Originally Posted by pnwjourneys

It looks like I may just have gotten an F seat on the DAR-DXB leg of my trip home from Africa in November when EF was just showing Z1. I'm currently booked on a mixed award ticket in Y from DAR-DXB and in J from DXB-SEA. I've been checking periodically for availability to upgrade to at least J on the DAR-DXB leg. Tonight my search on as.com came back with J availability on both legs. I called and they couldn't see it. Got a supervisor involved--couldn't see it. And interestingly EF wasn't showing J on the DAR-DXB leg, but it was showing Z1, and as.com showed a mixed cabin award available--F on DAR-DXB, J on DXB-SEA. But she couldn't see or book that either. She suggested I try to book it online and then cancel my existing ticket (I have enough miles to do that). So I did and it went through, and I have an EK record locator in addition to the Alaska one. The Emirates site shows my reservation but not yet an e-ticket number (I know it can take at least a few hours), so I'm going to wait for that to show up before I cancel my existing award ticket.

I do understand that F on the DAR-DXB route isn't all that exciting (no suites, etc) but it's better than coach, and therefore worth the additional 22.5K miles to me (and who knows, maybe F will open up on the DXB-SEA leg sometime before my flight--I won't be holding my breath however!).

Hope these are helpful data points on both the phantom availability problem and as.com sometimes being able to "see" F availability even when there's just Z1.