Originally Posted by
jsguyrus
What others have reported is the 60K awards mostly were phantoms although that was never confirmed. Today I see almost no 60K awards so its possible AS eliminated all the phantom space.
I can confirm that.
Up until very recently, a search on AS showed plentiful J award space to Dublin every day (in fact 4 seats in J on every flight). Encouraging, wasn't it? If you searched in united.com, you would see the same thing. Even more encouraging, no?
Actually, no. Virtually all of that was phantom inventory. If you tried to book it, it would not ticket (typically you would get a message saying that they had to check with their partner, and they would get back to you within 24 hours). Shortly after 9 am Dublin time, you would get a follow-up message informing you that so sorry, the ticket could not be booked.
I confirmed this with multiple attempted bookings using AS miles and also using UA miles. The result was exactly the same - no ticket (so in fairness, the blame should be shared between EI, AS and UA - all three were participating in a pretty significant, willful deception). All that inventory you saw was fake fake fake fake fake.
A few days ago (maybe a week?) all that phantom inventory seems to have vanished overnight. Nothing left but those laughable 280K deals.
Too bad - it looked so promising, but was just a tease.