Originally Posted by
MasterGeek
What kind of legwork or strategy do you use to plan your award redemptions ? The advantage of booking way in advance like 360 days out is that there is a level of certainty about the availability of award seats
There's plenty of legwork to be done that can play to your advantage. Doing repeated queries against the various FF program websites to find the trends when seats open up, how many seats are released, time of day they release inventory. Knowing the number of days out (e.g., 331) and tracking how many days pass before the seats are no longer available is a big help in knowing how big is the window of availability. The same can be done to find close out (e.g., within two weeks) availability. For example, people who are working JL awards know they open J seats about two weeks before the flight. JL also releases J seats at 331 (IIRC) and pulls most remaining availability after a set number of days (I'm not sure on the exact number at this point). I don't know about you, but I don't wait until 331 days away from the target flight date to learn what the lay of the land is going to look like. If the loss of availability between 331 and 365 is a deal breaker, then AS (and AA, and perhaps others) is the wrong program for your needs.