If you’ve ever tried to find a business class flight using points, you already know the struggle. Airline websites are notoriously bad at showing award availability, and hopping between a dozen loyalty program portals to find one open seat is a full-time job. That’s where Seats.aero comes in – it’s the tool that does the heavy lifting for you, scanning award space across programs in real time so you can actually find flights with points without losing your mind.
Here’s exactly how to use it.
What Is Seats.aero?
Seats.aero is an award flight search engine that aggregates real-time availability across multiple airline loyalty programs. Instead of logging into United, then Air Canada, then Air France to check the same route, you search once and see what’s open across all of them. It’s especially powerful for finding business and first class award seats, which are notoriously hard to track down.
There’s a free tier, but I’d recommend upgrading to Pro — you get access to more date ranges, better filters, and the full calendar view that makes this tool so useful.
How To Use Seats Aero
Using Seats.aero is simpler than it looks. You enter a route, pick your travel dates and cabin class, and the tool returns every available award seat across its supported loyalty programs in one calendar view. From there you click into any date to see flight details, compare pricing across partner programs, and head directly to the airline’s website to book. The steps below walk you through exactly how to do that.
Step 1: Go to Seats.aero
Head to Seats.aero and create an account. Free works to get started, but upgrading to Pro is worth it if you’re serious about finding premium cabin awards.
Step 2: Enter Your Route
Type in your departure and arrival airport codes. JFK to CDG, for example. If you’re flexible on destination, you can type “Any” in the arrival field and see everything available from your home airport. Seats.aero also supports multi-city region codes (like WST for the entire West Coast), which are listed directly on the site if you click the button above the search bar.
A search like LAX → Any in business class will show you every available award seat departing Los Angeles across every supported program. That kind of search would take hours to replicate manually.
Step 3: Filter by Cabin Class
Click into Advanced Filters and select Business or First. This is a Pro feature, but it’s the one that makes the tool genuinely useful for premium cabin hunting. Once results load, click the cabin class column header to sort – cheapest awards rise to the top.
Step 4: Read the Calendar
Seats.aero returns a calendar view showing every date with available award space on your route. Each date box displays the number of open seats and the mileage cost. Green dates indicate nonstop options are available; blue means the routing involves a connection. If you’re chasing a specific experience – say, a nonstop business class flight on a particular carrier – green is where you start.
Step 5: Click a Date for Flight Details
Tap the gray info button next to any flight and you’ll see the full itinerary: flight number, aircraft type, departure and arrival times, and the mileage cost. This is where you confirm whether the routing actually works for your trip before you go any further.
Step 6: Use Booking Options to Cross-Check Partner Programs
This is where Seats.aero gets really interesting – and where a lot of people leave points on the table.
When you find a flight you like, click the Booking Options button. You’ll see the same flight priced out across multiple loyalty programs that could potentially book it as a partner award. So instead of just seeing the United MileagePlus price, you might also see what it would cost in ANA Mileage Club miles, Avianca LifeMiles, Aegean Miles+Bonus, or EVA Infinity MileageLands.
A few important things to understand about this view:
Not all of these are confirmed. Some programs show as “Estimate” rather than “Confirmed,” meaning Seats.aero is calculating a likely price based on the program’s award chart rather than pulling live availability. Treat estimates as a starting point, not a guarantee – you’ll need to verify directly on the partner program’s website.
Watch for fuel surcharge warnings. Some programs (Aegean and ANA in particular) flag potential fuel surcharges in this view. That can meaningfully change the true cost of the award, so factor that in before you get excited about a low mileage price.
Some programs are offline only. If you see “Offline booking only” next to a program (Avianca LifeMiles sometimes falls into this category), it means you’ll need to call to complete the booking rather than doing it online.
My favorite move here: always check ANA’s website directly. Even when ANA shows as an estimate or appears to price higher than other programs in the Booking Options view, I’ve consistently found better deals by going straight to ana.co.jp and searching the same route. ANA’s award chart has some genuinely underpriced sweet spots – particularly on long-haul routes – and they don’t always surface cleanly through aggregators. If a route has ANA as a partner option, it takes two minutes to check and has saved me significant miles more than once. Just keep in mind Amex is the only bank that transfers to ANA, and transfers can take up to 48 hours.
Step 7: Verify Availability Before You Transfer
Once you’ve identified a program you want to book through, go directly to that airline’s website and confirm the award space is actually there before you move a single point. This is non-negotiable. Points transfers are almost always one-way and irreversible — if you transfer and the seat disappears, you’re stuck with points in a program you may not be able to use.
Confirm the space. Transfer the points. Book.
Seats.aero vs. Point.me – What’s the Difference?
You’ll see both tools mentioned in the points community, and they’re genuinely complementary. Seats.aero is built for power searching — broad calendar views, multi-program scanning, and real-time availability across a wide range of partners. Point.me skews more toward helping you figure out which of your existing points balances can book a specific trip. If you have Amex Platinum, a limited version of Point.me is included free – worth poking around. For raw award hunting, Seats.aero is the one I reach for first.
The Bottom Line
Seats.aero doesn’t book flights for you – it finds them. That’s the job it does exceptionally well. Once you know how to read the calendar, use the Booking Options cross-check, and verify before transferring, you have a genuinely powerful search workflow that most people using points have never figured out. That’s your edge.
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