Air New Zealand Air Points - USA - NZ Award Availability

I am trying to plan a trip to NZ for next Christmas using my United Miles. I called them today and was disappointed to find out that there was absoultely zero availability (in Coach, at least) despite the fact that the travel date is 327 days away (surprisingly, I was able to get seats LAX-SYD on UA metal but they wouldn't offer a connection). The agent mentioned that this may be because AirNZ has not yet released any award seats. Any idea when this will occur? Or, because its christmas time, will I be unable to find any availability at all? Also, I read on another thread that NZ was going to begin SFO-AKL. If this proves true, when will those flights be loaded into the booking system and will award seats become available?

As always, any advice you can provide will be appreciated.

The direct AKL-SFO flights are already in the NZ booking system as of today, so this is probably a great opportunity to grab some award seats. It may take a few days for the flights to be loaded into partner airline systems though...

Regarding award seats at christmas time in general, having had a look at availability usingsmile67's great tool, I can see that there are definitely first and business award seatsavailable around Christmas time, but no coach awards. Even on SFO to Auckland flights, which were presumably loaded into the system only in the last 24 hours or so, there are no coach awards available after December 3rd, but once again business and first award seats are relatively plentiful. Perhaps NZ blacks out all economy class rewards over Christmas - that's a bit sneaky! http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/frown.gif

The other thing to remember is that NZ doesn't make all award seats available to partners, to ensure that its own frequent flyers have greater access to such in-demand times. I know that there have been occasions in the past when AirNZ had award seats available to book through AirPoints but nothing was available through UA Mileage Plus, so there is definitely a two-tier availability system at work.

Thanks mad_atta.

One more newbie question, what bucket is NZ award availability taken from?

Award booking classes for NZ (and most other *A carriers now, I think) are:

First = O
Business = I
Economy = X

See *A Booking codes thread (http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/Forum82/HTML/001451.html)