Originally Posted by Human Unit 763246B
I wish airline frequent flyer programs were as easy as the coffee programs. Only Southwest is so easy. With Southwest, if they have an empty seat, it's yours for the asking. With other airlines, they can refuse to let you redeem an award for a specific flight even though they have more than one empty seat. It happens all the time. Many of us have had trouble redeeming awards of which probably most of those flights had empty seats.
I think you misunderstand. What's easy about Southwest is they only have one kind of award. Most airlines have a few-restrictions award that works similar to Southwest, but they typically cost 50k miles for domestic roundtrip ticket (NW calls them RuleBuster, AA calls them AAnyTime, etc).
You're probably only trying to redeem DISCOUNT award tickets (that only cost 25k), and in fact airline marketing may have made you think that these are "standard" award tickets. But in fact the way the airlines look at it (but don't promote much), it's the 50k awards that are standard, and the 25k awards that most people want that are resticted discount awards.
(Of course, the other thing that's easy about Southwest is that it typically takes way less spending to get a Southwest award ticket than even that discount restricted 25k award at other airlines. For example, a typical hotel stay might earn 500 miles or 1/50 of the restricted 25k award or 1/100 of the unrestricted 50k award with other airliens, but earns 0.5 credit or 1/32 of the unrestricted award with Southwest.)