One of the most often overlooked but incredibly useful features of Award.Flights is the ability to save your searches for easy and fast execution of your queries later.
I have found it invaluable to help semi-automate my searches. While it ultimately is not a useful as ExperFlyer’s email alerts, it certainly is very handy … and FREE.
If you aren’t familiar with Award.Flights, take a look at my tutorial on how to use it.
Why Use Saved Searches?
Let’s say you are looking for an award to open up availability and you haven’t had any luck. After reading my Series on Close-In Availability, you realize that availability changes all the time so you decide to keep checking back each day to see if anything has changed. That’s easy when you are searching for just one flight, but what if you have multiple flights you are looking for? Looking back at the calendar, trying to remember which routes to search … keep it all straight can be a nightmare. I know that this may sound like the start of an infomercial for a product you don’t need but I swear … Saved Searches comes in handy.
Rather than remember what to search for and then plug in information into the 7 required fields in Award.Flights, why not do that once, save the search and then execute that search each morning while you’re waiting for your coffee to brew?
How To Use It
Using Saved Searches is dead simple. All you have to do is two things.
First, execute your search as if you are looking for the award availability. In the example below, I am looking for award availability on Air Canada’s direct flight from Calgary (YYC) to Tokyo (NRT) on September 15.
From the results page, you can see that there is no direct flight availability.
I know that there are direct flights from YYC-NRT from experience and because I confirmed it with FlightConnections.
So I can conclude that while there are direct flights, none are available for an award, as of today. But being the persistent guy that I am, I want to be able to search for the availability every day until it becomes available. Knowing that, we move onto the second step, saving the award search.
Remember the results page from earlier? We’ll let’s take a closer look at it.
See that new green button labeled “Save this Search”? Click on it.
Running Your Saved Searches
Now that your search is saved, all you have to do it re-run each search whenever you feel the need. I typically do it when I sit down at my computer because it can just run in the background.
All you need to do is click on Load Saved Search and choose the search you have saved. You can have multiple saved searches, which is quite convenient.
Conclusion
Award.Flights has been my go to search tool for Award Availability for some time now and this added feature makes it even more convenient. Happy hunting!
