On the first day God created commercial avaition....on the second day He created Y, B, M, H, Q, V, and W coach class seats on United....and on the third day He ran amok!!

I just tried to book a standard award (40,000 miles, no capacity controls, no blackout dates) from Burlington, VT to San Francisco the Sunday after Thanksgiving on United. Finding no seats available, I took a look on the Web. I found zero availability for connecting flights from BTV-IAD-SFO, but plenty of availability for individual segments BTV-IAD and IAD-SFO.

I contacted the UA Premier Award Reservation Center, and pointed this out to a very curious res agent. He scratched his head, went away, and on the fourth day he came back with the revelation that no one on his support staff had the faintest idea what was going on. Curiously, one of the flight segments with "zero availability" had at least 17 empty seats on a 50 seat aircraft. My archaeological dig was rewarded with confirmed standard award seats on my desired flights.

It appears that United's yield managers are waiting for dozens of travellers to wave fistsful of dollars at them for individual flight segments.

This is raw capitalism at work....soon we will be seeing $4 fares on off-peak flights and $40,000 fares for the same seats on peak flights .