What is SeatSpy
Similar to Reward Flight Finder, SeatSpy is an easy to use seat redemption finder for British Airways and Virgin Atlantic. Any person who has tried to find reward seats on the carriers website knows that it is simply not user friendly or intuitive with the mashing of the back button a very frequent step.
While Expert Flyer can help with this – although exceptional – it is a paid service and for many it is over the top for what the average person needs.
Seatspy breaks down the search into two categories – finding seats to where you want to go and finding seats based on what dates you can fly.
That’s not even the best part… for the first time, it is now possible to search for seat availability on a full journey – for instance from London (LHR) to Sydney (SYD) via Singapore (SIN).
Searching for flights to ???
Searching for flights to a destination you already know where you want to fly to is simple… load in the details and press search.
Boom. Once the page loads, you will be able to trawl through the data to see what is available. Things to note are:
- The column on the left is the outbound journey and the one on the right is the inbound.
- Dashed lines represent off peak fares while solid lines represent peak fares
- The colours Silver, Blue, Green and Red represent the 4 available classes to fly.
- Hover over the date and a popup will show the number of seats available with the cost in points.
All this can easily be changed in the search bar at the top of the page selecting out what you don’t want to see or change the destination all together if things look a bit too bleak.
Search by Date
Say you know the dates you want to fly on but don’t know where to go, try searching by the date. A somewhat amazing tool as British Airways and Virgin Atlantics own website can do this but not to this degree. While the carrier’s own website can allow for a little more flexibility, SeatSpy’s attempt at it really starts to show why it is in Beta.
Seatspy will load the data onto a Google map and produce a summary of the data in table form…. Problem is that that is all. To find more information on where you want to go, such as point requirements, require you to go back to the main page and search for it again using the Search Reward Flights Now section.
Not to mention that if you wanted to amend the travel dates or class of travel, you need to go back to the main page as well. Not as user intuitive and somewhat of an afterthought to on of the pages most interesting aspects.
Is the Tool useful
Of course anything that makes searching for seat redemption easier and avoid having to use the carriers own search tool for the bare minimum is always a blessing. However, you should not avoid other options on the market including rewardflightfinder.com or Expert Flyer if it better suits your needs.