Airlines are famously unhelpful when it comes to IT. They don’t make it all that easy to search for award seats which allow you to cash in your points, and sometimes it feels as if that’s borderline intentional. Fortunately, a few entrepreneurs have taken it upon themselves to create their own solutions. Enter: SeatSpy, the latest website which brings a year of availability within one click.
British Airways and Virgin Atlantic
We’re big fans of Reward Flight Finder, but unfortunately the site no longer displays Virgin Atlantic reward availability. SeatSpy, the newest entry into the market has rectified that, showing an entire calendar year of both British Airways and Virgin Atlantic availability in one click.
When you arrive on the page, you have the option of looking for BA or Virgin flights, and after inputting the details of your query, an entire calendar year of dates will pop up, colour coded for each cabin. You can search by route, number of seats and so forth.
You won’t be given any information as to which flight each day is available, but you can of course take the date information, and then plug it into British Airways or Virgin Atlantic’s website, knowing that the first date you search will return positive availability. It saves the wild goose chase.
Alerts And More As Well
Like Reward Flight Finder, this is a big breakthrough in sorting through dates where travel is possible. Unfortunately, only mainline Virgin and BA routes are displayed, and availability for flights on airline partners like ANA, Cathay Pacific, Qatar and so forth won’t pop up.
Basically, the tool is nearly perfect if you want to fly on a British Airways or Virgin Atlantic aircraft, but it won’t get you very far if you’re hoping to cash in on another airline, between airports that Virgin and BA planes don’t fly.
One great move from SeatSpy, since it’s in beta, is that everything is currently free. If you register, you can get availability alerts sent directly to your inbox, or even by text message. At some point, we’d expect that to change, but if you get in while it’s free – there’s pretty much nothing to lose, and lots of luxury travel, or just travel in general to gain.
HT: Inside Flyer UK
Thanks for sharing. Could you list other tools that you like for doing similar searches on other airlines/alliances?
it’s a great tool and they way it displays all class is something that the reward flight finder website could benefit from. However, I have recently set up an alert both on seatspy and reward flight finder for availability to South Africa in Nov 2020. Reward flight finder came though for me today and I have booked my Amex companion voucher seats – no alert came through from seat spy. Seat spy is also only showing availability to Oct 2020 whereas reward flight finder showing to Nov 2020. I understand seatspy is in beta and if they can sort the alerts out and be more up to date then the way availability is displayed would swing it for me iN their favour