FlyerTalk Forums - View Single Post - AA Holiday milesAAver Award Travel Inventory - limits, releases
Old Jan 4, 2012, 10:10 pm
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iahphx
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Join Date: Mar 2000
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AA Holiday milesAAver Award Travel Inventory - limits, releases

This was a contentious issue last year in the "Award Availability" thread, so I'm a bit hesitant to get AA's defenders all riled up again. But this is an important issue that deserves serious discussion and <redacted> its very own thread.

Basically, what's going on is that AA is severely -- but quietly -- limiting the availability of domestic coach saver awards for the Thanksgiving and Christmas hoidays. This first appeared last year when, suddenly, almost all of the domestic coach award seats around the Thanksgiving holiday simply vanished shortly after being loaded. And AA never loaded any domestic saver seats for most days around Christmas on almost all the domestic routes.

The month of November 2012 is now loaded in the schedule and you can see the exact same pattern. It's easy to spot if you pull up a "boring" high-frequency, short-haul market like AUS-DFW or STL-ORD that normally has award availability on almost any day. Thanksgiving this year is November 22 and, it appears to me, that there are no coach saver seats being offered from November 14 through November 26 -- meaning you aren't going to be getting to grandma's house for turkey on a saver ticket.

I currently don't plan to be redeeming miles on AA for next Thanksgiving, so I don't plan to do exhaustive research looking for loopholes to this embargo (I certainly encourage others to do so). If it's like last year, there may be some. For instance, first class saver travel was not embargoed. Nor was an itinerary that included int'l travel. So there are likely to be some clever workarounds. It is also possible that AA will ultimately relax the embargo, and offer awards seats on some of the less busy Thanksgiving travel dates.

That said, I don't think it should be a secret that AA is basically imposing Holiday blackout periods and hoping nobody notices. I've noticed, and it definitely diminishes the value of the AAdvantage program in my mind.

Last edited by JDiver; Jan 5, 2012 at 10:42 am Reason: redacted dilatory statement
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