FlyerTalk Forums - View Single Post - Award availabilty study: AA is the best of the worst
Old May 30, 2011 | 1:20 pm
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sdsearch
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Originally Posted by audio-nut
Originally Posted by sdsearch
It's actually AA (and most other legacies) that have 100% reward availability at only double the cost. But once again, it's a question of cost for most people, not just availability.
Right, they all are at 100%, even B6 and WN.
No, WN is no longer 100% (nor has DL been 100% the last few years).

First, for legaices: DL instituted 3 tiers (not just saver and anytime) a couple years ago, and the anytime is the 3rd tier up at DL and costs more than 100% (but I forget exactly how much). This multi-tier award system is at the heart of complaints about DL award redemption in recent years.

Now back to WN: Under RR 2.0, your cost in points is not only proporitional to the fare you would pay in cash in a given column (discount cash fares vs anytime cash fares), but it also has a multiplier for the column. The anytime cash fares are already often more than 100% times the discount cash fares, but once you add the greater column multiplier for getting an award from the anytime cash fares column, it's way more than 100% of the lowest possible cost. (But since cash fares and bucket availability can change daily or even hourly, so can both the lowest cost in points and the highest cost in points under RR 2.0. So it's very hard to say what the biggest ratio could possibly be ahead of time.)

(I know little about B6's program, because it never was of interest to me. I've been a member of WN's program for about 15 years now -- since the days it involved collecting 16 stickers! -- and so I keep up with it, though it suits me less and less every time it changes.)
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