Is Seats.aero Worth It?
Our honest review after using the award travel search engine's paid sub.
Here at Next Vacay, we are big fans of award travel — mainly booking flights with our accumulated points or miles. This has allowed us to expand our travels and explore internationally while staying on a budget.
We’ve always done this through the various airlines directly, but anyone with credit card points to burn knows this can be a time-consuming and frustrating exercise to try and piece together the right flights and points transfers at the right time. Not to mention the learning curve to understand which airlines partner together and which credit card points to use on each, plus having to do the manual searches on each airline’s site and creating individual loyalty accounts. Speaking from experience, I’ve felt like this on many nights of manual searches…
Enter Seats.aero, a points and miles search tool designed to help travelers find award availability quickly and efficiently to give you the most bang for your buck and snag those elusive award deals for premium fares. We recently discovered this platform and wanted to share our experience with it to help you decide if it's something that can help with your award travel planning as well.
Key Features & How It Works
Seats.aero specializes in searching award availability across multiple airlines and loyalty or credit card programs. Key features include:
Real-time award seat availability search across many popular international airlines (up to 60 days out with the free plan)
Customizable filters for flexible searches based on airline, origin or destination
Expanded search criteria, calendar dates, and faster updates (with premium paid subscription)
Custom alerts when seats are released for point redemption based on your search criteria
For comparison, other similar tools include Point.me (known for guided award booking help), ExpertFlyer (for seat alerts and in-depth searches), and AwardLogic (another comprehensive award search engine). However, these tools have very limited capabilities in the free offering and most of the paid subscriptions are more expensive than Seats.aero at $9.99 per month.
User Experience & Performance
We tested both the free and Pro ($9.99 per month) versions of Seats.aero for several long-haul flight award searches (economy, premium economy, and business class) and found it both fast and user-friendly. The minimalist design keeps searches straightforward, and results populate quickly.
Pros:
Saves you significant time and legwork of doing manual searches
(Mostly) accurate award availability data with real time searches showing what's on the airline's inventory (we cross-checked this with manual searches)
Helps you search specific destinations and opens up the possibilities of partner airline travel since it's hard to know which airlines fly where
Ability to explore and filter flights based on the credit card award programs they partner with — AmEx, Capital One, Chase, Citi, and Bilt.
They also allow you to search American Airlines award travel, even though American doesn’t partner with any other award programs for points redemption, it’s a much easier way to find what’s available if your plans are flexible
Open-ended Explore feature for searches when you have points to burn but are flexible on the destination or timeframe
More specific Search feature for when you have dates and destination already determined
The Alerts feature is a great way to set up an alert for a specific trip you’re trying to plan so that Seats.aero can notify you when an award redemption becomes available, especially for those coveted business and first class seats. The alerts do not put a limit on the 60-day booking window - major benefit.
Pro membership allows you to search broader date ranges, number of stops, and other details
Additional tools like upgrade finder, seat map viewer, and first class finder
Pro membership allows you to search travel dates for up to a full year of availability and with advanced search filters like nonstop flights, number of seats available, and maximum amount you want to pay in fees to redeem
Pro membership gets you access to full searches for Rooms.Aero, their hotel award search platform that shows redemptions for Hilton, Hyatt, IHG, and Marriott
Cons:
The main downside to the free version is that you can only search up to 60 days out. For some people, this isn’t an issue with booking in a shorter window for domestic travel, but for others who need to plan more in advance - and especially for big international trips - this isn’t too helpful.
The searches are all for one-way travel, so you have to do separate searches for return flights and build your itinerary manually
A couple of times while doing searches, what was showing in Seats.Aero wasn't showing when I clicked through to book on the airline site - this mainly happened with KLM / Air France where the flights either weren't available at all, or the miles required were significantly more than what was showing on Seats.Aero. That said, it was a very small amount of searches and other times it was accurate for that airline.
To click through and view the flight on some airlines' websites, you need to create a login/profile and redo the search. Others like American Airlines, United, and Air Canada will take you right to the rewards flight without being logged in so you can view it and verify the availability. This isn’t a Seats.aero issue though, just the requirements of certain airlines and their websites.
Usually we found that for the best business or first class fares, these are available on the least desirable flights in terms of departure/arrival times, number of connections or duration (sometimes taking an entire extra day to get to your destination)
Does not have some advanced features like waitlist alerts seen in ExpertFlyer
Fewer loyalty programs compared to some competitors
There is a limit on number of live searches you can do per hour - but unless you are going crazy with it, you won't surpass the limit (and it shows you the percentage you're at for the hour each time you search)
Final Verdict: Next Vacay recommends ✅
Overall, Seats.aero is a solid choice for award searches, especially for travelers wanting a streamlined, fast tool for finding flights using points (and for free). The alerts tool is one of the best features of the free plan. Most of the lowest fares for business or first class seats were found in searches with the shorter booking window as airlines tend to release them closer to the departure date.
We recommend it for points-savvy travelers who are also flexible on certain aspects of the trip — whether that’s the dates, destination, and/or duration it takes to get there. Are we keeping our monthly Pro subscription? For frequent advanced flight searches—absolutely.
Have you tried Seats.aero or another platform you recommend for booking award travel? Let us know your feedback in the comments!
Disclaimer: when you sign up for Seats.aero Pro with our referral link, we will get a free month of the Pro membership. Thanks for reading and happy travels!