Like everything else in life, some award flights are easy to book, while other award flights are difficult to book, to say the least.
Looking to book a business class flight to Europe for a trip taking place this time next year, and you’re open to any airline? Easy peasy. Booking Qatar Airways Qsuites between now and six months from now for a trip from Montreal to Tokyo? Not very likely.
Let’s take a look at what it would take to piece together an award trip for the latter scenario, but in a general sense.
Rather than going through any specific examples (because booking any one “unicorn” award flight would be beyond the scope of this article), we can discuss how to put yourself in the best position to score an “impossible” award flight.
Setting Expectations
Now, I know you might expect to read this article and have a step-by-step guide to book any award you want at any time – but please know this is never guaranteed. Airlines can change their award patterns, their schedules, and even last-minute aircraft swaps are known to happen.
To book, and then fly, a unicorn award requires the stars to perfectly align. But when it does, you can smile in satisfaction as your efforts have finally paid off.
As a last point of clarification, how “good” an award seat is does not necessarily correlate with how easy it is to book – some of my favourite seats in the sky are very accessible with no special booking strategies required.
Have Flexibility and Transferable Points
When using your points to fly around the world – even on non-unicorn award bookings – having both flexibility and transferable points currencies are the best tools for success. With rare First Class and business class products as your end goal, being flexible and having access to transferable points is more important than ever.
For example, say you’re looking to fly Qatar Airways A380 First Class product, and you’re using Qatar Airways Privilege Club and American Airlines AAdvantage to search for availability. It’s possible the only award seats available are on Tuesdays and Thursdays – which is exactly the pattern I encountered years ago when securing my ticket.
Although you may wish to fly on a different day to maximize your vacation time and your actual time on the ground at your destination, that may not be possible if you also wish to fly the best airline products on the same trip – this is where flexibility is important.
Having transferable points currencies is important because there are usually multiple points currencies you can use to book the same flight.
For example, you can book Japan Airlines First Class using both Cathay Pacific Asia Miles and American Airlines AAdvantage miles with the latter being touted as the best way to book. That’s because it costs just 80,000 AAdvantage miles compared to 135,000 Asia Miles for a flight between the United States and Japan.
However, Cathay Pacific has access to Japan Airlines award seats at the 360-day mark, while through American Airlines you can only book 331 days ahead.
Considering Japan Airlines tends to reliably release space at the calendar open date, paying more via Cathay Pacific might be the only way to score a First Class seat on Japan Airlines’s stunning new A350 First Class product.
Along the same line of thinking, Japan Airlines will release business class seats on the new aircraft as well, but the competition to acquire these seats won’t be quite as fierce as it is for the First Class seats.
Therefore, in this case, you could be better off waiting and booking with Finnair Avios (which have access at 355 days) for a lower price than with Asia Miles (plus the Avios program offers frequent transfer bonuses from card issuers on both sides of the border).
The final consideration here is how long it takes for points to arrive in your frequent flyer account after transferring from American Express Membership Rewards or another bank program.
Most of the time, we’re lucky in that points will arrive into your chosen account instantly; however, if they don’t, you’ll have to either speculatively transfer points into the related account beforehand to book the ticket or hold the award flight while your points transfer. The second scenario is definitely preferred, so check if it’s possible far in advance of your booking.
To summarize, when you’re looking to book a unicorn award, you’ll need a lot of flexibility due to rare award space, and you’ll also need to be intimately familiar with which points currencies you need to book that specific flight, and even how long the transfer time is between the transferrable points account and the frequent flyer program.
Know When Award Space is Released
As you can probably tell from reading the section above, knowing when award seats are released for the specific route and aircraft you’re aiming for is one of the most important elements that go into successfully booking a ticket.
After all, if you know that award space reliably drops at the six-month mark, there’s no reason to pay more with Cathay Pacific Asia Miles to book the ticket earlier than then when you can secure the same Japan Airlines A350 First Class flight with American AAdvantage instead.
Now, let’s get this out of the way first: there’s really no easy way to know when award seats are released. You will need to search, and search, and then search some more to find out for yourself.
With many First Class cabins having only six seats, available award seats will get instantly snatched up as soon as they’re released, so you may not even see them before they’re gone. Given this, it’s crucial that you know the exact minute seats will be released so you can stand by and be the lucky person to secure a seat.
The general patterns with award seats are that they are released at the end of the calendar (i.e., around 365 days away) or very close to the flight date.
With this in mind, I would recommend searching as far out as an award calendar will allow you, and also searching close to the departure time, from just hours before take-off to maybe two weeks out.
If it’s a Taiwanese airline you’re targeting, try searching at midnight Taiwan time. If you’re using Aeroplan, try searching at midnight Eastern and Pacific time. (You’ll probably need to try them all.)
Of course, also ask your friends and search the internet for any clues; however, you might find that the award space release schedule for a certain product is somewhat of a tightly guarded secret. That, and, most people are not spending hours of their life searching for award ticket release times, and so they simply may not know these hyper-specific details.
Anticipation and Schedule Changes
Moving into the more advanced plays, you may be able to successfully gauge when an existing flight will turn into your unicorn flight.
One big thing to pay attention to is new routes and schedule changes. When an airline adds a new route to its schedule and begins to sell tickets, there is often award space made available as the flight is currently sitting completely empty.
The same thing happens when an airline increases frequencies – when EVA Air bumped their flight frequency from Toronto to Taipei from 5x weekly to daily, those two additional flights had plentiful award space.
Additionally, take note of when airlines tend to make schedule changes across the board for any upcoming seasons.
Even though Singapore Airlines is selling Shanghai tickets for the next 12 months on the Boeing 777-300ER, we know that Spring 2025 aircraft and schedules will be firmed up around mid-October 2024. Therefore, October could be a great time to be digging through the Singapore Airlines KrisFlyer award calendar to see if any aircraft changes have been made.
On that note, we can take it one step further and anticipate these changes ahead of time. Getting ahead of the change can be very helpful since once a route is confirmed to be hosting a unicorn award seat, it becomes a hot ticket item as the public looks to seize any available seats.
For example, if you studied the 2024 and 2023 summer calendars for Singapore Airlines, you may have noticed that the Singapore–Hong Kong route in the summer season tends to be on Airbus A380s with the fanciest Singapore Suites product.
Based on this precedent, we can look ahead and make an educated guess that this will be the same for the Summer 2025 season, even if the schedule currently shows the Boeing 777-300ER being used for that route.
In this instance, you might choose to secure a booking now, placing an educated bet that your flight will eventually change from the Boeing 777-300ER to A380 once the schedule is confirmed (hat tip to Prince of Travel team member Chris for this info).
Of course, there’s always the possibility the change doesn’t happen as anticipated, and then you can either choose to fly it anyway or cancel the booking. Just make sure you’re aware of what the change and cancellation fees are before completing any booking.
As another example, we can look to the recent past when Japan Airlines was set to receive their new Airbus A350-1000 with an all-new First Class and business class product, and they announced that it would debut on their New York (JFK) –Tokyo (HND) route.
In anticipation of this new product, some people speculatively booked a First Class flight with award space as far ahead as possible on one of the two daily departures for this route, hoping that their flight would be the one selected for the new aircraft.
In order to better anticipate flight changes and to become more versed in the ebbs and flows of the airlines’ schedules, I recommend that you both read up on sources around the internet (there seems to be a blog for everything these days) and get notified with any news regarding aircraft or schedule changes on the airline you’re aiming to book a seat with.
Ask your friends, reach out to your Miles & Points groups, and see if they have any insight on the specific flight you’re looking for.
Pay to Play
Finally, it’s worth noting that there are services available to send you an email, a text, or some other form of notification when there are any notable or unusual award spaces dropped. For a specific trip and flight, notifications from a service like seats.aero will come in handy.
For more general emails like “Massive Qatar Airways Qsuites Award Drop for 2+,” there are services like Straight to the Points and Thrifty Traveler.
The benefit of the former is that it’s tailored to your trip, while the benefit of the latter is that you’ll receive notice of all rare award space with specific dates and routes at the ready so you can go ahead and book. This is perfect for if you don’t have a specific trip or date in mind, and you’re flexible with booking anything as long as it’s on a unicorn product you’re happy with.
The biggest reason to use these paid services is because the methods we went over above may not be enough to score you the tickets you want since unicorn awards are named this way for a reason. In fact, some airlines release award space with no pattern involved, and it’s impossible to really catch unless you’re searching all day, every day.
Given this, chances are that you’ll need paid services as a tool in your arsenal alongside all the methods listed previously to secure the award space you’re after. However, do keep in mind that everyone subscribing to the email service will receive the same notice, so you’ll still need to act quickly to secure any specific dates you have your eyes on.
The Non-Importance of Unicorn Award Flights
After reading this article, you might think award seats are extremely difficult to come by unless you can fly on a random Tuesday to Austria via three layovers and have every possible frequent flyer currency at your disposal, but please note that’s not the case at all!
The scenarios described above are for those who are after the cream of the crop in terms of onboard experience and who savour the win of making the booking as much as taking the trip itself.
If you’re looking to travel to Japan sometime in the next year and are open to any airline as long as it’s in a premium cabin with a lie-flat seat, you can put in a quarter of the work and secure a comfortable trip.
Furthermore, new First Class and business class products are all the rage at launch, but in a few years, these seats will likely become the standard seat for these airlines and will no longer have the word “rare” associated with them.
While it’s certainly cool to be one of the first to experience Japan Airlines First Class on their brand-new A350, it’s good to also know that Japan Airlines is expecting plenty more of these aircraft to be delivered and the increased supply will make it easier to book this cabin down the road.
All that being said, chase unicorn award flights if the thrill is what you’re after, but try not to be too disappointed if it doesn’t pan out because – once again – the stars usually have to align just right to make it a reality. (By that, I mean that you will probably have to fly on a random Tuesday to a non-top-choice destination and compromise on your time on the ground.)
There are always more trips to be had and more points to be earned, so when you do finally sit in Singapore Airlines A380 Suites with the door down between you and the other suites, and you climb into your double bed, you can smile in satisfaction as you decide between Krug and Comtes for your pre-departure beverage.
Conclusion
Two thousand words later, I hope you’ve learned a thing or two about booking unicorn award flights. The most important things to take away from all this is to be flexible and to know which transferable points currencies you’re going to use to book, along with any nuances that particular frequent flyer program has.
Know when award space is going to drop for your particular booking and be ready to pounce as soon as you see availability.
Be alert to any schedule changes, new routes, or new frequencies. Look through historical data and place an educated bet on which flights will change into the exact aircraft you’re after. Finally, don’t be afraid to take advantage of any paid services to bring you closer to your goals.
All this is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to successfully ticketing a unicorn award ticket, and I’d love to connect and compare notes on any unicorn award flights you’ve studied in the past. Please don’t hesitate to reach out to me and I look forward to comparing notes!
