Episode Description

Have you ever wondered what your award search tool can see that you can’t?

My guest this week is Keith Van, who leads community at seats.aero, one of the award search platforms I reach for most. What made this so fun for me is that his team sees something the rest of us never do. They can watch how travelers everywhere are searching for award space all at once, which means they notice patterns in demand and in availability that none of us could piece together alone, and a few of the ones Keith shared upended assumptions I didn’t know I was holding.

We also get into the part of these tools that trips people up the most, the gap between what a search shows you and what you can book right now, and how to protect yourself before you move your points. And Keith pulls back the curtain on how a platform like this works, from why it can see some airlines and not others to the features longtime users walk right past. Whether you’ve never opened an award search tool or you consider yourself a power user, I think you’ll finish this one seeing these platforms, and the data underneath them, differently.

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What You’ll Learn from this Episode

• What an award search tool like seats.aero is, and how a meta-search differs from checking airline sites one by one
• Why the most-searched cabin in the data isn’t the one the points world assumes, and what that says about how people travel
• What cached, stale, and phantom award availability mean, and why confirming a seat before transferring points matters so much
• Why award search platforms can support some airline programs but not others, and what airlines gain by controlling their data
• What the data reveals about where people are searching, and the destinations where awards are hardest to find
• The lesser-known seats.aero tools, and a sister site for hotels, that even experienced users tend to miss

Featured On the Show

• Join the seats.aero Discord community here
• Check out seats.aero here
• Check out rooms.aero here
• Follow me on Instagram
• Get on the waitlist for the Points Made Easy Course here!
• If you have any questions or you want me to dive deeper into a specific topic, email me here: podcast@pointmetofirstclass.com

Click here to download the full episode transcript

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