I have a feeling that perhaps the onslaught of this newfound F (TN Business Award) availability may not have been deliberate by TN. I have nothing concrete to suggest this other than it is incredibly out of the ordinary for them. I also regularly monitor Z inventory (as a Tiare member) for upgrades and I would have expected Z availability to jump with the new F availability but that did not seem to happen (at least for the few dozen flights I was monitoring...in fact some F became available without any Z which doesn't make sense).

Perhaps related or unrelated I noticed it looks like TN has been making some changes with their Amadeus Altea PSS in the past several days. For example, a new version of the online "Manage Booking" was rolled out a few months back (that allowed purchase and selection of seats via the website) but then in the past few days the Amadeus backed system now is requiring an email address be added to all PNR before making any "Additional Services" changes such as seating and special meal selection (Qatar requires the same). It's definitely an upgrade as now all web based PNR changes are followed up with a confirmation email.

One additional observation from this week is that TN reservation reps are now enforcing married segment rules in booking awards. For example, when booking a TN award directly with TN, you could find PPT-CDG (via LAX) available in F but (but the same flight PPT-LAX would have no availability) and simply have the agent start building the PNR as PPT-LAX-CDG then right before it was time to pay ask them to change the PNR to simply remove the LAX-CDG portion and you would have end up with PPT-LAX in F even though it was not available as a standalone. This would usually work for me nearly all the time in the past. I tried the same trick multiple times today and the agent said their system no longer allows them to drop a segment without cancelling all the segments.

One theory is that TN is incorporating new revenue and yield algorithms based on their newer higher capacity fleet and therefore the automated revenue management systems are looking at previous years data of the smaller A340 fleet and assuming more seats are going to go unsold and making F inventory available. Larger airlines definitely mitigate this but not all....a similar thing happened with Qatar and U business availability last year when they were making changes and taking on a bunch of new wide-bodies but that was corrected after several days (during that time one of the nice side effects was that Qatar was unintentionally sharing their U inventory availability with the GDS).

In any event, as a frequent traveler on TN to Tokyo, Los Angeles and Paris I had a field day this week burning both my Club Tiare and AA miles. Paris to PPT (via LAX) for 90K Tiare miles is a steal! All the reservations I have made have ticketed properly (both 001 and 244 ticket stocks).