The general results are not too surprising - it is not too hard to get seats on WN when the schedule opens outside of a few peak dates. I think Alaska ranks pretty high as well for US carriers.

However, if AA is below UA then the study is clearly flawed. Even if that were true, UA's deceptive *net blocking should drop it 20 points, not to mention the complete dearth of C seats on many international routes.

The methodology explains that bookings for 2 travelers were attempted in February for the June-October time period for 10 long haul routes and 10 city pairs <2500 miles. Unfortunately that doesn't provide enough information to be useful. Were these 10 random city pairs or SFO-JFK, LAX-ORD, etc.? Did they attempt domestic economy (probably) or the more coveted international business class (unlikely)? The timeframe is also pretty broad, June-August is generally more difficult than Sept-Oct.

In the end, I would much rather see greater transparency and consistency as to release of award inventory rather than surveys which may be based on useless hypothetical bookings.