Originally Posted by
ckpeter
There are many cases of preferential access to own members, but it is not a general case. It is more often the case that awards available to one airline's own program members are also available to partner programs.
In particular, my experience with JL is that the JL web site award availability matches what is available to other partners (I am referring to immediately available award seats, not the waitlist availability).
That's good to know for JL. For Star Alliance, my experience is more like
UA Fan's: airlines will frequently have seats in their own award buckets but none in the alliance buckets.
That was one reason the ANA tool is (was?) so valuable. It showed the O and I fare buckets (I believe those are the buckets...) whereas most airline sites just show their own equivalent of XC/XF (again, those are the UA buckets...not sure how standard they are).