Blog
How award travel works3 min read
Search a nonstop and find nothing; search a connection through the same flight and the seat appears. Nothing malfunctioned — you met the unit airlines actually sell.
Read the essayHow award travel works3 min read
Award space rarely departs from your home airport. Flying to meet it can be the best trade in award travel or the way the whole trip unravels — the difference is a ledger, not a trick.
How award travel works3 min read
The points get the attention, but the cash beside them is written by three different authors — governments, airports and the airline itself — and your choice of program changes only one of them.
How award travel works3 min read
Award charts do not price cabins; they price single letters of inventory. Learning to read the booking class — and the fare basis built around it — dissolves half the mysteries of award search.
How award travel works3 min read
Programs rarely announce that your points now buy less. Here is the structure of how award prices actually change — and the signs worth noticing — without a single prediction.
Honest data4 min read
Every result here carries a panel titled “Where this came from”. This is the guided tour: what each field answers, and why it earns its place on the page.
Honest data3 min read
Our coverage page lists more programs we cannot search than programs we can, and says which lock is shut on each. Here is why the barrier column exists — and what it cost us to get honest about it.
Engineering3 min read
Some award pages refuse automated visitors outright; others admit everyone through a waiting room built for humans. Both are answers, and we treat them as answers.
Honest data2 min read
A search result that says “4 seats” is making one of five different claims, and most tools flatten them into the most confident one. Here is how to tell them apart.
Honest data2 min read
“Live” award data is a spectrum, not a switch. The difference between when a tool looked and when the source last answered is where stale results hide.
Honest data2 min read
The most consequential distinction in award search is between a program saying “nothing available” and a tool failing to get an answer. Most tools render both the same way.
How award travel works2 min read
Programs load award schedules on fixed horizons — but the folklore about “booking at 330 days” confuses the calendar opening with seats appearing.
How award travel works2 min read
Moving bank points into an airline program is instant, irreversible, and the single most common way to strand value. The discipline that prevents it fits in three questions.
Engineering3 min read
The engineering that keeps a search product honest: versioned parsers, schema fingerprints, and a test suite that replays every response we have ever trusted.