edgewood49

I have been daily working on securing some tickets for two international award trips, one for the end of this year and another early next. For the past so many months essentially all I am seeing is BA with hefty dollar add on cost. AND when they list Business let alone FC it's seems to be always the shorter flight and the trip over the pond is always coach even though it;s listed as business or FC. Very very frustrating and as a long long time AS traveler something has changed back at the "ranch"

AS has refused to answer my repeated customer service request. Anyone know something ?

They did just hire a Director of Alliances, new position

pt flyer

We used Alaska miles for an upcoming roundtrip to Europe. We are flying American to Frankfurt and Air France back from Paris. We avoided large fees by avoiding BA. We watched the typical offerings for the routes that we thought might work for us, (Amsterdam, Paris, Frankfurt) for about 3 weeks until the dates that we wanted became available. We were able to get a good idea of what types of flights were available and when they showed up as available. We booked the first day our flight dates were available and had good success. When I spoke to the agent at Alaska Airlines, she said that booking as soon as the flights become available is a good strategy as is frequently checking back as sometimes more flights are released as the dates get closer. Good luck to you

edgewood49

How long out ? in past years and I am going back many you either saw way out there availability or close in say 60 days What I am not seeing now is or was the usual pattern. How are you flying c, b or fc ?

flytoeat

Specifically when, to where, and for how many? Obviously, it's cyclical, but I've redeemed 10 business/first tickets to Europe in the past two months.

dayone

No TATL reward availability is an urban legend and has been debunked in earlier threads.

I found J and F DFW-LHR on AA's new 77W for a Christmas trip.

eponymous_coward

Took me all of 1 search to find 1 seat on SEA-LHR-SEA on AA in premium classes, with a late December outbound, early January return...

(just listing the longhauls)

12/27 AA 46 or 90
1/6 AA 51 or 87 or 99 or 109 (the last one is J on the LAX-LHR flight, so you get AA's longhaul J product)

DL segments aren't that hard to come by, either.

AF showed up pretty instantly on SFO-CDG, as well as AA connecting flights.

-shrugs-

Jimgotkp

You have to be flexible. Most of the award space will go to/from London or Paris. If you don't want to purchase a separate intra-Europe ticket then good luck finding something between Seattle and that other city.

AKLifetimeFlyer

Choose hubs for positioning cities, be flexible, and search as far in advance as possible. It's not rocket science. Everyone is trying to get the same seats, you just have to be first.

edgewood49

Ok VCE to SFO/SEA 10/11 all BA, SFO/SEA to JNB middle of Jan 06 some coach EK just popped but essentially all BA Heck I tried AMS to PDX/SEA in Oct and got BA then I tried AMS to YVR all BA !! Maybe my keyboard only works for BA !!

My observation of years of doing this is that there all of sudden a lot of BA that's all, I will return to my first thing in the morning mid day and evening search !

CDKing

There is speculation on the aa board that AA may get a cut of the BA fuel surcharges so they limit the number of seat AA releases. All we need is an option to exclude BA from the calendar view and maybe some sort of mixed cabin filter.

slopeboy40

Agreed. An option to hide mixed cabin itineraries would be sooooooo helpful.

3Cforme

That's an area where you want to be careful what you ask for.

Delta.com award search, in the flex date/price calendar view, is pretty good at suppressing mixed cabin itins. It may show a Business award at xxx,xxx miles for a certain date but not display pricing for a mixed itin that gives the long segment in business and the short leg in coach that may be 40K miles less than xxx,xxx. Some travelers would be happy with the mixed itin but won't see it unless they click on the date to check itineraries by price.

You may be distracted by AS in F and partner long-haul in coach. DL would also suppress DL long-haul to Paris and the AF intra-Europe connection in coach (unless one checks specific dates).

slopeboy40

Good points. My thought is they could just have a radio button to toggle on/off much like the airline selector buttons when searching for award travel. I just want a button that says (and does) "Allow Mixed Cabin Intinerary".

flytoeat

-How many people?

-Are you only willing to travel on October 11th?
-VCE is always tough. To Jimgotkp's point, are you willing to make your way to another gateway?

-Re JNB, I'm doing a paid trip in AF business for $2600: YVR-CDG-JNB-CDG-YVR. When these kind of deals are available at about $0.10 per eqm, I'll earn rather than burn. (approx 26K eqm, 52K rdm)

eponymous_coward

Your problem is AF/KL doesn't have a lot of availability to CDG from North America that day (you could get to LHR or CDG on AA/DL, FWIW). Given that AS doesn't allow partner mix and match, you have 3 choices:

BA SEA-LHR-VCE
AF/KL SEA-CDG/AMS-VCE

(DL and AA don't fly there offseason, I think.)

Kind of hard for AS to make AF/KL open up North America-CDG on a particular date, innit? What exactly do you propose to have AS do to make AF open up availability? "Open up SFO-CDG or the dog gets it?"

Also, AA has MANY flights to LHR/CDG/rest of Europe. Ditto DL.

IMO, your best approach is to worry about getting to Europe, then use the train/LCCs to get around to where you want to go...