Is SeatSpy the easiest way to find frequent flyer award seats on British Airways and Virgin Atlantic?

Airlines have pretty clunky interfaces when it comes to searching for frequent flyer award seats. Usually you enter your dates and availability is returned for those dates only. Very late 20th century thinking, really. A new online tool called SeatSpy corrects this.

Virgin Atlantic and British Airways customers can use the new tool, which is currently in Beta testing. This means all the features are currently available, some of which will become paid services later on.

How Does SeatSpy Work?

Searching with SeatSpy is incredibly simple. Enter your origin and destination, the amount of passengers and the cabin you want. Leaving it on “Any” means it will show all award seats.

Click on the search button and boom! You have the entire year’s worth of results displayed as quickly as snapping your fingers. It’s pretty impressive, I must say! Colour coding is used to show availability in each class. Also, it denotes between peak and off peak award pricing. You need to use more Avios on British Airways in peak periods than off peak periods, for example. All you need to do then is hover over your date to see extra details. Once you’ve made your decision, you can head off to your airline’s web site and plug in the precise dates you want and make your booking.

The Where Can I Go Feature

What I also like is the feature on SeatSpy called “Where Can I Go?”. You enter your dates, departure airport and the class you wish to travel. The system then returns a nice list of every place that has frequent flyer availability as well as how many seats in each direction.

It plots the location of the destinations on a Google map as well, just in case you don’t recognise the place. This is really handy for those who want to go away, want to use points, but don’t have a particular place in mind.

Overall Thoughts

You would think that something as good as SeatSpy would be snapped up by the airlines themselves. It’s simple, it’s fast and does exactly what you need it to do. I imagine if an airline did get their hands on it, it would end up a bloated, slow piece of integrated IT, so perhaps it’s best stand alone.

Now that I’ve been going on about it, feel free to head over to the SeatSpy web site and check it out yourself. It works pretty well and it will be interesting to see how things pan out as time progresses.

Do you think this is a useful tool? Will you use it or will you keep doing things as you already do? Thanks for reading and if you have any comments or questions, please leave them below.

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