Best (and worst) ways to search for Avios availability

What websites can help you find Avios availability?

Finding flights can sometimes be as hard as collecting Avios. There are websites out there that will help make the process easier. Here I talk through the tools you need to get the flights you want.

British Airways Avios availability tools

BA confusingly has several different ways of looking at availability.

• Do a dummy booking via Book flights with Avios page on the BA website - this allows you to put in a destination, select departure and return dates as well as the class you want to book into. This is one of my preferred ways of looking at availability for one reason: if you're using a BA companion voucher it will show extra availability that the voucher unlocks.
  
  It can be slow, there's no way of setting up alerts, and if you flick around between dates too much then it can throw up an error. One small bugbear is that when you edit the search dates it will default to economy, even if you've been viewing business or first.
  
  This method will give you Avios options on partner airlines too, although not if you are using a companion voucher.
  
• There's the "Reward Flight Finder" page on the BA website. This allows you to enter a starting point, and destination as either a city, country or continent, as well as the outbound and inbound dates. You can enter specific dates, date ranges or months which is really helpful.
  
  This tool initially presents you with a calendar, where you can quickly flip between economy, premium economy, business and first class. This in itself is helpful as you can see if moving cabins gives you any more options. You can then select the dates that you want to move book, and then it'll take you into the Avios booking process.
  
  You cannot use this tool to find availability with, or book with, a companion voucher.
  
• In the BA app there's the "Reward Flights" section, which takes you to a different "Reward Flight Finder". This is a really quick way to see availability by date, and destination across different cabins. It does not take into account your companion voucher, but it does make it very easy to jump between cities in different regions or countries. This is useful if you want to head to part of the World, but are open on which country or cities you end up in.
  

SeatSpy to find reward availability

SeatSpy is a third-party website unaffiliated with BA. They have a modern, easy-to-use interface, that allows you to find Avios availability between two destinations. The results page shows you the number of seats available as well as the taxes that you would pay.

The platform takes into account peak and off-peak dates and allows you to search across all cabins (free plans allow just Economy).

SeatSpy has alert functions, where you can add routes and they'll notify you via email if seats become available. This is critical functionality if you're focused on a particular destination. You need a paid plan to use the alerts. You can also get alerts sent you to via WhatsApp, Telegram and SMS on the most expensive plan.

SeatSpy has two plans: Premium for £2.99/month (£2.49 if you pay for an annual plan, which is paid in one go) and First Class which is £7.99/month (£6.66 on the up-front annual plan).

The key difference between the paid plans is:

• Unlimited alerts on the First Class plan, four on the Premium plan
• Alerts are sent to you instantly on First Class, for Premium they're sent hourly
• SMS alerts are only available on the First Class plan.
• With the First Class plan, you can have email alerts sent to more than one email address.

It's also worth noting that SeatSpy had availability data for lots of Airlines, including Virgin, Etihad, KLM, Air France and American Airlines

Expert Flyer

I have a love/hate relationship with ExpertFlyer. It's undoubtedly the most feature-rich platform, but it's quite a clunky and old website. At the time of writing, I can't login, as my account was originally setup via Facebook login and Facebook is saying that login is unavailable for the site. Their blog is currently throwing an HTTPS error as well.

There are two subscription plans: Basic at $4.99/month or Premium at either $9.99/month or $99.99 for the year. The main difference between the plans is:

• There is a limit of 250 queries per month on the Basic plan, on Premium it's unlimited.
• On Premium you also get access to Flight Availability alerts. Both plans have Seat Alerts. The difference between these functions is that Flight Availability alerts covers awards and upgrade opportunities, which is what you really want.
• Premium plans can search within a three day (either side) window for dates.
• Premium plans also get access to features like Aircraft Change alerts.