SeatSpy Can Help You Find Reward Seats

As most AFF readers would know, you can get excellent value for your frequent flyer points by redeeming them for reward flights. But finding award seat availability is often tough, especially in premium cabins.

The good news is that there are plenty of websites and tools to help you look for reward seats. For example, you could use the Qantas, British Airways, American Airlines or Japan Airlines websites to search for Oneworld award availability. Each of those websites have their own pros & cons.

There are also various third-party tools such as Expert Flyer, Award Nexus, Point.me, KVS Tool and Award Logic that can help with the search for award seats. But most of these websites only let you search for award flights one day (or perhaps up to a month) at a time.

This is where a tool like SeatSpy comes in handy. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work with all airlines. But it’s perhaps the best tool out there to easily find award availability for specific routes on airlines including Etihad Airways, British Airways, American Airlines, Virgin Atlantic and United.

SeatSpy even integrates with AwardWallet, a service that helps to keep track of your loyalty points and accounts.

How SeatSpy works

With SeatSpy, you can only search for award availability on one airline and route at a time. But the tool will instantly show you what award availability exists across all cabin classes for that route over the next year, all on one page.

For example, you could use SeatSpy to search for British Airways award availability on the Singapore-London route.

Below the Month Availability Overview, you’ll find a calendar showing availability on each individual date over the next year. This is colour-coded with different colours depicting different cabin classes.

For British Airways flights, for example, hovering over any date brings up a detailed summary of the number of award seats available in each cabin class on that date. SeatSpy will also show the number of British Airways Avios it would cost you to book that seat through the British Airways Executive Club program.

Searching for award availability on Etihad Airways is a bit trickier because that airline makes every seat on every flight available to book using Etihad Guest miles. But many of the seats showing are not “GuestSeat” awards, which is what most people are actually looking for.

With Etihad, GuestSeat awards cost the fewest number of Etihad Guest miles. They are also the only category of award seats available to book with points through other partner airlines, such as Virgin Australia Velocity or Air Canada Aeroplan.

For example, when searching for Etihad award availability on SeatSpy from Sydney to Abu Dhabi, many dates show 9 Business Class seats as being available for a cost of more than 600,000 miles per seat.

But SeatSpy is still useful because you can easily check the pricing for many travel dates at the same time, by simply hovering your mouse over each date. The lowest available price for each date is shown, so if a price of 600,000+ miles is shown, you can tell that there is no GuestSeat availability on that date.

But if you find a date showing 1-2 Business Class seats for around 100,000-200,000 miles, this is a good indicator that there is GuestSeat availability on that date. (Etihad rarely releases more than 2 GuestSeat awards on flights to/from Australia.)

Cross-checking with the Etihad website, the availability showing on SeatSpy appears to be accurate.

As you can see above, the Etihad website shows that there are two GuestSeat Business awards available on the same Sydney-Abu Dhabi flight that we found on SeatSpy. Sure enough, those seats are also available to book using Velocity points on the Virgin Australia website.

There may occasionally be a few bugs, and the availability on some airlines may not always exactly match what you can book using the points or miles of every one of that airline’s partners. But as a starting point, SeatSpy can give you an excellent indication of what award availability is out there. This can really help you to narrow down your search for award availability.

The following airlines are currently supported by SeatSpy:

• Air France
• American Airlines
• Austrian Airlines
• British Airways
• Brussels Airlines
• Croatia Airlines
• Etihad Airways
• KLM
• LOT Polish Airlines
• Lufthansa
• SWISS
• United Airlines
• Virgin Atlantic

SeatSpy pricing

Although there are some features that you can use for free, you would need a paid subscription to gain full access to SeatSpy.

As SeatSpy is a British company, the subscription fees are charged in British Pounds. A Premium subscription costs £2.99/month (~AU$5), while First Class membership costs £7.99/month (~AU$14). If you purchase an annual subscription, you’ll receive two months for free each year.

For most people, a Premium subscription would be more than adequate. With that tier, you can even set up to 4 award seat alerts at a time.

The main benefits of the Premium tier involve better access to alerts. You can see a full list of the features available with each subscription tier on the SeatSpy website.

You can leave a comment or discuss this topic on the Australian Frequent Flyer forum.

Matt Graham

The editor of Australian Frequent Flyer, Matt's passion for travel has taken him to over 70 countries… with the help of frequent flyer points, of course!
Matt's favourite destinations (so far) are Germany, Brazil & Kazakhstan. His interests include economics, aviation & foreign languages, and he has a soft spot for good food and red wine.

You can connect with Matt by posting on the Australian Frequent Flyer community forum and tagging @AFF Editor.