I was trying in January '02 to get award seats to Europe in October '02, with about two weeks' worth of date flexibility. US had nothing to any city in either class of service - except for an occasional single seat on one flight, second seat on another flight. I'm wondering if the uncertain state of US Airways at the time was what led to very tight award availability.

United's response was pretty much "When do you want to go?" We got two business class seats to Paris on exactly the dates we wanted, with a stopover in Washington DC.

I was low-elite on both airlines at the time.

I will give US credit for one thing though: back in 1997 (when I was Gold Preferred), a buddy offered me a tee time at the Old Course on a Saturday - while I was sitting in Maryland on a Wednesday. A wonderful agent at US Airways took my request and said "This is gonna be tough, but let me do some research and call you back in a few minutes." She called back with an 80,000-mile business class award, leaving the next day, DC-Boston-Brussels-Edinburgh, then back the on Monday Glasgow-Brussels-Montreal-New York-DC. Middle of peak season (late July), and no junk fees for the tickets - even though they were paper tickets picked up at the airport. To this day, I think this ranks as my best use of FF miles ever...