Finding Business Class Reward Seats – Why Is It Still So Difficult?

[PayRewardsFinder]

Hi everyone,

I'm interested to hear how other members go about finding international Business Class and First Class reward seats, particularly when using points accumulated through programs such as pay.com.au's PayRewards.

One of the biggest frustrations seems to be having a healthy points balance but then spending hours searching different airline websites, comparing loyalty programs and trying to work out where reward seats are actually available.

I've been working on an independent project called PayRewards Finder, aimed at making this process easier. We're still in the development and testing stage, and I'm particularly interested in understanding the challenges experienced frequent flyers face.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on a few things:

• Which airline loyalty programs do you find offer the best Business Class reward availability?
• Do you use tools such as Seats.aero, AwardTool or other reward-seat search platforms?
• What's your biggest frustration when searching for premium reward seats?
• Would having multiple airline reward programs searchable in one place genuinely make a difference?

I'm especially interested in hearing from members who accumulate PayRewards Points through business spending and then transfer them into airline loyalty programs.

I'm not affiliated with pay.com.au, and this isn't an official pay.com.au product.

I'd appreciate any feedback or suggestions from those who have been navigating reward bookings for years.

Thanks, and looking forward to the discussion!

 

[freqflyer77]

It's difficult due to a lack of reward seats.

Creating (yet another) search tool won't change that.

 

[MEL_Traveller]

The difficulty with the plethora of existing award seat finders… and there are many… is that airlines have restrictions on visibility based on your status, and in some cases, your points balance.

 

[CaptJCool]

The other difficulty is the 15 million members competing for the same 1/2 seats per flight opened up as Classic Rewards when once there was half or quarter of that

That spawned the join other programs where 95% less of the total membership residing in a place nowhere near Australia would be chasing the same Oz-Euro seats that you are

 

[elanshin]

By not creating these tools publicly Supply of reward seats are not increasing (possibly even decreasing). Ease of access and information is what's making it much harder to find. When its 100k award searchers vs 1m vs 2m etc the odds of success decrease each time.

But if you're serious, ask yourself a question first - what advantage do you propose over existing award finders? I can tell you that most of them are not necessarily lacking in their core functionality in today's game and have a much bigger existing audience.

If you genuinely created an advantage, I'd personally keep it quiet or run a concierge service first. Otherwise you're just going to be blasting server/computing bandwidth away.

Airlines also play a cat and mouse game with information about redemptions where they do change their processes so that its harder to "search".

Just some examples of this:

It used to be common to release all award fares in class brackets (using QF as an example) U for Business, X for economy etc. That was easy to find and as more users used tools, they changed that by default the awards are first released without the booking class codes.

Then I assume finders were scraping sites for the awards and now there are many seats locked behind status and login.

It used to be awards are released like clockwork on the dot at specific times. This is increasingly rare now.

There are other things we're starting to see increasingly more as airlines are basically trying to beat the award sites. Point of Commencement is one that hides quite a few JAL tickets for example.

Edit: I suggest trialing a few of these paid/free award sites and I think you'll see how capable they are. Maybe run a search like ASA - EUR on seat.aero.

 

[AuSammy]

It's difficult due to a lack of reward seats.

Creating (yet another) search tool won't change that.

Yeah! As someone who puts in the hard yards and effort into using QF multi search to create itineraries for myself and a couple friends from the scraps available, the last thing we need is another tool, another effluencer, another website, another instagram account making it easier for lazier people to find and grab the very limited number of seats made available by airlines.

End of rant.