Originally Posted by
sdsearch
No, that's not the same as this holiday travel issue. But as reported in other threads (and re-reported in this thread), in a general sense, AA no longer always releases inventory at 330ish days out. It depends on the route and the cabin whether they do, and then it depends on who knows what when they do if they don't do it right away (when the flight goes on sale).
And, yes, it used to work the way you described, but it's no longer anywhere near that simple.
Either that, or people faster than you are booking it all up very quickly. Someone in this thread mentioned being up at midnight when the inventory opened up, booking an award ticket successfully then, seeing half of the award inventory gone by 3 am, and all of it gone by 6 am. Read back in this thread to figure out what route(s) exactly they were talking about (plus to figure out which timezone the midnight/3/6 were referenced to!).
Yeah, this stuff probably belongs in the general "Award Availability" thread, but I would submit that the 330 day load is still a useful booking strategy on AA for plan-ahead travellers. I'm no expert on this (I haven't studied it), but it seems to me that more award seats get loaded at 330 days than at any other time in the calendar. And compared to some other airlines I've looked at, like CO, AA still follows the 330-day pattern.
As far as staying up past midnight to grab the first 330-day seats, I would say that practice exists, but is limited. I've played that game to Hawaii for peak times on DL and it does work -- and I could tell other people were playing the game too as seats would quickly disappear. But for most markets -- and YUL would certainly be one of them -- it's completely unnecessary. There aren't enough anal people out there to worry about.
In general, if you really want to force an award seat when the airlines don't want to give you one, you have to be creative. Strip your trip down segment by segment and see where the "problem" is. Consider the option of partners, and non-standard connections (you have 24 hours in a city to make a legal AA award connection). Consider nearby airports and cities. And then once you have a strategy, call instead of relying on the websites. In most cases, you can make something work. I don't think I've ever abandoned an award trip that I wanted because I couldn't find anything. I have, however, switched frequent flyer programs where one program was making the trip particularly difficult to book (usually Skymiles).