I am aware of the married segment capacity management of EK, have learnt to deal with it. But recently (last couple of weeks) I have had several bookings where married segment rules suddenly applied to bookings with long stopovers in Dubai (where, in the past, the individual segments were always available according to single segment capacity rules as long as there was no married segment within 24 hours). Now, it looks like they regard segments as married even if there are multiple days inbetween them - with the consequence that it is impossible to say if there will be seats available if you want to change such a segment.

Case in point: I want to book RUH-DXB-DUS vv. with segment 1 flown today and segment 2 flown in three weeks. In the past, capacity on these segments followed single segment availability (and not married segment). Now that has changed. R-class seats are available on both flights, but fare engine is not picking them up but only offering Y-class. EK explains this with "POS restrictions" (quote). The R-class fare rules do not have any POS restrictions listed, and this routing has priced as R-class consistently over the last 2 years when booked in a similar fashion.

Anybody else had a similar experience lately?