Amex travel for flights

Looking for some advice in booking flights to Europe thru Amex travel versus booking thru airline directly.

Have a few hundred thousand Amex points saved up and will be booking flights in the next two weeks for a late April departure. Does booking thru Amex travel offer any benefit? Flights seem a touch more but probably easier to purchase with points. If I book thru airline, I will use the points to pay that charge or a great portion of it.

What are the other benefits?

It is not advised to book through Amex (or any third party) for flights. If you need customer service, it's Amex, not X Airlines and it's much harder to get help.

Having said that, a "free" flight and depending on prices you can find elsewhere it can certainly be worth it. The headache of finding the best value is too much of a burden for many/most. Transferring miles and booking directly through the airlines is most often the better option, but it can be complicated and not ALWAYS the best value. There are very few hard and fast rules in points and miles, and it depends on your specific flight.

Not being a smartass, Google "X points to Europe" and you'll get some ideas. Many of them will be aspirational flights that never have availability but it's a place to start. Fly to Europe for 20K points

Amex travel is usually more expensive than the airlines.

I've found that paying for the flight via the airline with your Amex card and then paying your Amex bill with the points is a pretty good option. That way, you get the points for buying the flight - if you have a platinum card, you get 5x points on flights.

You get roughly the same transfer on the points to your bill as you do points to the actual cost of the flight. That's what I'll be doing for these flights I'm going to be buying to Italy this summer.