Originally Posted by
j3brooklyn
All very well-intentioned, but not an answer to my question. I am looking to book award seats during my son's school vacation. This is a highly desirable time, and flights will be full, so it is unlikely that additional reward seats will be made available. Also, I can't wait until the month before to book tickets.
What I really want to know is how late I need to stay up waiting for the seats to load. Since nobody seems to know (or be willing to share), I will post my findings once I book the tickets.
Sorry, this is a late comment and is probably hardly useful at this point, but it is entirely NOT the case that high occupancy flights "never" get additional seats.
They
almost always do. Even if it's just one or two. It's literally a matter of monitoring multiple times per day and jumping on the opportunity. Use something like my site (signature) to do this.
I find some of the worst flights are something like LAX-RAR, YUL-ZRH, FRA-SIN, SIN-NRT and so on (others will probably disagree, but there's enough "busy" flights out there to bring up a number of examples). But you are almost always guaranteed that if you're monitoring from one year out, that at least one additional seat will open at SOME point. Maybe someone will cancel, maybe someone will change, maybe the airline will decide to gain a few extra pennies from a reward seat - who knows. I've even seen SQ F space open on FRA-SIN on the 380 less than 24 hours before departure (although this was a few months ago, I haven't checked since), so everything happens.
Just be optimistic and ready to re-route if you find a better route and if that's an option.