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Best Ways to Search for Star Alliance Award Availability

You’ve been dreaming of traveling to Germany / Japan / Singapore / Canada (or any other heavily serviced Star Alliance route), but find the cash costs to fly there a little bit too high for your liking. You’ve heard of transferring your points to book economy and business class tickets, but have no idea how to find Star Alliance awards or it’s taking you hours upon hours to find options for your flight. 

This article will walk you through a step-by-step process to find and book Star Alliance flights using points.

What is the Star Alliance

Star Alliance (*A, for short) is the first airline alliance comprised of 26 airlines servicing about 1,200 airports globally:

  1. Aegean Airlines
  2. Air Canada
  3. Air China
  4. Air India
  5. Air New Zealand
  6. All Nippon Airways (ANA)
  7. Asiana Airlines
  8. Austrian Airlines
  9. Avianca
  10. Brussels Airlines
  11. Copa Airlines
  12. Croatia Airlines
  13. EgyptAir
  1. Ethiopian Airlines
  2. Eva Air
  3. Lot Polish Airlines
  4. Lufthansa
  5. Scandinavian Airlines
  6. Shenzhen Airlines
  7. Singapore Airlines
  8. South African Airways
  9. Swiss
  10. TAP Air Portugal
  11. Thai
  12. Turkish Airlines
  13. United Airlines

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 the case of the Star Alliance, you can use your United Airline miles to book Singapore Airlines, Lufthansa, or Air Canada flights!

Searching for Award Availability by Individual Airline

Say you’ve found a flight that has a Star Alliance carrier. There are several ways to find availability for that flight.

Let’s use San Francisco (SFO) to Frankfurt (FRA) for example. This route is heavily serviced by Star Alliance carriers. On Google Flights (Feb 7, 2024 to Feb 21, 2024), this roundtrip flight would run us around $900 for a non-stop basic economy ticket on a Star Alliance carrier—not particularly fun for the wallet or our legs. Similarly, business tickets start around $3,200 roundtrip and if you want a non-stop ticket, get ready to splash out over $3,700!

In an effort to save you money and to also let you potentially fly business class for cheap, we’ll walk through examples about how to use your points to find award availability for Star Alliance 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.

United Airlines

To search for United Airlines award availability, you’ll have to first go to their website. In their booking page, enter your search criteria (departure & arrival airport, dates, etc.), and select “Book with miles.”

You’ll be prompted to either login or create an account. United does not let you have full flexibility to their search unless you are logged in.

After searching, we can see multiple flight options from SFO to FRA, with the cheapest one-way economy ticket costing us 40,000 miles + $5.60 in taxes. Alternatively, the cheapest business ticket costs us 155,000 miles + $5.60 in taxes.

United 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 for a reasonable price.

To navigate to this tool, you click “30-day calendar” right under the carousel. You may have to use “Advanced Search” to isolate the calendar view to only show business/first cabin pricing.

Using this tool, we can immediately see a ton of availability for business/first across the entire month of February!

Avianca Airlines

Avianca probably isn’t the first thing you think of when you think of airline award bookings, but Avianca LifeMiles has proven to be one of the top (and cheapest) ways for users to search for Star Alliance bookings.

Avianca is best for simpler award bookings (e.g. non-stop flights).

To navigate the Avianca website, start off by:

  1. Going to the LifeMiles website
  2. Select English as the language by hovering over the flag in the top right
  3. Click “Log In” in the top right
  4. Login to your LifeMiles account or click “Join LifeMiles” at the bottom to create an account 
  5. Once logged in, click “Travel” on the top banner
  6. Fill in your search criteria (departure airport, one-way/roundtrip, number of travelers, etc.) (Note: LifeMiles doesn’t ask for date in the initial search; rather you can view dates in the subsequent screen)
  7. Click “Find Flights”

Singapore Airlines

Singapore Airlines is Singapore’s national airline carrier and is rated among the world’s best airlines by Skytrax. Given that Singapore Airlines doesn’t tend to release a lot of partner award availability, it’s important to be able to understand how to use their search interface since its often the only way to find Singapore Airline award flights.

Searching for awards on Singapore Airline’s website is pretty simple: 

  1. Navigate to their website
  2. Select “Redeem flights”
  3. Login to your KrisFlyer or make a new account
  4. Once you’ve logged in, enter your search criteria (departure airport, dates, class, etc.)
  5. Click “Search” to view your options
  6. To see the award flight options, select between “Singapore Airlines,” “Star Alliance,” and “Other Partner Airlines”

By searching through Singapore airlines, we can see that SFO to FRA in economy will cost you only 30,500 miles + $226.70. Unfortunately, no business class availability appeared:

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 route and flight!

Searching for all of these options individually can take a lot of time and effort. A tool that can let you search across United, Avianca, and even Singapore Airlines (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, Expert Flyer cannot search for any United Airlines availability. This is a significant limitation when considering Star Alliance flights.

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.

Award Hacker

AwardHacker is a free-to-use tool that helps you get a sense of the price of award flights. It is most useful as a first tool to use when trying to evaluate the value of your points. However, since it is not dynamically updating award inventory, its use cases beyond gathering an understanding of what’s possible are limited.

The AwardHacker website is relatively easy to use. Just navigate to their website, input your search criteria, and watch as your award options populate.

However, as previously mentioned, while this is a useful view to understand the types of award flights available, we have no way of knowing how to book these flights. There’s no information of what dates these flights are actually available; this is a purely static view of the options available. Consequently, beyond an initial glance of seeing what airlines have award options from SFO to FRA, there’s not much else to do here.

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 United, Avianca, and Singapore Airlines individually, we can search through all of them quickly and efficiently through Roame (for free!). Note: as of now, Roame cannot search Singapore Airlines.

And in fact, not only do we quickly find and determine that 40,000 points is the cheapest Star Alliance economy option, we can also see that there are some other amazing options available through Air France for only 12,000 points + $80.20 (combined with a transfer bonus). Normally, to find this, you would have to search through Air France’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 Frankfurt sometime in the next year. 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 Frankfurt 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 Frankfurt based on what’s available. Lie flat, here we come!