Best Ways to Search for Oneworld Award Availability
Ok, so you’ve set your eyes on a flight to Japan / Dubai / London (or any other heavily serviced Oneworld route), but are shocked by the relative cash costs for each. You’ve heard about transferring your points to book flights, but have no idea how to find Oneworld award tickets or it’s taking you literal hours to find any sort of availability for your dream flight. This article will walk you through the step-by-step process to book Oneworld flights using points.
What is the Oneworld Alliance?
Oneworld is an airline alliance servicing about 1,000 airports in 170 countries made up of 13 airlines:
- Alaska Airlines
- American Airlines
- British Airways
- Cathay Pacific
- Finnair
- Iberia
- Japan Airlines
- Malaysia Airlines
- Qantas
- Qatar Airways
- Royal Air Maroc
- Royal Jordinian
- SriLankan Airways
The beauty of airline alliances is that you’re able to use miles from one airline’s loyalty program to book another airline’s flights. In this case, you’re able to use your American Airlines miles to book British Airway or Cathay Pacific flights!
Searching for Award Availability by Individual Airline
Say you’ve found a flight that you’re interested in that has a Oneworld carrier. There are several ways to find availability for that flight.
Let’s use New York (JFK) to Dubai (DXB) for example. On Google Flights, we can see that this flight would cost us almost $1,100 out of pocket to fly on a Oneworld airline in Economy. Business would run us $3,700 at minimum. Ouch.
We’ll walk through examples about how to use your points to find award availability for Oneworld Flights.
Note: We recommend you search for award flights one way at a time. Meaning, don’t try to book all your award tickets on one roundtrip ticket. The reason being is that award availability can be difficult to find. It may even be easier to split the ticket across two different point currencies or easier to price out an award ticket one way at a time.
American Airlines
To search for AA award availability, all you need to do is login to their website (AA.com), enter your search criteria (departure & arrival airport, dates, etc.), and select “Redeem Miles.”
After searching, we can see multiple flight options to DXB that will cost us 40,000 American Airline miles one-way for economy. Remember: we can book Qatar Airway flights using AA miles since they are both part of the Oneworld alliance.
AA.com also has a useful calendar view feature where you can see award availability across weeks and months. This can be especially helpful when trying to find business and first class flight availability. Using this tool, we can immediately see a ton of availability for both economy and business/first across the entire month of January!
British Airways
British Airways (BA) is the flagship carrier of the United Kingdom. They have a robust award search engine for Oneworld flights, but it’s not as easy to navigate to—they require you to have an account.
- Navigate to British Airway’s home website
- On the navbar, hover over “Book” and select “Book a flight with Avios”
- Log in to your BA account or make a new one
- You should now be on the “Book flights with Avios” page. Using the interface, enter in the appropriate flight information (departing airport, arriving airport, departure dates, return dates, etc). Once finished, click “Get Flights”
- Select whether or not you want stopovers
- Find your flight!
After searching for my New York to Dubai flight, I was able to find two reasonable Economy options: one on Qatar Airlines for 42,000 Avios + $138.80 in taxes and another on British Airways for 50,000 Avios + $200.00 in taxes.
Unfortunately, no business class availability was showing for January 11, 2024, but I could change my class of travel and try to search across the dates to see if anything is available. I looked through each day individually from January 8, 2024 to January 14, 2024 to find business class seats; despite my efforts, no business class seats were available.
This reveals a frustrating part of the award search process: sometimes, you might have to look through an entire week, only to find nothing. It can take a lot of time and energy.
Alaska Airlines
Similar to AA, searching for Oneworld award availability on Alaska is very simple. All you need to do is go to Alaska's website, enter your search criteria, click “Use Miles” and go from there. You don’t even need to make an account to view the subsequent results!
Searching on Alaska reveals the same Qatar Airlines economy flight we’ve been looking at on AA and British, but this time using Alaska miles (costing 42,500 miles + $56.00). Unfortunately, the business class ticket is rather expensive here. To find business availability, we’ll have to go through the carousel of dates again and search them one-by-one until we find a business seat open.
Award Search Aggregators
We’ve gone through how to search for awards on some airline websites, and we can start to notice something: each airline has its own pricing for the same flight! Just take a quick look at the summary table here:
| Partner | Economy | Business/First |
|---|---|---|
| American Airlines | Qatar Airways 40,000 miles + $43.20 | Royal Air Maroc 70,000 miles + $30.60 |
| British Airways | Qatar Airways 42,000 miles + $138.80 | N/A |
| Alaska Airlines | Qatar Airways 42,500 miles + $56.00 | Qatar Airlines 170,000 miles + $56.00 |
Searching for all of these options individually can take a lot of time and effort. A tool that can let you search across American, British, Alaska, and more could be really useful…
Expert Flyer
Expert Flyer is a paid subscription tool helping users find award & upgrade availability, seats, airline schedules, and more. While there is a free version allowing users to set alerts for when seats open up on their flight, the only way to commence any award searches is through their paid Basic ($4.99/mo) & Premium ($9.99/mo) plans:
To search award flights on Expert Flyer, you can navigate to the "Awards & Upgrades" tool located on the left hand side. On this page, you can fill out the standard search fields (e.g. departing airport, arriving airport, departure/return dates etc.). If you choose to select an airline, ExpertFlyer will prompt you with additional options on fare class you can choose as well.
However, ExpertFlyer does have some limitations. It is best for searching nonstop award availability; it struggles a bit with complicated searches involving layovers. Additionally, you will not be able to see all the award availability possible; for example, searches on British Airways will only show economy awards available to Gold Elite members.
At the same time, ExpertFlyer has some awesome features. If a flight you’re interested in doesn’t have listed availability, you’re able to set an alert. If a seat opens up, you can receive an email or text to go ahead and quickly book that flight before availability disappears.
Roame
Roame is a free-to-use award search tool with a paid subscription tier enabling users to quickly search for award availability across 16 airline loyalty programs, covering 122 airlines (including alliance and non-alliance partners of the programs).
For our intents and purposes, instead of having to search through American, British, and Alaska individually, we can search through all of them quickly and efficiently through Roame (for free!).
And in fact, not only do we quickly find and determine that 40,000 points is the cheapest Oneworld economy option, we can also see that there are some other amazing options available through Virgin Atlantic for only 18,462 points (combined with a transfer bonus). Normally, to find this, you would have to search through Virgin Atlantic’s award availability via their website; basically, rinse and repeat the process you had done earlier.
Roame’s paid subscription (Skyview) goes ahead and takes this one step further. Let’s say we’re trying to find the cheapest business class ticket to Dubai. It was already annoying enough to have to parse through each date on the individual carriers…
Skyview allows users to search for award availability across weeks, months, and in theory, the whole calendar year. Let’s search for any business class seats to Dubai from 01/01/2024 to 10/24/2024:
Skyview just let us search the entire award availability across all of Roame’s airlines in a 10 month period within a minute. Now we can easily pick and choose dates for our potential flight to Dubai. Lie flat, here we come!
