Other Middle East and Africa Frequent Flyer Programs - LY Award Tickets using DL/AA

Anyone know how constrained reward availability is on LY using partner miles? (Particularly in C)

i have a stash of DL miles that may not be worth much soon!

I got one Y NYC-TLV-NYC award on LY using 75k AA miles last year. I booked the outbound several months in advance, and got the last available seat within the 10-day period that was acceptable. The return was for almost a year later, so I had to book a bogus return and then change it at the 330-day window. But when I called back at 330-days, I was able to find a seat on my first choice day. None of the days I wanted had EWR availability, and the only JFK availability I could find was on the flights at "bad" times (the 10am JFK-TLV flight that arrives at 3am for the oubound, for example). But it was an excellent value for what effectively was an open-ended 1-year ticket--that would have been almost $1400 from LY directly.

My guess is that C availability is even harder. IIRC, I asked about C both ways, and they couldn't find anything.

Last year I burned DL miles on LY tickets between TLV and Europe. At first I tried to obtain C tickets to London, but there appeared to be about two seats available on 2-3 weekly flights only (out of some 10-12 weekly flights to London at that time, most of them on widebodies). Nothing matched our dates, so we decided to go for three Y tickets to MIL, which were not in abundance but where easier to get.

The buckets for those awards then (I think it was X for business and R for economy) were buckets that DL had no access to. I had to call ElAl to check availability, and even that didn't always work. It was not LY's regular award buckets.

Shuly

I don't know about TLV-Europe, but my USA-TLV award the AAdvantage CSRs were able to check availability directly. They had to check each day individually, but were quite patient and methodical in doing so. And I'm not even elite on AA.