New Avios flight finder tool – pick a date, see what cities are available

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• sandgrounder says:

  7 Jul7 July 07:16

  Excellent! I shall have a little play with this later, but it looks promising!

• Ralph says:

  7 Jul7 July 07:57

  I appreciate that Raffles has come at this from the Avios angle and rightly so as that’s the thrust of his blog. I also collect American Advantage miles and for those that might have the aadvantage credit card that brought a bonus I think that there is value in topping up those miles, especially when AA offer a 40% bonus since its possible to find one way flight redemptions from the USA and ELIMINATE other carriers, thus eliminating BA’s fuel surcharges. We got two AA businesses class fights direct lax lhr for £3 taxes. This method might not save much money but it does offer greater flexibility in mixing carriers.

• N says:

  7 Jul7 July 08:28

  Useful tool. But you can’t ignore the number of miles – entering a huge number helps.

  (And why is BHX the default starting point? Does it have some not-quite-right location detection?)

  • trickster says:

    7 Jul7 July 10:10

    MAN was my default start location. I’ve never used the tool before, but I am in Manchester right now!

• Sully says:

  7 Jul7 July 09:06

  Well according to my search, with 2,000,000 miles and asking for ANY beach destination in October, it says the only place I can go is Barcelona!

• jose says:

  7 Jul7 July 09:32

  Does it includes Iberia flights?

• Paul says:

  7 Jul7 July 10:31

  This is a very helpful however as others have said you need to change the number of miles to a very high figure to cover the options.
  Sadly, when availability is shown it is highly unlikely that BA are involved. Over a dozens searches this morning to continental USA for February and whilst AA clearly have availability in First and Business a subsequent search of BA.com comes up with zero for both BA and AA, so no real surpise there!

  The tool highlights once again the appalling state of BA availability and their contempt for their frequesnt flyers and the avios scheme.

• Andrew S says:

  7 Jul7 July 10:33

  Hi Raffles – seems a great deal of interest in the “tools” to find award availability. Whats your opinion on the paid for alternatives? I hear some good things about the KVS tool, which at $75 for a year is not cheap, but in the context of a First or Club booking…

  • Rob says:

    7 Jul7 July 12:46

    They are all fairly useless for BA. This is because BA does not put award seats in their own fare bucket, so you can’t see them by looking in the GDS computers.

    With KVS, for eg, you need to give it your BA log-in details and it checks for you – manually. If you need to check the same few routes every day it is quicker by logging into KVS and clicking on each save trip, but not hugely faster. It CANNOT email you when seats open up.

    I know someone who has used the API for Avios Flight Finder to create an app that automatically emails you when certain flights open up but he is only using it privately. Anyone with a decent bit of coding experience should be able to create something similar, at least until Avios blocks access to their database via the app.

    • Andrew S says:

      7 Jul7 July 16:13

      Thanks Raffles, you have saved me $75…

    • Singing Dwarf says:

      7 Jul7 July 18:02

      Interesting idea to use the API….

• Simon says:

  7 Jul7 July 13:39

  Doesn’t appear to work all that well for larger numbers of people. For example, it’s showing availability for five people LHR-PMI on 25/10 returning 02/11 (I assume with a change in MAD, can’t get the AA site to show the route), but the BA shows no availability on that route at all during the whole week. Am I doing something wrong?

  (Before you say it, yes I’ve left it late to book for half term!).

  • Rob says:

    7 Jul7 July 16:29

    I’m guessing they are showing you airberlin via somewhere – they love Palma!

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