Award flights

award.py (next to this file) asks each airline's own website for award space and prints one table per program, direction and date: itineraries with miles, cash taxes and seats left per cabin. It drives a throwaway headless Chrome (installed Google Chrome, temporary profile, no window). Needs macOS, Chrome, uv.

./award.py delta,alaska SEA TYO,HND 2026-12-01 2026-12-08 --cabin Y,J
./award.py all JFK LHR 2026-12-01 --json          # every registered program, full data
./award.py ana SZX,HKG TYO 2026-12-01 --cabin Y,J  # signed-in program, slow on purpose

Arguments: programs (comma-separated, or all), origins, destinations, departure date, optional return date. Every search is one-way; a return date adds the reverse direction as its own search and table, because most programs price each direction separately. Cabins are Y, PY, J, F (default Y,J). Prices are per passenger on Delta, Alaska and Etihad (checked with two adults); the other programs were only checked with one adult. Each cell is the cheapest fare in that cabin; mixed means some segment is in a lower cabin. --json returns every fare of every itinerary.

Several programs list cash fares converted to miles next to real award seats (Qantas Classic Plus, SAS FLEX, Velocity "any seat", Etihad brands without a G); they show up as six-figure prices. --awards-only drops them, --brands labels every price. Use one of the two before quoting a price as "the award rate".

Airport codes are passed to the airline as typed. City codes (TYO, NYC, LON) work only where the airline's own site accepts them; an airline that does not fly or sell a market returns an empty table, which is an answer, not a failure.

Programs

See reference/coverage.md for the full list: which programs work, which need the user's account, which block automated browsers, and what was tried. Read it before telling the user a program "is not supported", and before starting work on a new one.

Which program to search is not the same as which airline flies the route: a program sells its partners' seats too. United, Singapore, Air Canada, British Airways, Cathay, Qatar, Air France, KLM, Emirates and others have sign-in walls on their own sites but showed up through programs that work; coverage.md has the airline-by-airline table. For a trip, search the programs where the user holds miles, plus the working programs that partner with the airlines flying the route.

Programs that use the user's account

ANA only shows award space to a signed-in member. That provider copies the member's ana.co.jp sign-in cookies from the user's Chrome profile (one Keychain read of "Chrome Safe Storage"; ANA_CHROME_PROFILE picks a profile other than Default) and answers ANA's password re-confirmation from ANA_PASSWORD or the 1Password item named by ANA_OP_ITEM (default ANA, optional ANA_OP_VAULT). The password step runs once per run; never wrap it in a retry loop, because repeated bad passwords lock the mileage account. ANA searches one cabin at a time and rate-limits hard: details in reference/ana.md.

Pace and blocks

These are airline websites with bot protection, used from one personal network address. Each provider waits its own pace between searches; --pace overrides it. Count searches before running: programs × origins × destinations × directions (× cabins for one-cabin-at-a-time programs).

• A table that says a program is blocked, rate-limited or needs sign-in is reporting the site's answer. Do not loop, and do not work around it: no CAPTCHA solving, no stealth or proxy tooling, no calling an API behind a sign-in wall. Wait, slow down, or tell the user.
• Do not scan a month day by day. Ask the user which dates matter.

This is a personal convenience at human volume, not a scraper.

Booking

The tool stops at search. Redeeming miles spends the user's balance irreversibly: do it only on their explicit request for a specific itinerary, on the airline's site, and confirm flights, passengers, miles and taxes with them before the final submit.

Adding or repairing a program

One module per program in providers/, registered in providers/__init__.py. The contract and the shared itinerary shape are in providers/_base.py; sniff.py URL OUT_DIR records the JSON traffic of any page in the same headless Chrome. Protocol notes per program live in reference/<name>.md; write one for every program attempted, including the ones that did not work.