Introducing Award Spy – The Kayak.com For Hotel Awards
A couple of months ago I got an email from a Reader asking if I could review his site called Award Spy.
I get quite a few emails daily from Readers asking about various things, and I always try to answer them.
However, typically in the emails it is me helping the Reader out, however in this case it was in fact the Reader that helped me.
What Is Award Spy
Award Spy is essentially an Award Search engine for Starwood, Marriott, and Hilton properties.
So typically when I am going to visit a city and need to look for Hotels, I first hit SPG.com, check for options, then Marriott.com, check for options, then Hilton.com, and check for options.
As you can see, it is very tedious and ineffective.
It is like if you were looking for an Airline ticket and instead of going to Kayak.com, you decided to search United.com, Delta.com, AA.com, etc individually.
However with Award Spy, you just plug in the city and it will show you all the Hotels available from Starwood, Marriott, and Hilton.
After you pick your hotel, simply enter your dates, and create an alert.
After you create the alert it will tell you if there is availability.
The alerts are really useful if there is a particular hotel you want to stay at, but there is currently no availability for Free Nights or Cash & Points.
With Award Spy, you can set an alert and it will email you if the specific option opens up.
Recap
While there are many tools to find Award Availability for Airlines, there aren’t any to my knowledge that focus exclusively on Hotels.
Similar to how AwardWallet has become the go-to for keeping track of miles because it is so easy to use and far more effective that checking each site individually, I highly suspect that Award Spy will quickly become the Gold Standard for Hotel Award Searching.
That being said, Award Spy is a new website, and Michael (the owner) had originally asked me for feedback on how to make the site better.
Unfortunately I got swamped at work and with updating the blog (which is a full time job in itself), so I wasn’t able to ever provide him feedback.
So for those of you that tried Award Spy and liked it, feel free to tweet Michael at @AwardSpy or email him with your feedback, because I am sure he would appreciate it.
-Parag
