Reading award.guide

The flow, end to end

Watchlist (what to search) → daily crawler (fills the cache from seats.aero) → Explore / Itineraries / Tracker (read the cache).

You never name a single flight. You switch on the regions, airports, cabins, card wallets, and programs you're flexible about, and the crawler fans out across every origin × destination pair in that scope. Everything you see afterward is the most recent cached result — which is why each row tells you exactly when it was last pulled.

Watchlist — define your search

• Regions — curated airport groups (Western Europe, South America…). Tap From to depart from a region, To to fly to it, or both. Any region can be either.
• Click an airport in a region to include/exclude it — narrow a built-in region (e.g. drop ORY from Western Europe) without cloning it.
• Your airports — pin specific airports (foreign or domestic) with the same From/To control.
• Cabins & wallets — which cabins to track, and which transferable-points currencies you hold (Amex, Capital One, Chase, Citi). Wallets decide which airline programs are reachable.
• Programs to crawl — narrow to specific programs (e.g. just Flying Blue + Aeroplan) to focus the daily API budget where you care.
• Coverage meter — estimates how many API calls/day your active scope needs vs the daily budget (≈800). If it's over, the crawl rotates across days so nothing is starved.

Explore — where your points can go

• Source & Destination can each be a whole region or a single city. Search region → region (e.g. West Coast USA → South America) to compare every routing at once — award space often hides on a neighbor route (SFO→Rio instead of LAX→São Paulo).
• Views: Cheapest per destination (one row per city you can reach), Cheapest per route (one row per city-pair — best for region→region), or Every date.
• Your cost is the headline: the raw airline miles converted into how many of your card points it actually costs, after transfer ratio and any live transfer bonus.
• Pulled (UTC) tells you the exact date and time that row's availability was last fetched — critical, because award space is volatile (see below).

Itineraries — stitched trips

Builds round-trip, open-jaw, and one-way trips out of the cached one-way segments, ranked by total points across all legs. Useful when the best plan isn't a single nonstop — e.g. position to a hub, then catch the long-haul. It also notes program rules (stopovers, surcharges) where they matter.

Tracker — price history

The cheapest bookable award per route · program · cabin, plus a day-over-day trend from the history we keep each time a price or seat count changes. Use it to see whether a fare is rising, falling, or newly appeared before you commit points.

Key concepts

• "Your cost" (normalized points) — an Aeroplan award of 60k miles isn't 60k of your points if your card transfers 1:1 with a bonus. We do that math so you compare apples to apples across programs.
• Wallets vs programs — wallets are the points you hold (Amex…); programs are the airlines those points reach (Flying Blue, Aeroplan…). One program can be reachable from several wallets at different ratios.
• Phantom availability & the "Pulled" time — award space appears and vanishes fast. A cached result can be stale, so always check the Pulled (UTC) timestamp and re-verify on the airline's own site before transferring points. This is a discovery layer, not a guarantee.
• Daily budget & rotation — seats.aero allows ~1,000 calls/day. If your scope needs more, the crawler crawls the least-recently-updated origins first and rotates over a few days, so coverage stays fair instead of always refreshing the same few routes.