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Seats.aero Review 2026: The Best Tool for Finding Award Flights
July 1, 2025
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You have credit card points. You want to fly somewhere great. But every time you try to redeem them, you hit a wall: no availability on the dates you want, or you'd have to search through a dozen different airline loyalty sites to find something that works. That's exactly the problem Seats.aero was built to solve.
Whether you're a frequent flyer who already lives and breathes points and miles, or someone who just accumulated a pile of Chase or Amex points and wants to actually use them, Seats.aero can save you hours of searching — and potentially thousands of dollars in travel costs.
Here's our complete breakdown of how it works, what makes it worth paying for, and who will get the most out of it.
What Is Seats.aero?
Seats.aero is an independent, third-party award flight search engine. It scans availability across 24+ airline loyalty programs simultaneously and presents the results in one place, so you can compare options across programs, dates, and cabin classes without logging into each airline's website individually.
It is not affiliated with any airline or loyalty program. You still book directly with the airline — Seats.aero just does the searching for you.
It supports two tiers: a free version and a paid "Pro" subscription at $9.99/month or $99.99/year.
How Does Seats.aero Work?
Seats.aero continuously pulls award availability data from the loyalty programs it tracks and stores it in a searchable database. When you run a search, it returns results instantly from that cached data — showing you which flights are available, which cabin classes have open seats, how many points each program charges, and roughly how much you'd pay in taxes and fees.
For Pro members, results can also be refreshed in real time (live searches), which is especially useful for popular routes where availability changes quickly.
Once you find a flight you want, you transfer your credit card points to the relevant airline program and book directly through that airline's website. Seats.aero never touches your booking — it's purely a search tool.
Free vs. Pro: What's the Difference?
The free version of Seats.aero is genuinely useful, especially for last-minute searches. Here's how the two tiers compare:
Free plan:
- Search award availability up to 60 days out
- Access to all 24+ airline programs
- Basic filters (airline, alliance, transferable currency)
- Email alerts for award availability
- 15-day search windows
Pro plan ($9.99/month or $99.99/year):
- Search up to a full year of availability (361-day windows)
- Live search results (real-time data refresh)
- Advanced filters: number of passengers, max fees, nonstop only, specific flight numbers
- SMS alerts (in addition to email)
- Access to all specialty tools (more on these below)
- United PlusPoints upgrade finder
- Fare class viewer and seat map viewer
- Full access to Rooms.aero (hotel award search)
For anyone planning international travel more than two months out — which is most big trips — the Pro version pays for itself quickly. Finding even one business class seat that would otherwise cost $3,000–$5,000 in cash makes the $100/year subscription a rounding error.
Key Features Worth Knowing About
The Explore Tab
This is Seats.aero's most powerful feature for flexible travelers. Select a loyalty program, set your origin region, destination region, and cabin class, and the tool returns every available award across all dates. You can then filter by month, specific departure airport, number of seats, and maximum point cost. It's the fastest way to see what's out there if your dates aren't fixed.
The Search Tab
When you have a specific origin, destination, and date range in mind, the Search tab lets you query all 24+ programs at once. Results are sorted by price and filterable by alliance, transferable currency program (Amex, Chase, Capital One, Citi, or Bilt), and cabin class. This is the tab most people start with.
Award Alerts
One of Seats.aero's most practical features. Set alerts based on your route, preferred cabin, loyalty program, date range, and maximum point cost — and you'll be notified by email (free) or SMS (Pro) when matching availability opens up. You can set highly specific alerts, like "nonstop business class from JFK to Tokyo for under 80,000 miles," and let the tool do the monitoring for you.
Specialty Search Tools
Pro members get access to several tools designed for specific high-value redemptions:
- ANA First Class Finder — Shows all available ANA first class seats bookable through partner programs, including Virgin Atlantic Flying Club seats that don't appear on Virgin's own website
- Lufthansa First Class Finder — Lufthansa releases unsold first class seats to partner programs up to 14 days before departure; this tool tracks every available seat and date
- Qatar Qsuite Finder — Identifies which Qatar Airways routes feature Qsuite and have award availability, filterable by region and loyalty program
- United PlusPoints Finder — For United elite status members, this tool surfaces flights with upgrade space (PZ and PN fare buckets), which is critical for using PlusPoints before they expire
Seat Map Viewer (Pro)
Before committing your points to a flight, you can view the aircraft's seat map for select flights, including which seats are already occupied. It's particularly useful when booking a premium product like Qsuite, where seat configuration matters a lot.
What Seats.aero Does Really Well
Speed. Searching a full year of award availability across 24 loyalty programs in seconds is genuinely impressive. What used to take hours of clicking through individual airline calendars can now be done in a few minutes.
Breadth. The range of supported programs is hard to beat. Whether you're working with Aeroplan, United MileagePlus®, Flying Blue, Singapore KrisFlyer, or Turkish Miles&Smiles, Seats.aero has it covered.
Alerts. The alert system is generous — particularly on the Pro plan — and one of the most reliable ways to catch scarce business or first class availability that disappears quickly.
Transparency. Results show the approximate cash cost in taxes and fees alongside the points price, so you can evaluate the full cost of a redemption before heading to the airline's website.
Where It Falls Short
Not beginner-friendly. Seats.aero assumes you know what you're doing. You'll need to know airport codes, understand the difference between loyalty programs, and have a sense of which transfer partners your credit cards connect to. There's no guided experience for first-timers.
Cached data on the free plan. Free searches rely on stored data that may be hours old. Popular award seats can disappear within minutes of being released, so results that were accurate at 10 AM might be gone by noon. Always confirm availability on the airline's site before transferring points.
One-way searches only. You have to search return trips separately and build your itinerary manually. Not a dealbreaker, but worth knowing.
Live search limits. Even on the Pro plan, there's an hourly cap on live data refreshes. Heavy users doing lots of searches may occasionally hit this limit.
Fees aren't always exact. The taxes and fees shown in results — particularly for Canadian-based programs like Aeroplan (displayed in CAD) — may not be perfectly accurate. Always verify the final cost on the airline's website before transferring.
Who Is Seats.aero Best For?
Seats.aero delivers the most value for travelers who:
- Hold transferable credit card points (Amex, Chase, Capital One, Citi, or Bilt) and want to find the best use for them
- Are flexible on dates, routes, or departure airports
- Are hunting for premium cabin availability (business or first class), where award seats are scarce and the search effort is most worth it
- Travel internationally on long-haul routes, where points redemptions offer the biggest value over paying cash
- Are willing to spend a small amount of time learning how the tool works in exchange for significant travel savings
Casual travelers booking domestic economy flights will likely find the free version sufficient — or may not need Seats.aero at all. But for anyone serious about getting real value from their points, it's one of the most useful tools available.
The Bottom Line
Seats.aero has become the go-to award search tool for points-savvy travelers, and for good reason. The speed, breadth of programs, and powerful filtering options make it significantly better than searching airline websites individually. The Pro subscription is well worth the cost for anyone planning one or more premium international trips per year.
The learning curve is real, but the payoff — finding a lie-flat business class seat to Europe or Asia for tens of thousands of points instead of thousands of dollars — makes it one of the most valuable tools in any traveler's kit.
If you're building the credit card stack to fuel your Seats.aero searches, Kudos can help you figure out which cards earn the most points for your spending — so when the perfect award seat shows up, you're ready.
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Editorial Disclosure: Opinions expressed here are those of Kudos alone, not those of any bank, credit card issuer, hotel, airline, or other entity. This content has not been reviewed, approved or otherwise endorsed by any of the entities included within the post.
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