Originally Posted by
fedechat
LAN release their seat 330 days in advance on International routes. On domestic it depends, sometimes 330 days in advance, sometimes 10 months, you need to check on LAN (Lanpass account is required) and look for the lowest award level. On long haul or international routes, the award for partners will be available for 1 to 3 days, after that time, you have to check every single day and sometimes twice a day.
You were right - I guess you do have to check more than once a day. I'd been checking every day for over 2 weeks for 3 flight segments - CUZ-LIM, LIM-JUL, & JUL-LIM (the first two just being the two legs of a CUZ-JUL itinerary). I looked this morning, and amazingly enough, there were 3 seats on the CUZ-LIM flight. I booked 2 of them immediately (via ba.com), then checked the other flights to see if anything had opened up. No such luck.
A few minutes ago, I happened to check again. What do you know, 2 seats were available on LIM-JUL. I grabbed those immediately, too. They definitely were not available this morning.
Thankfully, we won't have any checked bags, so having 2 PNRs for the trip CUZ-LIM-JUL shouldn't cause any problems, but it's kind of weird booking the legs individually like that. Does anyone know of any reason I should call BA and/or LAN and try to get them to combine the itineraries into one?
I'll definitely be checking on availabilty on the JUL-LIM leg over the next couple days. If it pops up, we may have found (something of) a pattern as to when award space is released.