Originally Posted by
TalkingPoint
This is mostly due to United sending way too much capacity to oceania. They were flying double daily on syd-sfo plus had flights from lax to mel and syd as well as a iah-syd flight. I think some days they were operating 10 flights a day from the US to ANZ. Compared to DL/AA who I think have only been doing 1/day. United has had to pull back a lot of that because it was going out empty. Even looking at last nights LAX-MEL and LAX-SYD flights, there were double digit nonrevs in Polaris on both flights - 27 unsold J seats on LAX-MEL alone and they only had a 789 on it. You're not going to find much OW award availability because qf isn't even serving SYD-SFO daily, and AA can't even make DFW-SYD work.
UA definitely is going nuts with its capacity dumping, but that is not uncommon. Asia, commonly seen as the hardest market to get long haul J, has consistently seen UA J seats within 14 days or so to numerous locations. Not to mention SQ which shows which program is superior, AC or AS. One allows you to redeem SFO-SIN-BKK for 87.5k in J on casual searches, one does not even see any premium availability whatsoever. To EU, AS's partners have literally half of what *A gets, and not to mention excellent availability on LO SN and very reliable availability on LH OS LX within 1 month of departure in premium cabins. Not to mention Africa which is extremely weak on AS. Only place AS comes out on top is South America with LA. But that you can use AV to cover, or just use extremely low cash prices in most markets as intra-south america there is very few routes with legit premium cabin. So in nearly all cases, AC has way better availability and similar prices, while AS points are MUCH harder to obtain.