How To Use Seats.Aero To Find Award Availability

Award search engines have been cropping up at an unprecedented pace over the last few years. No longer do we need to search for flights and hotels laboriously, one website at a time. Instead, sites like Seats.aero offer a one-and-done solution that helps you save time and money.

Let’s take a look at how Seats.aero works, its pricing, and the features it provides.

What Is Seats.aero?

You can be forgiven if you’ve never heard of Seats.aero. The oldest of the most recent batch of award search tools, Seats.aero is an incredibly useful website that helps you find economy, business, and first class award space from tons of different airlines.

It also offers Rooms.aero, which searches for award space at hotels, but that’s a feature for another article.

Along with award space from 16 different airlines, Seats.aero has useful tools such as a Delta One first class finder, Lufthansa first class finder, Qatar Qsuite finder, and United Airlines upgrade space tool.

Seats.aero Price

Using Seats.aero is free for everyone. While the free version of the site is useful, there is also a paid version that offers more in-depth features.

The best part about being a paid member is the ability to search for flights an entire year in advance. While award availability can pop up last minute on flights, booking as far in advance as possible — ideally when the calendar opens — can mean getting highly sought-after awards.

Bottom Line:

You don’t need to register or pay to use Seats.aero, but you are limited to searching for flights 60 days in advance as a free user. Those with a Pro account unlock an entire year of award availability.

How To Use Seats.aero

Seats.aero has tons of features available for its users, whether they’re using the free version or the paid option. Let’s explore them in depth.

Programs

Seats.aero’s search covers 16 different airline loyalty programs, encompassing Star Alliance, SkyTeam, and Oneworld. This means its search results give incredibly comprehensive information for those looking to fly.

Airline programs include:

It’s important to note that although Seats.aero isn’t searching every airline program in the world — for example, it doesn’t include Turkish Airlines — that doesn’t mean you won’t see results from that airline. This is because its partners still display those awards. In this case, United still shows any Turkish awards that are available.

Explore

The Explore function on Seats.aero is best used for finding flights without a specific date.

To take advantage of the Explore function, you first need to select an airline. From there, you’re able to choose the regions you’d like to fly to or from and filter down results from there.

In this example, we’re looking at all flights that Air Canada Aeroplan has from North America to anywhere else in the world. You can see that there is a ton of information dumped in here.

• Date: The date that the award is available
• Last Seen: How recently Seats.aero refreshed this information
• Departs: Departure airport
• Arrives: Arrival airport
• Cabin: Whether you’re flying economy, premium economy, business, or first class
• Color: Green indicates a direct flight, blue indicates a flight with connections.
• Search: Allows you to type in a date or an airport code to narrow down results
• Information Button: Displays detailed information on your search results, including flight number and airline

When you first complete a search, all of this information is presented to you, which may seem overwhelming if you’re not familiar with looking for airline awards. Unlike competitors such as Roame, PointsYeah, Awayz, AwardTool, and Point.me, Seats.aero’s interface is bare-bones.

But that’s part of what makes it so useful. There’s no fluff, and once you can wrap your mind around what you’re seeing, it becomes simple to use.

Filters

Along with the search results you’re given, you also have optional filters:

• How Far in Advance: 60 days (free users) or a full year (paid users)
• Departs: Departure airport
• Arrives: Arrival airport
• Airlines: Which airlines to display
• Seats: How many seats you need (up to 9)
• Points: The maximum number of points you want to pay (up to 300,000)
• Days: Which days of the week to fly
• All Flights: Connecting or direct (paid users)

When is the Explore function useful? It’s not something you’re going to want to use if you have a specific vacation in mind or you have certain dates you need to travel.

Instead, Explore is good for when you want to go somewhere but have a lot of flexibility. Let’s say you’d like to go to Europe but don’t really mind where. With region searching, you can search from all of North America to all of Europe in a single go. From there, you can pick a date that works for you, even if it means heading to Switzerland instead of Spain.

Another great use of Explore is to score really rare award seats. This is great if you want to fly something like All Nippon Airways first class or business class to New Zealand.

By filtering results down to flights from North America to Tokyo (HND), you can quickly find any first class ANA seat available.

This is leagues better than older systems that required you to click through a calendar a month at a time in hopes of finding an award seat.

Bottom Line:

Seats.aero’s Explore function lets you sift through all of an airline’s award seats. While this may be overwhelming for some, it’s a great way for those with flexibility to book low-priced or hard-to-find awards.

Search

Seats.aero also has a Search function, which you can use to find specific flights.

The Search function is best for when you need to go somewhere specific, as it can return live results to ensure that the seats you need are actually available.

Let’s say, for example, that you need to go from San Diego (SAN) to London Heathrow (LHR) next year.

There’s a lot to break down here. A lot of it looks similar to the Explore function, but you can also see new information, including:

• Last Seen: Search includes live results, which means your seat is guaranteed to be there
• Program: The award program whose miles you want to use to book

Some other things to note here include limitations on how often you can complete a live search.

Seats.aero limits how much information you can pull per hour, as seen on the blue loading bar showing 2%. That means this search used up 2% of hourly availability for live searches, so if you’re poking around or pulling huge amounts of information, that can go pretty quickly.

Filters

Search also has separate filters from the Explore function and some really strong features.

• Origin/Departure Airports: You can enter a single airport code, such as SAN, but can also put in regions, states, or airline hubs
• Add +/- days: Search multiple dates at once, up to 180 days in either direction
• Show Individual Flights: Gives you flight numbers and departure times in your search results
• Programs: Select which airline programs to use
• Alliance: Filter by airline alliance
• Transfer Partners: Filter by which credit card points you want to use
• Points: Set a maximum number of points (up to 200,000)
• Days: Set days of the week for travel
• Stops: Limit flights by number of stops (up to 3)
• Duration: Set a maximum duration of travel (up to 48 hours)
• Aircraft: Filter flights by operating aircraft
• Connections: Choose your connecting airports

All of these filters are free to use, but there are some filters specific to paid users.

These can be really helpful if you’re trying to keep away from high fees, for example, which airlines such as British Airways are notorious for.

• Direct Flights: Exclude connecting flights
• Fee Limits: Exclude flights with high fees
• Minimum Available Seats: Specify how many seats must be available
• Operating Carriers: Limit which airlines you see
• Filter to This Cabin: Show the results with your specified cabin class

Bottom Line:

The Search function on Seats.aero is incredibly powerful and lets you search across regions with up to 180 days of flexibility. It also allows you to hone in on specific dates and routes.

Tools

The Search and Explore functions really make up the bulk of Seats.aero, but it also has pretty useful tools available to travelers.

Qatar Qsuite Finder

These tools are highly specific and can help you pinpoint really difficult-to-find award seats. For example, the Qatar Qsuite tool shows you any business or first class award seats that Qatar Airways is currently offering.

ANA First Class Finder

A newer addition to Seats.aero is the ANA first class finder, which searches for coveted ANA space on all available routes.

Delta One Finder

Delta Air Lines is notoriously expensive when redeeming SkyMiles for its flights. At the same time, it’s also very restrictive in releasing partner award space, which is why this tool is so helpful. The Delta One finder shows you all Delta One flights available using Virgin Points instead of SkyMiles, which are far cheaper.

Lufthansa First Class Finder

One of our favorite tools, the Lufthansa first class finder, shows all available awards on Lufthansa first class. Although the airline only releases seats 4 days in advance, Seats.aero’s tool shows you exactly what routes are available and when.

United PlusPoints Finder

Especially helpful for those with United elite status, the PlusPoints finder shows which United flights have confirmable upgrade space available. It also shows how many are available, lets you select which type of upgrades you’re looking for, and displays the flight numbers of these flights.

Fare Class Viewer

The fare class viewer is in beta but gives you the ability to search the available fare classes of an airline that you specify.

Why does this matter? It can help with finding upgrades. For example, those who have elite status with Alaska Airlines can upgrade directly to first class for free when booking a flight. However, they need to purchase specific fare classes to do so.

The fare class viewer can make this simple to find and implement, especially across multiple flights.

Seat Map Viewer

One of the coolest new features of Seats.aero is the Seat Map Viewer, which shows you the seat map and a picture of your seat so you know what to expect.

It also shows which seats are available, which are occupied, and which are blocked off.

Bottom Line:

While the tools available on Seats.aero can be pretty niche, they’re also great at sifting out and displaying really rare award seats, making them great to check on often.

Alerts

Seats.aero allows you to set alerts for flights. It’s free for everyone, but those without a Pro account are limited to alerts 60 days in advance. That being said, you can set as many alerts as you like; they’ll automatically be deleted after availability has been found.

To set an alert, you need to fill in some information, including your email address, the mileage program you’re using, your departure and arrival airports, the date you’re flying, and the cabin class you’re flying.

Pro Alerts

Those with a paid account have access to additional features when it comes to setting alerts:

• SMS messages instead of email
• Date range instead of specific date
• Any date instead of specific date
• Set alerts up to a year in advance

Paid users also get more filters:

• Minimum number of seats
• Maximum cost in points
• Maximum amount of fees
• Maximum number of stops
• Fare class
• Specific operating carrier
• Specific flight number

Bottom Line:

Alerts are free for everyone, but Pro users get a whole host of extra filters that make their alerts much more useful.

Routes

The Routes function on Seats.aero lets you view which routes the website is tracking. If you’re a Pro user, you can also request that certain routes be tracked.

Along with the ability to see what routes are available on Seats.aero, you can also check out how often results are refreshed and do a search for award availability between the city pairs.

Paid users can also have a look at route statistics, which displays information on total seats available and the average cost (in miles) for different cabins.

Final Thoughts

Seats.aero is one of the best websites out there for finding airline award seats. Although it’s not especially beautiful to look at, its features make simple for users to find and book award flights. Plus, it’s free to use and even allows you to set alerts for free without registering, which sets it apart from its competitors.