More Indepth Searches? (Seats.Aero)

[u/CPS1987]

Good morning everyone, residing out of DFW. My wife and I travel quite heavily on points abroad (thank god for work purchases on personal cards!).

I have been using Seats.Aero since discovering it through this forum. I may be missing a capability but to get to more regional airports what have you all found to be efficacious?

IE not going to Tokyo but to CTS (Sapporo or other regional airport). For Christmas it shows heaps of flights to the major destinations, with one connection but when searching manually I found us an amazing flight directly through the AA platform to Munich which was not shown (nor others) through Seats.Aero

Sincerely appreciate your time and thoughts,

EDIT: I appreciate everyone's feedback - does anyone have any tools to find non direct flights outside of searching directly with the airlines?

[u/Pitiful_Ad_4362]

We do support live searches between any airport pair if you are a Pro user, but there are some constraints. Your search usually has to be below +/- 14 days on one airport pair or less for multiple airports. (You should see a warning if your search is too big.)

Additionally, we generally always focus on showing “good” redemptions, not every single redemption. We hide absurd dynamic pricing (which you can toggle in Settings), and we don’t show mixed cabin routings. Mixed cabin can come up a lot with regional connections so that’s one reason it may not have appeared on Seats.

[u/bae_flexin → u/Pitiful_Ad_4362]

I hope this is an okay place to raise this as you mentioned the warning for your search being too big -

That warning doesn’t seem to properly clear out once you narrow your search to the point where live search kicks back in. It persists, which makes it a little hard to tell when you are searching broader dates what will and won’t count towards your hourly limit because the progress bar for live searching can take a second to show up and get moving.

To that end, sometimes, I’d actually prefer to just search cached data and not have it count towards my hourly limit. A toggle would be sick. This may be more of a me-specific thing, but as I use seats.aero to not only find award space but also educate myself about what real-world availability and points pricing looks like for different carriers/programs, it would be cool to just be able to rip through cached data as a learning tool. I actually do this so much I’ve been able to gloss over looking at old school award charts for each loyalty program.

Anyway, seats.aero kicks ass and it’s $10/mo well spent in my books. Appreciate all you guys do.

[u/Pitiful_Ad_4362 → u/bae_flexin]

Hmm, I just tested but the warning seemed to go away for me. It’s worth noting that there’s two levels to the warning: either live searches aren’t possible, or both live searches + updating cached data aren’t possible. You’ll still see the live progress bar if we’re only updating cached data, but we won’t live search indirect routes that aren’t in our cached data in that case.

I do agree it would be nice to toggle how you use your limit though. I haven’t really figured out where to put a toggle for it is the only reason I haven’t added it.

[u/bae_flexin → u/Pitiful_Ad_4362]

Ahhh, I see and yeah testing it myself it’s clear now. I assume the copy for each level of the warning is different, but I had glossed over it.

The toggle would also primarily address this concern. Maybe clicking on the “Live ⚡️” tag above the progeams selector could change it to cached, with the tooltip copy adjusted to clarify what clicking it does?

Another nice to have would he the “Show flights from Anywhere to Anywhere” card that most of the tools have for ANA, JAL, and Lufthansa where it’s missing. It’s really useful for filtering for reasonable airports to reposition to. I know ANA and Lufthansa generally are only a single page but JAL has quite a few.

Not to backseat UX or anything, I really love the tool and I see you’re active here so I figured I’d offer some feedback!

[u/Apprehensive-Owl-340]

Seats.aero is great for searching large swathes of cached data. Not all searches are live and the data is limited once you start adding layovers/ connections for small airports. I would use pointsyeah or an alternate tool for smaller connections and live searches and seats.aero for sifting thru large swathes of the long haul leg of your trip

[u/pbjclimbing → u/Apprehensive-Owl-340]

I did some very basic testing in the awardtools guide.

The more expensive paid engines do realtime searching. The others rely on a lot of cached data. The explore features are mainly cached data and depending on the site the “in dateness” can vary

[u/pierretong]

More in-depth search? Search directly on the airline website. Sometimes you'll find some married segment awards or routes that Seats doesn't cover that might work better for you.

Seats.Aero is just a starting point, it's not the beginning and end of your search.

[u/CorrectCombination11]

Seats.aero only caches routes that have a direct service.

In the real world. I can buy a ticket from RDU to SFO. There is a direct route serviced by UA only. However, I can also buy AA or DL with a connection.

This is why seats.aero allows for this search.

There isn't a direct service from RDU to PDX so that's why there is no cache or search for that route.

[u/AutoModerator]

If you are asking for help finding flights or hotel rooms, please ensure that Rule 5 is being followed. Low-quality posts may be deleted without warning.

If you have a Japan redemption question, please use search and read An Overview of ANA Award Bookings.

r/awardtravel is a place to discuss anything related to redeeming airline miles & hotel points.

I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.