Quote:
Originally Posted by cityflyer369
Are you suggesting that as a Flying Blue member one should carry out a query via all ST FFPs that the KVS tool can query, in the hope that one of these programs shows award availability that Flying Blue can find only via "Long Selling"?
(And of course one would have to leave out a query via the FFP of the airline that one actually would like to fly with because they may offer, to their own customers, award seats that are not available for Flying Blue customers.)
To me this approach seems to rest on the assumptions that (a) there is a type of award seats (let's call them "ST awards"
that are available via all ST FFPs. (With ST FFPs typically offering more seats on their own airline to their own customers, on top of those available to all customers of all other ST FFPs.)
And that (b) Flying Blue's search machine gives only an incomplete record of these "ST awards", but that other FFPs may have a record of award seats that is more complete, at least partially so.
I am particularly skeptical about (a)[which makes assumption (b) futile].
I am well aware that assumption (a) is true for *A (with a few exceptions), but in years of participating regularly in FT discussions and of reading the Flying Blue forum nearly every single day, I have not come across any post that would substantiate this assumption. In other words: I doubt that the concept of "ST awards" exists in a way similar to *A awards. But I am happy to hear about it if I have overlooked anything over the past 10 years.
KVS is being rather willfully obtuse here (and I say this as a KVS fan) -- you are correct that KVS shows results by screen-scraping a few other websites, including AF's. So if AF is showing incorrect availability then it will show incorrectly on the KVS tool when searching by that method. KVS also lets you search for KE awards via DL and AS, but as discussed in this thread neither of those tools are necessarily 100% accurate.
And while it is probably true that if DL can book a KE award, then likely AF can too (though it might require some extra work), this is not necessarily guaranteed. For example there have been some instances where awards on AF/KL metal seem to be available for booking using AS miles but not using DL miles. There is no such thing as a single unified "SkyTeam award seat".