About Field Notes
Findings from building an honest search product
Field Notes is where we write up what building this product taught us about award availability — the mechanics that are underexplained everywhere else precisely because explaining them honestly means admitting what a search tool cannot know.
14 essays so far, written by the product team.
The standard
What every essay is held to
The same rules as every figure on the rest of the site, applied to prose.
No invented numbers
Field Notes carries no statistics we cannot stand behind, no unnamed “studies”, and no figure that would send someone to transfer points or refresh a calendar on a wrong morning. Where the honest answer is “we do not know”, that is the answer.
No fabricated voices
The byline is the product team, an organisation, not an invented persona with a headshot. There are no testimonials we did not receive and no anecdotes we did not live. Dates are real publication dates.
No unsubstantiated claims about others
We describe how award inventory works and how we handle it. Where a comparison would need evidence we do not have, we do not make it — the mechanics are interesting enough without it.
Drawn from building the thing
Every essay comes from a decision we actually faced writing this product: what a seat count really means, why an empty result is not the same as no seats, what a release horizon does and does not promise. That is the one subject we can write about without guessing.
The topics
What we write about
Three threads, each linked to the essays that follow it.
- How award travel worksThe mechanics of award inventory — married segments, booking classes, release windows, surcharges — explained honestly, including what no search tool can observe.
- Honest dataWhy truthful award data is rarer than it should be, and the specific ways this product renders what it knows and admits what it does not.
- EngineeringThe machinery that keeps a search product honest: versioned parsers, replay corpora, and the walls we stop at rather than route around.