New Avios flight finder tool – pick a date, see what cities are available

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American Airlines recently launched a new interactive map to help people find reward seats.

It is pretty effective and it would be good to see British Airways launch something similar. Until they do, though, you will find that the AA version still does the job nicely for British Airways Avios availability.

You can find the AA Award Map here.

Effectively, it lets you pick the dates you want to travel and then comes up with a list of possible destinations. It works for BA flights as well as AA.

Award Map 2

For example, this is what you get for the weekend of Friday 16th to Sunday 19th October departing from London to anywhere in Europe. It shows results for British Airways and other oneworld partners including airberlin.

You need to tweak the options for the best results.

It suggest Gdansk in Poland as an option, for example. The suggested routing was London to Frankfurt on BA, Frankfurt to Berlin on airberlin and Berlin to Gdansk on airberlin. That is a little excessive for a weekend break so select ‘direct flights only’.

You should also ignore the mileage requirements shown. These are what it would cost to book the flights using American Airlines miles rather than Avios points.

If you are the sort of person who first looks for a gap in their diary and then tries to find an idea for a holiday to fit around it, this could be a great help.

How to earn Avios points from UK credit cards

How to earn Avios from UK credit cards (December 2021)

As a reminder, there are various ways of earning Avios points from UK credit cards. Many cards also have generous sign-up bonuses!

There are two official British Airways American Express cards with attractive sign-up bonuses:

British Airways BA Amex American Express card

British Airways American Express

5,000 Avios for signing up, no annual fee and an Economy 2-4-1 voucher for spending ….. Read our full review

British Airways BA Premium Plus American Express Amex credit card

British Airways American Express Premium Plus

25,000 Avios and the UK’s most valuable credit card perk – the 2-4-1 companion voucher Read our full review

You can also get generous sign-up bonuses by applying for American Express cards which earn Membership Rewards points, such as:

American Express Preferred Rewards Gold

Your best beginner’s card – 20,000 points, FREE for a year & two airport lounge passes Read our full review

The Platinum Card from American Express

30,000 points and an unbeatable set of travel benefits – for a fee Read our full review

Run your own business?

We recommend Capital On Tap for limited companies. You earn 1 Avios per £1 which is impressive for a Visa card, along with a sign-up bonus worth 10,500 Avios:

Capital On Tap Business Rewards Visa

The most generous Avios Visa or Mastercard for a limited company Read our full review

You should also consider the British Airways Accelerating Business credit card. This is open to sole traders as well as limited companies and has a 30,000 Avios sign-up bonus:

British Airways Accelerating Business American Express

30,000 Avios sign-up bonus – plus annual bonuses of up to 30,000 Avios Read our full review

Click here to read our detailed summary of all UK credit cards which earn Avios. This includes both personal and small business cards.

(Want to earn more Avios? Click here to visit our home page for our latest articles on earning and spending your Avios points and click here to see how to earn more Avios this month from offers and promotions.)

Category

American Airlines and AAdvantage, British Airways and Avios, oneworld alliance partners

This article is closed to new posts. Discussion continues in the HfP Forums.

sandgrounder says:

7 Jul7 July 07:16

Excellent! I shall have a little play with this later, but it looks promising!
Ralph says:

7 Jul7 July 07:57

I appreciate that Raffles has come at this from the Avios angle and rightly so as that’s the thrust of his blog. I also collect American Advantage miles and for those that might have the aadvantage credit card that brought a bonus I think that there is value in topping up those miles, especially when AA offer a 40% bonus since its possible to find one way flight redemptions from the USA and ELIMINATE other carriers, thus eliminating BA’s fuel surcharges. We got two AA businesses class fights direct lax lhr for £3 taxes. This method might not save much money but it does offer greater flexibility in mixing carriers.
N says:

7 Jul7 July 08:28

Useful tool. But you can’t ignore the number of miles – entering a huge number helps.

(And why is BHX the default starting point? Does it have some not-quite-right location detection?)
- trickster says:
  
  7 Jul7 July 10:10
  
  MAN was my default start location. I’ve never used the tool before, but I am in Manchester right now!
Sully says:

7 Jul7 July 09:06

Well according to my search, with 2,000,000 miles and asking for ANY beach destination in October, it says the only place I can go is Barcelona!
jose says:

7 Jul7 July 09:32

Does it includes Iberia flights?
Paul says:

7 Jul7 July 10:31

This is a very helpful however as others have said you need to change the number of miles to a very high figure to cover the options.
Sadly, when availability is shown it is highly unlikely that BA are involved. Over a dozens searches this morning to continental USA for February and whilst AA clearly have availability in First and Business a subsequent search of BA.com comes up with zero for both BA and AA, so no real surpise there!

The tool highlights once again the appalling state of BA availability and their contempt for their frequesnt flyers and the avios scheme.
Andrew S says:

7 Jul7 July 10:33

Hi Raffles – seems a great deal of interest in the “tools” to find award availability. Whats your opinion on the paid for alternatives? I hear some good things about the KVS tool, which at $75 for a year is not cheap, but in the context of a First or Club booking…
- Rob says:
  
  7 Jul7 July 12:46
  
  They are all fairly useless for BA. This is because BA does not put award seats in their own fare bucket, so you can’t see them by looking in the GDS computers.
  
  With KVS, for eg, you need to give it your BA log-in details and it checks for you – manually. If you need to check the same few routes every day it is quicker by logging into KVS and clicking on each save trip, but not hugely faster. It CANNOT email you when seats open up.
  
  I know someone who has used the API for Avios Flight Finder to create an app that automatically emails you when certain flights open up but he is only using it privately. Anyone with a decent bit of coding experience should be able to create something similar, at least until Avios blocks access to their database via the app.
  - Andrew S says:
    
    7 Jul7 July 16:13
    
    Thanks Raffles, you have saved me $75…
  - Singing Dwarf says:
    
    7 Jul7 July 18:02
    
    Interesting idea to use the API….
Simon says:

7 Jul7 July 13:39

Doesn’t appear to work all that well for larger numbers of people. For example, it’s showing availability for five people LHR-PMI on 25/10 returning 02/11 (I assume with a change in MAD, can’t get the AA site to show the route), but the BA shows no availability on that route at all during the whole week. Am I doing something wrong?

(Before you say it, yes I’ve left it late to book for half term!).
- Rob says:
  
  7 Jul7 July 16:29
  
  I’m guessing they are showing you airberlin via somewhere – they love Palma!