garkman

Just wanted to share my experience on snagging LH F. While availability does change/update at 0:00 UTC, please make sure to check very frequently - here's why.
I tracked the entire availability for LH431 from ORD-FRA for the date range of 1/9 thru 1/29 (I began tracking this range on 1/7 and stopped on 1/16). I used the ANA tool to do a reverse search in order to bypass the <4 day limit.
Of the 21 days I tracked, only 7 didn't show availability at some point, and 3 of those 7 were still 9+ days out. 12 of 16 flights that were T-8 or less had availability at some point during my tracking. **The flights that didn't show availability had 0, 1, or 2 open seats (out of 8). 1 flight showed availability with as few as 2 open seats out of 8 (this was at T-1).
5 of 8 open seems to be a magic number - when it hits 5 available there's a vastly larger chance of a seat opening than with 4 available.
**CHECK often because nearly every flight I tracked had seats free up while I was tracking them - I'm not sure if it's pax cancelling or what, but it almost always happened. For me, my Tuesday flight had no award availability with 4 open seats at T-6, however sometime between 4AM and 10AM CST a seat opened up at T-6. I checked and 5 seats were available, 1 award, I got the award seat making 4 available and then award availability was closed.

This was a summary of a spreadsheet, so sorry if it's confusing...

...And then right after I post this I re-check availability and my flight has another award seat available by the looks of it, at T-6 with 4 open...so availability changes at times other than 00:00 UTC even when the number of open seats doesn't change.