If you’ve ever collected Avios you’ll know British Airways don’t make it easy for you to spend them. Step forward SeatSpy.com.
The Issue
With British Airways, when you want to use your Avios you have to be very specific. You need to know the date you want to fly both outbound and inbound, you need to know which cabin class you want to fly, how many seats you want to book and finally from where you want to depart to where you want to arrive.
Once you’ve done all of that, you’re left with the result that there are no first-class seats available to redeem. You then have to go 1 page at a time until you find availability.
The Solution
How about this, you know where you want to fly from and to but don’t know when or with how many people you want to go with if any.
Ta-dah, a list of results with everything from Economy to First all listed. Not just listed though, outbound and inbound side by side showing a full 354 days in advance, all neatly organised and colour coded. It even differentiates between a solid colour (being peak fares and thus more points) and a banded colour (being off-peak fares and thus fewer points).
The good stuff doesn’t end there, hover over a specific date and it will tell you how many Avios points are required. Also useful if you want to quickly see the difference in Avios points between peak and off-peak fares, say if you’re wanting to upgrade your flight using Avios.
Alerts
If there’s no availability on the dates you want you can simply set a reminder. Choose the date range you want to monitor, for how many people and which class and SeatSpy will email you with the option of receiving the notification instantly after some seats become available that meet the criteria.
Not only do you recieve an email, SeatSpy will send you a text if you’re signed up for the top level package. A word of warning though, only set up alerts for seats you actually want, otherwise you’ll be getting bombarded at all hours of the day.
Haven’t a clue where to go?
If you’re the impulsive type or you’ve been to plenty of places and can’t make your mind up where to go, the where can i go feature is fairly good. Type in the dates you want to fly, your departing location, what class you want and how many seats and it will show you an interactive map courtesy of Google of where you can go. If you’re more a text based person their is a list underneath the map.
An improvement i would like to see is when you click on a location on the map, along with the airport which it already shows, i’d like how many tickets are available, how many avios it requires and whether it’s peak or off peak. The same with the list below, it says how may tickets are available but doesnt give any indication whether theyre peak or off peak and how many avios would be required.
The Cost
Theres 3 options:
- If you just want to have a look and see what’s available and don’t mind receiving an alert the same day seats become available that’s all free.
- If you want to use the “Where can I go feature”, Get alerts by What’s app and no later than 1 hour after tickets become available you’ll want the Premium option at £2.99 a month.
- If you want all the boxes ticked, Instant alerts, texts, WhatsApp’s you’re the First Class features at £7.99 a month.
My Take
The interface is wonderfully simplistic which makes searching easy and quick, even better that it’s free. For me though as a power user, £7.99 a month for the top package is STEEP! I think good value for money would be £1.99 for the Premium package and £3.99 for the First Class package.
Having said that, if you set an alert for 2 first-class tickets to Los Angeles which would typically run you close to £10,000 and you manage to get them with Avios, there’s plenty of money to be saved. I guess that’s a call only you can make.