What is AwardClaw?
AwardClaw is a daily intelligence service for award travelers. We scan eight airline loyalty programs — American AAdvantage, Alaska Mileage Plan, Aeroplan, Turkish Miles&Smiles, Flying Blue, Virgin Atlantic, United MileagePlus, and Singapore KrisFlyer — for saver-priced business and first class flights, and we email subscribers when matching seats appear. We also publish a daily briefing summarizing news, credit-card offers, and data points from across the points-and-miles community.
How does AwardClaw find award seats?
Every three hours we query the seats.aero partner API for each of our eight tracked programs across roughly 125 long-haul international destinations. We filter to saver pricing (≤100K miles in business, ≤180K in first), require at least two seats and direct flights, and cap taxes at $500. Routes with five or more open dates in a 30-355 day booking window get flagged as a "drop" and stored in our database. Subscribers tracking that origin get an alert.
Which airline programs and routes do you cover?
Eight programs: American AAdvantage, Alaska Mileage Plan, Air Canada Aeroplan, Turkish Miles&Smiles, Air France/KLM Flying Blue, Virgin Atlantic Flying Club, United MileagePlus, and Singapore KrisFlyer. From any US or Canadian hub to about 125 long-haul international destinations across Europe, Asia, Oceania, the Middle East, South America, and Africa. We deliberately exclude Central America and the Caribbean because shorter routes flood the results without offering business-class value.
Is AwardClaw free?
The daily briefing is free for everyone — news, deals, credit card updates, and data points. Award drop alerts (real-time business and first class availability matching your tracked cities) and the longer subscriber-only sections are Pro ($5/mo) or Pro+ ($15/mo). Pro tracks 3 cities, Pro+ tracks 10.
How is this different from AwardMapper, seats.aero, or AwardTool?
Those are search engines — you go to them with a query in mind. AwardClaw is push: we tell you when something worth booking appears, and we filter aggressively (saver-only, 2+ seats, direct, $500 max taxes) so the alerts you get are actually bookable. We also pair availability with news context — if Aeroplan devalued a partner chart this morning, your alert reflects the new pricing.
What sources do you monitor for the daily briefing?
Reddit (r/awardtravel, r/churning, r/Flights), X/Twitter award-travel community, and 30+ blogs and newsletters including OMAAT, View from the Wing, The Points Guy, God Save the Points, Frequent Miler, Doctor of Credit, and others. We use an LLM-based research pipeline to deduplicate stories and surface only items with novel signal.
How fresh is the data?
Award drops are scanned every 3 hours (with a 4-hour blackout overnight Pacific time to conserve API budget). News and deal aggregation runs once daily before the morning briefing at 6:30am Pacific. Credit card bonuses are pulled from issuer websites weekly.
Can I trust an AI-generated briefing?
Every news item, deal, and data point in the briefing links to its primary source. We use LLMs to deduplicate and summarize, but we never invent facts — if a claim cannot be traced to a source URL, it is dropped. The award-drop data comes directly from the seats.aero partner API, which itself sources directly from each airline.