Originally Posted by
MastaHanky
I could be in the minority here, but I've been discovering that it's easier to find award travel at the "low" level when the flight dates are nearby as opposed to dates several months out.
That makes perfect sense. The closer to departure it gets the more accurately an airline can predict a flight's load factor at time of departure. Way far out inventory allocations will be more a function of the forecast and less a function of actual reservations held.
If you have a transatlantic flight (to a place like FCO, markets like LON with more close-in booking business travel could be another story) only booked to say 60% 2-3 weeks before departure it's a very safe bet that there's no way the plane is going out full or even close to it. No harm in opening the floodgates to award bookings to try and capture any incremental traffic you can...
It's all a numbers game and it's much easier to predict those numbers close to departure.