Originally Posted by
jayer
My hero and data point is a family friend who manages to book her entire 8-member extended family to Hawaii every, single, year for the last 20, and always on the days she wants. Small gentle blond woman who would normally drive across town in the middle of the night in the rain to tell you about Jesus rather than fight over anything. Except she knows the scriptural day and the hour and the minute holiday flight availability will be poured out on the public. That night she is logged on with her flights typed in at midnight, or whenever it is, gives it about 30 seconds in case her watch is fast, and hits enter.
Your family friend's strategy to get to Hawaii is sound. Indeed, it is probably the single best strategy for getting a group to Hawaii at peak periods. But she won't be flying AA this year using that strategy for Thanksgiving or Xmas (unless she picks one of the very few non-embargoed days, like perhaps Christmas day). AA will not load the seats. That's what this whole thing is about. The usual 330 (or is it 331?) day load is "intercepted" by the script.
Originally Posted by
sdsearch
Please explain to me how you add an international segment onto DFW-CLT or DFW-LGA, when there are no international flights on AA from CLT or LGA?
In other words, this "trick" of adding an international segment seems to me can only work if you are trying to go to a city out of which AA flies international flights. And there's fairly few of those.
But, meanwhile, if you do manage to do this, and do this every year (because you face the same situation every year), do you think AA won't notice?
There are definitely some limitations to this strategy and, yes, you generally have to be transiting an AA hub. I would note that LGA and JFK are considered the same city for this purpose so you could theoretically buy a DFW-LGA + JFK-LHR ticket to enhance award availability.
I don't think AA is likely to spend its resources tracking down people who don't show up for their free tickets.
That said, I don't know anyone who actually uses this trick to do that. Instead, if they live in NYC, they book a Hawaii-London ticket with an NYC stopover. They fly Hawaii-NYC and later take another "free" trip to London (you have until ticket expiration to do this (but search the "married segments" threads about a potential wrinkle in doing this). Obviously, this is far more lucrative than throwing away an int'l ticket. And completely "kosher" with AA's rules.
Originally Posted by
FWAAA
And yet, in one minute, I found saver coach availability LAX-DFW on Nov 14, contrary to your OP. And as you later clarified, on Thanksgiving day itself as well.
And, of course, plentiful saver F award seats for every day of the month except for 11/14, 11/15, 11/21 and 11/25.
Is it possible that with over 60 million AAdvantage members, and just 3400 combined mainline and Eagle flights daily, that the prime holiday saver coach seats were snapped up by someone else the moment they became available? Or is that not a possibility?
In your zeal to disprove me, you were careless in your research. Those aren't AA flights available -- they are AS. AA now displays some AS availability on their website. To my knowledge, AS does not have a holiday embargo (another great workaround, and one that I would jump on if it worked for your itinerary, as those seats will go fast).
And, as you know yourself, the availability of F seats is a red herring, as there has never been a first class holiday saver embargo. No reason for one, as there is little business-generated demand for first class travel during the Holidays. Of course, if your choice is paying 25K for coach or paying 25K for first class, it's a nobrainer to redeem for FC.
Finally, I'm no statistician, but I would definitely say there is absolutely zero possibility that all the seats on on the embargo days in all these domestic markets have been immediately snapped up.