lowfareair

The question seems a little absurd, but it's fairly straightforward: For the past several weeks I have not been able to find a single saver award in business class (U) on any US Airways flight to any city where they should be available, i.e. Europe, Mexico/CentAm, the Caribbean, etc. I've checked on us.com, aa.com, and ExpertFlyer across multiple months to a plethora of destinations.

I'm finding some on AA metal, yet not a single award on US Airways metal is available that I can see, even during the low season. Punta Cana in the middle of hurricane season? Nope. Manchester, GB in early December? Nuh-uh.

Any idea what is going on?

PHL

I found availability at the 100K level (roundtrip) in business class for PHL-LHR in January 2016....

lowfareair

Dates and flights? I see connections available that result in AA across the pond, but nothing on US metal.

EDIT: ExpertFlyer shows nothing on US in business the entire month of January on PHL-LHR or LHR-PHL

kfrombk

i can't even get through to them in the last 24 hours, they are the worst

PHL

I picked flexible dates, PHL-LHR, nonstop, award travel on the initial web booking page.

It returned a calendar with 50K (each way) business award options pretty much every Mon/Tue/Wed in Jan 2016. Return options pretty much the same.

I clicked Jan 6 outbound, Jan 20 return. The summary showed $314 in taxes, $50 booking fee, 100,000 points for the roundtrip. Great, I thought....

However...when I clicked continue to go to flight selection...it all goes to he11. Coach "low" only on the outbound for 30,000. Coach "off peak saver" available for the return for 17,500.

US has never been known for having a great IT organization. I guess this is no exception.

Sorry to get your hopes up for a January trip to London in Business.

lowfareair

Same here - keep getting the 'you are unable to book award travel over the phone in this weather, SorryNotSorry'. That would be fine and dandy if they 1) allowed you to book oneworld airlines beyond AA on their site and 2) had ANY darn international business award space available!

GNVGator

Flew LHR-CLT yesterday and there were only 4 of us in J and 40 pax in total onboard. I looked at expertflyer before we left and it said J9 C9 but U0. Meaning they were happy to give away the seats with a mileage upgrade/Cp certs but knowing damn well that the plane was leaving empty wouldn't open up any J award tickets...not sure what the criteria is anymore for determining which flight should be open to J awards...

Go Gators

mh4ll

Yeah, this really irritates me. I understand not wanting to give seats away as awards that might be sold for $. I do not understand sending planes out massively empty instead of offering those seats to frequent flyers (even day-of)

chuck1

It's just crazy. You use to be able to count on them opening up inventory 72 hours or so prior to departure even if they were stingy in advance. No more even on flights this open.

fly747first

The US Airways side has had a highly unintelligent RM team for quite some time now. These are the same pricing people who frequently make the error of making the non-refundable first class fares far more expensive than the refundable ones. Further, most competent yield analysts and managers would check their markets often so that the flights that have low load factors and are likely to go empty have award seats available. Then again, US Airways pays them less than than 40K so I'm sure they are not striving to be RM stars.

What is quite sad about the situation the OP references is that all US had to do was have one of their analysts go through an Excel file filtering out flights with really low load factors to identity which flights to open up award seats on.

lowfareair

I'm guessing this is an IT error where the analysts believe award seats are being added but never get pushed through for whatever reason. AA has plenty of seats in the U int'l biz saver bucket, and both airlines have plenty of inventory classified as 'first class' within the US and Canada.

fly747first

That would have to be some major IT glitch, because once the yield analysts release the booking class through the airline's revenue optimization system, the reservation system should pick it up right away, and if it it were really a glitch, someone should have caught it by now.