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As a post I wrote on the free iPhone app I think every flyers should have appears to have been pretty popular I thought I’d write a post on the tool I prefer to use when searching for British Airways Avios awards – BA Redemption Finder.
Avios is a very poor currency to use for long-haul flights (the number of Avios you need combined with the truly abhorrent surcharges British Airways adds to Avios bookings makes it an economical currency) but it is very useful for short-haul flights within regions where the surcharges and taxes are limited or capped – like in the US, Asia and even in Europe.
The British Airways website would appear to be logical place to start but, although it’s a good place to search for award availability if you’re restricted to just a few dates, as a tool for broader searched it’s cumbersome and time-consuming to use.
If I take the London – Larnaca (Cyprus) route as an example I can show you what I mean.
Let’s say that I know I want to fly this route towards the end of July or the beginning of August next year (my dates are reasonably flexible) and I want to search for Economy Class award availability.
If I was to use the British Airways website I would have to input a specific date on which I’d like to travel and then see what the website throws up (update: since writing this post I’ve found a better option on BA.com which I’ll be discussing in the next couple of days)
Often it’s something like this:
- I can see that there’s no availability on the date I selected
- I can see that there is availability on the days leading up to my selected date (shown in the date tabs)
- I can’t see availability in the future – the website forces me to select each date separately (27th, 28th, 29th) before it will reveal whether or not an award seat is available.
That’s annoying and time consuming.
Using the American Airlines website used to be the best option.
On AA.com you have to input a specific date (just like on BA.com) if you want to see award availability but AA.com will show you a month’s worth of availability in one go:
That’s much better and I can see that the 27th, 28th, and 29th of July don’t have any availability at Economy Class level without having to do any further clicking and waiting for results to show up….I can also see into the beginning of August.
For a situation where you know roughly when you want to fly AA.com is perfectly ok…but what if I told you that you could see an entire year’s worth of Avios award availability, for any route that British Airways operates, for both directions and all on one screen?
Sounds good right?
Well, that exactly what this next website can do.
BA Redemption Finder asks just 4 very basic questions…..
…and then shows you all the availability through to the end of the booking calendar in a very simple format to understand.
Here’s what I see when I search for a single Economy Class award on the London – Larnaca route:
Please excuse the crudeness of 3 screenshots but I don’t have a screen big enough to show all the results in one go!
With the dates highlighted in blue representing the dates on which at least one Economy Class award is available on BA’s flights on the London – Larnaca route its easy to see when you can burn your Avios and when you can’t.
BA Redemption Finder is especially useful if you know where you’d like to fly but don’t much care when you visit – all you have to do is type in the two cities, tell the site what class you’d like to fly in and how many people need to travel and it will return an answer within seconds.
This is a big time saver.
If, for example, I ask BA Redemption Finder to show me Business Class availability for two people between Los Angeles and London for next summer I can see very quickly that I’m going to struggle to book a week-long trip before the middle of August:
Without BAredemptionfinder I’d be stuck using AA.com (which is clunky) or, worse still, BA.com which would force me to search week by week and is even clunky-er than AA.com.
It gets better!
BA Redemption Finder’s designer, Tim Rogers, has recently added email alert functionality to the site.
After you perform a search the following form appears at the bottom of the page (click to enlarge):
The site will search for availability in the date range you specify once per day…and it’s free!
If once per day doesn’t seem often enough to you then there’s the option to sign up for an “elite membership” (costing £3/$4) which will then see the site search up to one per hour.
Two Weaknesses Of BA Redemption Finder
BA Redemption Finder is a fantastic tool that’s very simple to use but it does have two weak spots:
- The site will only search for Avios reward availability of British Airways flights. If you’re looking to use Avios on one of BA’s partner airlines BA Redemption Finder won’t be of much help.
- The site searches routes between cities rather than airports. What this means is that if you’re looking to fly out of a city with two or more airports (like New York or London) BA Redemption Finder won’t differentiate between the airports – if you’re not looking to fly out of JFK (for example) there is no way that I can find of preventing the site showing availability out of JFK.
Neither of these minor issues should detract from how good a tool this is for those of us looking to unload some Avios…but it’s always good to know a site’s limitations.
Bottom Line
BA Redemption Finder is easily the quickest and easiest tool to use if you’re looking to find Avios reward availability on British Airways flights – nothing else comes close. What’s better is that it’s free…and who doesn’t like free stuff? 🙂
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