Whoa! I just discovered an incredible resource that will appeal to beginners of our little hobby, and to full-on points & miles addicts.  It’s super cool and geeky, so of course I had to share it with you guys.

Meet AwardAce. You can use the site for:

• Booking guides to 22 frequent flyer programs
• Program guides that give you pertinent info about each program
• A Discover function where you plug-in your details to see where you can go
• An award pricing calculator that’ll tell you the award price for several programs

Now that I’ve found it, I’ll be playing around with it on the regs!

About AwardAce

• Link: AwardAce

Here’s what you can find on this well-organized and feature-rich site.

Booking guides

Step-by-step details with lots of pics on how to book award flights.

They also have the reservations phone number for each program as well as the exact prompts to enter to get to a booking agent.

So it’s a handy resource that’ll save you from hunting around on the various airline websites (although I like do to that anyway… but I’m a weirdo lol).

Program guides

Different from booking guides, this section includes:

• Each airline and its partners
• How to book partner award flights
• Which alliance each airline is in
• Transfer partners
• Program type ( if they’re mileage- or distance-based)
• Elite status info
• Fee schedule
• Mileage expiration
• Tons of other useful information

Again, everything is very well-organized.

Discover destinations

This is a cool feature. You enter:

• Your starting point
• How many miles you have
• In your preferred program
• And what class of service you want to fly

And it spits out of the possible destinations within reach.

I personally love this geeky type of stuff because it gets you thinking about all the possibilities. And having the information in such an easy visual format – a map – is so easy to put to actionable use.

If you have transferable points, you could enter all their airline transfer partners to see how far you can go with each one – and then choose where you want to go.

Or if you have a set amount of miles in a certain program, you can play around and see how you can burn ’em.

Or set a goal and then earn and burn. 🙂

Pricing calculator

This is my favorite feature, and it’s exactly how it sounds.

Enter your departure city and destination, and AwardAce will calculate the price based on a one-way or round-trip for every class of service in every program it serves.

The lowest prices for each route are highlighted in green.

Tip: Be sure to scroll to the right to see every program price – although the higher prices are on that side! Still, always good to know what to avoid.

I entered Dallas to Sydney just to see what would come up (results above).

After running a few more searches, I have to say I’m very impressed.

Again, the visual organization of all this complex information is just wonderful.

This is useful if you have a particular destination in mind. And you want to know which mileage program to focus your efforts on.

Bottom line

I feel like I got a new toy or something.

There are many useful, practical applications with AwardAce. I’ve also followed them on Twitter and they seem like a great bunch.

The site should appeal to newbies and dyed-in-the-wool travel hackers alike.

The only “complaint” is not every award program is represented. However, they’re off to a fantastic start and the major programs are included. Plus, there’s so much useful information that the pros far outweigh any cons.

Not to mention, the simplicity of the pages makes interpreting the complex information dead simple.

Anywho, have you heard of or used AwardAce already? I’d love to hear your thoughts on it!

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