How Can Seatspy Easily Help You Bag A Super Reward Flight

Seatspy is similiar to Reward Flight Finder but it monitors reward flight availability for both British Airways and Virgin Atlantic. Currently, all alerts are free but the Beta version does indicate that this will likely change once they move from Beta mode. Let us see how Seatspy can help you to find reward flights.

Step one – sign up for Seatspy

The website works much the same as Reward Flight Finder. First, you need to sign up for an account. When I tried to do this, it was not working in Chrome but did work in Internet Explorer so you may prefer to use the latter browser to avoid the hassle I had. I have contacted them to let them know so this issue might be resolved by the time you read this.

Once you have registered, you will need to sign back in. I also struggled with this on Chrome but again, no issues with Internet Explorer. Assuming you manage to log in, here is what to do next.

Step two –  how can Seatspy help search for availability

You decide at the outset whether to search British Airways or Virgin Atlantic. It doesn’t seem possible to search them both at the same time which would have been a very nice feature.

You simply enter the requested information, which includes departure and arrival airport, class, and how many passengers and then click availability.

As you can see the results show the days where there is availability. In this example above, I can see that there is availability for all dates bar the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 7th, 11th, 12th, 28th and 29th of the month. The other really nice feature is that the colour key shows what reward flights are available for all classes of travel. On Reward Flight Finder you need to search each class individually and set up alerts accordingly.

The results show availability for Economy class, Premium Economy, Business class and First as well as for off peak and peak. This makes it very efficient to use and is an improvement on the offering from Reward Flight Finder. In the example above, you can see that there is good availability for the month but only in Economy and Premium Economy at off-peak rates.

Step three – set up alerts

Setting up an alert is really easy. Once you have searched for availability, at the bottom of the page, you will be prompted to set up an alert. As you can see, the good news is that you can set up one alert for all classes of travel (or exclude the ones you do not want.) Alerts seem to come through pretty quickly after set up but I cannot find anything on the site to indicate the normal frequency. Remember, it is very poor use of your AVIOS to redeem for economy class.

Process for Virgin Atlantic

The process works exactly the same for Virgin Atlantic and shows much better availability for Upper Class. So excited for our forthcoming Upper Class flights to Shanghai with Virgin.

Any downsides?

Based on the alerts I am receiving, it looks as though once you have been notified of a date, it will not notify you again at a later date which is not ideal. This means you will have to save availability and as this changes rapidly this may defeat the object of the system.

Verdict

An initial review of this site looks like it could be promising as it offers some significant improvements on the Reward Flight Finder service. There are currently, quite a few bugs in the system so you will have to accept that it is a little clunky to use but once these iron out it could be a great alternative.

It is unclear currently how frequently the alerts will trigger or what the difference in frequency will be between a free and paid account. However, I am going to keep an eye on this one with interest.