You've done it! After flying many miles and/or earning miles through a credit card, you finally are ready to redeem your miles for an award flight. You might be familiar with how to find and book revenue flights, but what about how to search award flight availability?

Even if you know how to perform a simple award search, you may be looking for tricks, tips or pitfalls to avoid when searching for your ideal award flight. Dig into how to do an award flight search for availability on five of the largest U.S. airlines:

Alaska.

American.

Delta.

Southwest.

United.

How to search Alaska award flight availability

Alaska Mileage Plan members can start an award search right on the Alaska homepage. Start by clicking the checkbox to use miles, then enter your origin and destination airports, dates, and number of passengers. Then, click Find Flights to start your search.

Results are initially sorted by number of stops and from earliest to latest. You have the option to sort by:

Price.

Duration.

Departure time.

Arrival time.

"Prefer Alaska."

By default, Alaska will show you awards on all airlines and use any number of stops. You can filter results by number of stops, airlines or airports by deselecting options on the left side of the screen.

Alaska automatically shows the cheapest award rates for dates as well three additional days on either side of the date you searched. If you want to search a wider range of dates, click on the Calendar option. This will show you the award rates for all dates for the month that you searched.