Originally Posted by BearX220
Excellent question. My knee-jerk response: the testing model specifies X days' trip length (maybe X = 10 for leisure cities, 3 for business cities) and a given class of service and if the return's not available, the whole award is recorded as unavailable. In your Myanmar case three-quarters of an award does you no good. Repeat that one rigorous thing enough times, and you'd emerge with a fair picture of an airline's award availability.
I'm not certain that specifying an arbitrary trip length is the best approach. We may want to treat a round-trip as two one-way journeys when checking for award availability. That way we will know if award travel between two cities is more difficult to attain in one direction than the other. (This may not seem logical, but I believe we will find differences there based on some anecdotal information posted in various FlyerTalk threads. From what I recall, award availability on CO has been reported by many as being more difficult to attain from Hawaii to the mainland than vice versa.)
While I would like to see award availability for other than top U.S. cities, we do need to start somewhere and those are the most popular. In my view, we can get to the less popular destinations (SYR and the like) once we have things rolling.