Miles & Points

by Randy Petersen
December 2007

Could a DealFinder tool for awards travelers be on the horizon?

There is a new downloadable desktop tool from American Airlines called DealFinder that has probably passed unnoticed by many—but it didn’t escape my attention, because I believe this tool will eventually be of great interest to members of the American AAdvantage frequent flier program.

DealFinder is yet another example of how competitive the battle for passengers shopping for low airfares has become. Essentially, DealFinder enables travelers to enter where they want to fly, how much they’d like to spend, their travel dates and the number of travelers. The tool then scours the American Airlines database of fares, which changes constantly, and when a match becomes available, notifies travelers that they are ready to fly. This could be days, weeks and even months into the future, depending on the travel dates you enter. These customer-initiated searches by date have long been the domain of Web sites competing with the airlines for booking plane tickets. The Fare Alert by Expedia and the FareWatcher by Travelocity come to mind.

What does DealFinder have to do with AAdvantage members? If we look closely at the most recent round of technology improvements from American, we can spot a trend: The airline tends to introduce improvements to their general traveler audience, then later adapt the same technology for AAdvantage members. That is what happened with the calendaring that AAdvantage introduced earlier this year. I firmly believe that within the next year, AAdvantage will take the technology developed for DealFinder and introduce something akin to AwardFinder. It will let AAdvantage members enter where they want to fly on an award, the number of miles they want to spend, their travel dates and the number of travelers. The AwardFinder will then continually scour the availability of award seats, which changes all the time, and alert members when their desired match becomes available (assuming the award seats were not available in an initial search).

Seems like a great idea, doesn’t it? I’m disappointed the industry hasn’t already jumped ahead with this. But given how many challenges airlines have faced lately, I suppose it’s reasonable to assume they had more important things to attend to first (but then, what’s more important than keeping their best customers happy?). So, even if I’m wrong about this AwardFinder tool, I hope the seed of an idea has now been planted over at American Airlines. If I’m right about this, the airline knows its best customers are waiting. __________________________________________________________________

RANDY PETERSEN is publisher of Inside Flyer magazine and president of Frequent Flyer Services. Email Randy at editor@executivetravelmag.com.