The point of this post is all in the title. I love tools that let you set up alerts so that you’ll get notified when airline and hotel awards open up. I’ve recently had success using these tools to fly the exact United Polaris flight to London that I wanted, and to book the exact dates I needed at Nick’s favorite European hotel: the Grand Hotel Victoria at Lake Como. Of course, you won’t always get the exact flight or hotel award that you want, but it happens often enough that I think it’s an essential part of award booking.
For details about tools that offer alert capabilities, see:
- Flights: Which award search tool is best?
- Hotels: Which hotel award search tool is best?
People often ask me which tool offers the best award alerts. I don’t know. For flight alerts, I’ve had good luck with Seats.aero, AwardTool, and PointsYeah. For hotel alerts, I’ve had good luck with Rooms.aero (the companion tool to Seats.aero) and MaxMyPoint. The only one I’ve had problems with is StayWithPoints. With that tool, I haven’t received hotel alerts when I should have. (Note that each of the links in this paragraph are affiliate links which means that Frequent Miler will earn a commission if you click through and sign up for the paid version of the tool).
With flights, sometimes award seats open up far in advance, but often they don’t open until around a week before the flight or sometimes even closer to departure than that. That’s why, with flights, I think it’s essential to build up a large pile of miles in programs that offer free (or cheap) changes and cancellations right up to the day of departure. That way, you can use those programs to book “good enough” flights to get where you want to go and then when your alert triggers, you can book the award you really want and cancel the original. Programs that are particularly good for this purpose include American, Alaskan, and United. Delta is a good choice too if you can somehow find a good enough back-up flight through them (Delta’s award prices tend to be outrageously high — but not always). Where applicable, Southwest and JetBlue are good options too.
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