How we know this

Which airlines fly a city pair non-stop, the flight numbers and days, the aircraft type, and which hubs connect a pair nobody flies directly. We hold each route's page for up to six months and re-check it on a rolling basis, so the "last checked" date at the foot of a page is the real one. Schedules change slowly: a timetable a month old is almost always still right, which is why these pages keep their value between checks.

Every points figure is the cheapest seat we actually recorded on that route, in that cabin, on a specific date, together with the date we saw it. It is not a fare rule, not an award chart, and not a quote. Award availability moves in hours, so we drop a figure entirely once it passes our staleness window rather than showing it with a caveat. A page that has nothing fresh to say about price says nothing about price.

Confirmed means a recent check saw the seat. Unconfirmed means our sweeps stopped seeing it without evidence it is gone. We do not publish prices from unconfirmed cells.

Shown so you can judge whether a redemption is worth the points. Cash moves faster than availability, so it carries a shorter staleness window and a tighter refresh. Where we can, we also show whether the current fare is good, typical or expensive against that route's own recent history, which is a more useful answer than a cents-per-point number on its own.

Aircraft types come from the timetables themselves. Every source spells them differently, so we resolve each to an ICAO type designator before grouping; a string we cannot place confidently gets no page rather than a guessed one. Specifications and photographs come from open data and Creative Commons sources, credited on each page. Where we have no 3D model of an airframe we show the nearest relative and say so, rather than implying it is the aircraft you would fly.

Not every route, airport, airline or aircraft gets a page. A page is published only when we hold at least two independent kinds of real fact about its subject: a timetable, a set of routings, a confirmed award price, a cash comparison, an availability history, a non-stop network. Below that bar we publish nothing at all, rather than a page that exists to rank and has nothing on it. Pages that lose their evidence, or that nobody ever reads, are removed again.

• Whether a seat is still there. We report the last observation, not live inventory. Always confirm with the airline before making plans.
• Every route. Our coverage grows with our crawl, deliberately slowly and politely. An absent route means we have not looked yet, not that nothing flies it.
• Award chart details. Programme rules, surcharges and partner eligibility change often and are exactly the kind of fact that is stated confidently and wrongly. Where we are not certain, we say nothing rather than guess.
• Taxes and surcharges in full. What we show is what the source quoted at the time; the final amount at booking can differ.

If something here is wrong, tell us and we will fix the data rather than the wording. Start a search and the agent will pass it on.