The story behind AwardLocker
A builder's-eye view of how AwardLocker became the fastest award flight search engine on the internet.
The problem
Award travel has a fundamental information problem: airlines release saver award space dynamically, and most tools either show stale cached data or charge for access that makes the tool net-unprofitable for casual travelers.
I spent years manually checking Aeroplan, Alaska, AAdvantage, Virgin Atlantic, ANA, and Turkish websites — often four programs deep on a single trip — to find the cheapest path for a given redemption. The friction turned what should have been 20-minute planning into three-hour Sunday sessions.
Existing tools either cost too much ($15-25/month) or used cached data that didn't reflect live inventory. I wanted a tool that checked every program live, priced at a level normal travelers could afford.
The technical bet
The unlock: build the scraper infrastructure on baremetal C++ on a single high-spec OVHCloud server. No cloud markup. Use libcurl-impersonate to bypass airline bot detection. Run every airline scraper in parallel per search request. Aggregate results in protobuf, ship to the frontend over WebSocket.
The result: sub-100ms total response times, with live data every search. For the cost of what AWS would charge to run a single Lambda function per request at this scale, we run the entire backend.
The content bet
Beyond the search tool, we decided to build the most comprehensive programmatic database of award travel information online: 16,000+ pages covering every route pair, airport, cabin, program, and credit card we could research honestly. Not SEO slop — genuine reference content.
The goal: be the Wikipedia of award travel. Where you go when you want to know how many Aeroplan miles you need for a flight to Tokyo, or which credit card earns the most MR points on groceries, or whether Etihad First Apartment is actually worth 110K miles.
Where we're going
The roadmap: expand airline coverage (Air France/KLM, Singapore KrisFlyer, JAL Mileage Bank are next), add hotel point redemption search, build smart notification systems, and open an API for travel bloggers to embed award search in their own sites.
We're a lean operation — me as the founder, contractors for specific projects. We intend to stay that way. Profitable, independent, obsessively focused on delivering better award search than anyone else.
Want to help?
The fastest way to help AwardLocker grow is to use it, share it, and tell us what you wish it could do. Reach out with feedback, sweet-spot sightings, or interesting edge cases that break our search engine — we fix them all.