Originally Posted by
quinella66
Molly, I agree 100%. At least partly on the principle that the airlines have a completely closed system and simply tell you NO. There is no system of, say, 10 seats at "saver" rate, the rest are double. It is simply that the airline allocates and deallocates seats as it wishes with no outside accountability. If enough people start paying double miles, they can cut out "saver" seats except for their most low demand routes and you will never get any seats at the "saver" rate.
Actually, a few airlines do publish what the inventory buckets are that FF seats are tied to (or at least very closely approximate). I know that DL did when they switched to the 3 tier program. And I know that CO has shared some of the details but not all of them.
Most airlines do not just allocate NN seats to reward redemption. They tie the points to some arbitrary dollar value internally and then they can determine whether to allow redemption based on the "price" that seats are selling for. The allocations are fluid as demand (and consequently prices) increase for a particular flight/route. At the same time there will be flights that never have a redemption seat available. The guys at JetBlue were rather explicit about this during our meeting/T5 tour back in June. They
might open seats up very close to departure on some of their highest demand peak flights (think JFK-SXM/AUA around the winter holidays or spring break), but generally they just won't do it.