I called Alaska again this morning. They definitely have great reps. The rep I talked with looked into all partners. She found a flight from CDG on July 6 on Delta to Salt Lake and on to Seattle. The bad news: no DL flight availability on June 13/14/15 etc to cities close to where we wanted to start. (I did not have her check into every single Europe city, but she looked at several).

So, the very hard part for people is if you're booking an outbound, which partner will come through on the return? At the time we booked our outbound, AA was the only option.

The Alaska rep did confirm the following:

1. Looking at the AA award seat availability is interesting, but just because they have a flight award does not mean they make that seat available to Alaska. Alaska reps can only see what AA has specifically allocated to Alaska.

2. if you're on the lowest level award ticket, they will not put you on a flight leg they operate that requires higher number of miles. So let's say I'm able to get over to Europe, then back on AA from LHR to Chicago on the lowest level award ticket. If there's a seat on Alaska, but it is 20K instead of 12.5K, then we'd have to pay the 20K for that leg as a part of a separate reservation.

This is where the suggestion above to look at award seat availability is really helpful: look at Alaska's legs and see which cities actually have award availability at a given level. For example, right now, on July 7, they have seats at 12.5K on the 8 am flight. The seats on the afternoon and evening flight are 20K. They also list some options via Portland. Those are also 20K. 2 of the 3 require spending the night in Portland.

The award calendar lists all flights on July 5,6,8 and 9 as 20K. So effectively, award returns on the economy flights via Chicago are impossible on those days.

I also checked Dallas. Here the situation is better: all 3 flights on July 7 are at the 12.5K level. But all on July 8 and 9 are 20K.

I then looked at LAX. This is the most ridiculous situation of all. There's one option at 12.5K: LAX to San Jose, wait 2 hours, then San Jose to Seattle, for 12.5K. All other flights - all 13 non stops, plus 6 flights via PDX - require 20K.

I also checked Burbank. They have one flight at 12.5K with a 2.25 hour layover in PDX. All others are 20K miles.

===
The point of all this, gentle readers who are planning ahead, is you should definitely not count on getting a flight to and from Europe on Alaska. It is hit and miss, not just on the Europe portion but also on the domestic legs as well.

I dearly wish I'd built a lot of miles on United and Continental and American in particular because they seem to have a much more flexible approach: if they can't put you on one partner, they can and will find another. And very important: they have one way tickets. So, if you find a great flight flight on AA or its partners going over, and then a great one on United and its partners coming back, you're all set.

With Alaska, if you can't get a flight back on one partner, they can't put you on another (except for Air France and KLM), and also there's the issue of many cities having only one flight a day at the lowest award levels (maybe that changes as flight dates approach, but then you have to spend all the time constantly checking.) Also, there's no one way ticket for half the miles on the partner flights.