Emirates Airlines Skywards - Award availability

Hello all,

This is my first post on the Emirates forum. I plan on booking a Christmas/New Year vacation for 2010 and I want to take my wife back to the Maldives. Last year, we flew all the way from JFK-FRA-SIN-MLE on SQ and this year we want to go to faster route from JFK-DXB-MLE. We booked approximately 1 year in advance on SQ J awards. I was wondering how the availability is in Premium classes on Emirates. I would book 330 days out or whatever the max is with EK. I am hopeful of flying the A380 out of JFK in J or F for 2 seats. How do you think my chance are? Do they open many seats in advance or release them closer to the departure date? Thanks for your help.

You can login on skywards.com and check the avaibility. I dont think you'll get fares in economy but there should be some availability in peak economy or F class.

Thanks. My question was how EK was with their awards. Are they stingy with releasing premium awards? I have a ton of SPG points and would transfer these over to Emirates, but don't want to if I won't be able to get the awards.

Things are getting tough with Skywards especially after new regulations coming from January. I have noticed that there are some routes on which rewards in Economy are not available even if you want to book a year earlier. Only Peak Economy is available. Hard to believe that all 'Normal Economy' rewards' seats are already gone. May be; Emirates has blocked them deliberately keeping in mind that the requirements for rewards will increase from next year anyways.

Thank you for your response, that was exactly what I wanted to know. I guess I'll play with some "dummy" dates and see what kind of seats are available or I will exlplore other redemption options. I'd rather not go via Singapore again as it's much longer, but I may not have many other options. BA has a new route from Gatwick in Biz only, but I highly doubt they would have anything available as the route is brand new and they are at capacity this Christmas already.