time combing through half a dozen airline sites trying to find those ever-elusive First Class seats to Tokyo/Honolulu/Paris/etc.
AwardHacker is great for knowing all of the possible rewards and how many points they would cost, but the holy grail of doing a search for actual, available reward seats has remained elusive – in part because the airlines put up IT and legal roadblocks to 3rd party services to prevent their software from crawling through the airline websites and mining the resulting data. Awardex.io (based in the Baltics) tried this, but unfortunately their site has been completely hobbled recently and you're now greeted with a login message about "something new and exciting coming soon".
One of the other strategies for this problem is to let users download a software program to their desktops that can scrape the airline websites using the users' own mileage account logins. But if you're not experienced at downloading and compiling your own apps, this can be daunting.
Well, one of these desktop software makers has decided to launch a web-based version of their app. It's slick, it's easy, and it shows a whole YEAR of availability at a glance. At this point, though, it seems as if their fledgling site is using data that is many days old, and only works on a few thousand routes. Hopefully they can find a vector into performing these searches "legally" and we can all save ourselves heaps of time combing through half a dozen airline sites trying to find those ever-elusive First Class seats to Tokyo/Honolulu/Paris/etc.
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