Originally Posted by
Adam1222
There are stickies and/or wikis with this info for most airlines in their respective airline forums. If you are looking for a specific airline, you will likely get more up to date, accurate, and detailed information there then in the Info Desk, which due to its setup (and inherent in the "I have xx miles and want to travel to YYY" setting) unfortunately discourages many people with expertise on specific airlines from visiting. Information Desk should not substitute people going to the appropriate forum when they have a question about a specific airline or hotel. it's a bit of a misnomer- each forum is an information desk of sorts. We now have tons of duplicate threads- here on information desk and in airline fora. Was this the point of creating this forum?
One of the purposes of this forum is cross-program comparison and discussion.
The information may be available elsewhere, but it's often not in a concise, easy-to-locate form. It isn't in the Alaska Airlines forum--I know, because I moderate that forum.
As for why I created this thread--well, I have a Star Alliance award booking coming up with five different carriers, three of whom I haven't yet found out how to select a seat on. I thought I'd save everyone else the hassle of sifting through an hour and a half's worth of search results to locate the same information. Ideally, I'd like to see at least a high-level overview of some of these types of issues and questions here in the Information Desk, making this forum serve as a sort of one-stop signpost for common issues with further, deeper discussion and analysis in each individual forum.
You're right that we haven't yet attracted the userbase of experts in this forum to be able to make that vision become a reality, but we already do have a healthy population of experienced flyers stopping by to provide input and assistance to less-experienced members, and I hope to see that continue to grow. There's a lot of information and data on FlyerTalk, and the purpose of this forum is to make that information accessible--kind of like the reference librarian's desk at your local library...or the information desk at your local airport (hence the name).
That all said, how this forum ends up evolving and working is still very much a work in progress.