Originally Posted by
bobert24
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.
Why CUZ-LIM-JUL and not CUZ-JUL (direct flight, once a day)?. For JUL-LIM keep check every single day, they may release more seats a week before or at OLCI timeframe.
Originally Posted by
SanDiego1K
My experience is with booking flights on the day they are loaded and available to BA (or AS). I want to say it is precisely 330 days ahead. I booked award seats using BA Avios for travel in late 2016/early 2017. On Thurs, Feb 12, LAN opened up award seats for both BA and AS for Jan 9. I could see availability move day by day as the calendar moved. LAN consistently released 7 coach seats and 4 biz seats. Business class seats generally were only available for 24 hours, 36 at most. It appeared as though LAN then yanked them whether or not they were booked. I hope for your sake that LAN releases seats for several months out as I did not see that.
Yes, as I said it many times (in other threads), LAN release their seats 330 days ahead, but only for 24 hours on specific routes like IPC-PPT-IPC, and others like MIA-SCL, SCL-LIM are usually available for 36 hours or even more. They do this only for One World partners, but if you check their website, they will still available, probably because their own program does not allow oneway awards.
Last year (Feb~Apr 2014), I have a big problem with my itinerary with some changes that I had to do and I was no allowed, after complaining about this (LA awards only available for 24hs and no 5 days hold on AA was allowed), the AA agent contacted the OW department (AA specific department), then they magically open all SCL-MIA seats for a whole week, I was able to select the flight that I was looking for, but they forgot to close those open awards seats, AFAIR that week was available for more than 20 days (J and Y seats).
Anther route that is hard to get (impossible) is MIA-EZE-MIA, is the only route with 4M flight number, even is available on LA, AA will not see it, even with a long-sell. In the past, QF was the only tool that was able to show 4M (LAN Argentina) flights, but after they updated their search engine, no more.