Star Alliance - Award availability on South African Airway for IAD to CPT or JNB in June & July 2010?

I won tickets for the upcoming 2010 World Cup in South Africa, which is June 11th to July 11th. I have enough United miles to book a Star Alliance coach award, and am looking to fly out of IAD/WAS to CPT or JNB. I called United, and the agent I spoke to found some less than ideal routes on Egypt Air. Ideally, I'll fly South African Airways (SAA), but no availability came up for this route on SAA. Are the award seats all booked up, or has SAA just not released its inventory yet? Is there a conclusive way to find out which it is?

First thing you should do is grab what's available. Then keep calling to try to improve it. As a 1K, all your changes are free. I wouldn't be surprised if all the SA awards were already taken by other World Cup fans.

I'll echo mah here. Grab anything available and pray. But given the high demand and the limited supply of flights, awards seats are likely gone if ever released to begin with.

High demand periods like this will be tough to get. Maybe if you had started planning 3 or 4 months ago, you might have had a better shot.

As others have said, lock in whatever you can get, and try to improve later on. Often, you'll find stuff out a few weeks that will be much better. Otherwise, that's a long distance jog/swim to get there.

All, thanks for the advice. As suggested, I'm just going to go ahead and take what I can get for now, and make adjustments if needed and available as the event approaches.

Not that it helps your specific question for *A, but I have been watching June/July 2010 award availability on British Airways since about May 2009. BA held back their award booking for about one month longer than for a normal period, and then released all of the June/July dates in one fell swoop (approx July 15, 2009).

Everything to JNB and CPT was gone about 3 days later for economy and about 7 days later for business.

Unless for some weird reason SA cant sell their seats to / from the 2010WC, I would think your chances of getting an award seat are next to nothing. Even the commercial seats for this period are only available in Y and C, the most expensive fare buckets!