We often get asked “where do I start?” regarding how to look for award flights, which airline is best, etc. Even though we have all the lessons you need inside Fly Smart Accelerator, we decided to give you a step-by-step on how we look for flights.
The first step: Google Flights. Yes, I know it sounds obvious, but the reason is that when you are looking for a flight from your location to the destination, Google will show you direct flights but also connecting flights. If you don’t know anything about airline alliances or codeshare partners, this will help you skip these steps.
Let’s use, for example, flights from the UK to the Maldives.
As you can see from the picture below, it already shows me options with Qatar, Emirates, and SriLankan Airlines.
So we keep this info and now go to Flight Connections. This tool is just really easy and will save you a lot of time. This is the best trick you will know: instead of putting FROM: LHR to MLE, for example, you will just add MLE in FROM.
Why? Because here you will be able to see all the options outside the UK and maybe book repositioning flights, helping you save a lot since the UK airport duty is so high.
Now that you know which airlines fly to your destination, you can look for flights using searching tools such as Seats.aero or SeatSpy to look for award availability and save you time as well.
This is how we do every single award search, and of course, at the end we compare prices with Google Flights to see if it’s a good deal or not.
Let us know in the comments if this kind of post is helpful and if you have any questions!
