Updates to my Star Alliance Award Search tool

Since I’ve been forced into exile due to no power at home I finally found a bit of time to make some much needed and long awaited updates to the Star Alliance Award Search page on my Wandering Aramean Travel Tools site. These changes are mostly cosmetic, updating the UI to look a bit more like the award alerts and it should make things much more clear in terms of what flights do and do not have award availability.

Here’s a sample search result for Newark to Las Vegas in a couple weeks:

Rather than the shading and the plus and minus symbols there’s now three simple icons. The green checkmark means there is award space available in that cabin. The purple X means no space. And the blue and yellow exclamation point means it is a mixed-cabin itinerary. Hover over the icon and you’ll get details about which flights are in which cabin (no pointer showing in this screenshot but trust me, it is there):

There are two other differences in the search interface which I believe will make things better for everyone. The first is that the system can remember you MP number and auto-fill it for you when you’re searching. It uses the same account data that it would for any saved search alerts and you edit the entry in the same place.

The second change is that there is no longer an option to search for saver inventory; only saver inventory is shown. I get that some may have wanted to search for standard (a/k/a rule-buster a/k/a slEasyPass) seats but the data I have says not many were and keeping that available really messed up the UI. So I scrapped it. If this greatly upsets you let me know and I’ll consider putting it back.

Check it all out and let me know if anything seems amiss or if there are other enhancements you’d like to see on the tools.

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Alaska Airlines welcomes complexity with Hawaiian Airlines acquisition

Alaska Airlines will buy Hawaiian Airlines for $1.9 billion in a cash transaction. Unlike most other mergers, however, the company plans to embrace the complexity of multiple product offerings as it intends to keep both the Hawaiian and Alaska brands in service.

by Seth Miller 5 months ago4 months ago

6 Comments

nice… thanks for this

Thanks Seth

A UI thought – the green/blue/purple doesn’t really trigger the same mental process that green/yellow/red will IMO. You might want to replace the blue and purple icons with a yellow warning triange and a red “X”.

FWIW, I use the iconexperience.com package when I need UI graphics/icons.

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Can I pay you to do a search for me?

Chuck in Los Angees

Wandering Aramean says:

1 May 2013 at 6:25 am

I no longer provide award research for others, Chuck. Sorry.

There are a number of other resources out there who do.

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