Originally Posted by
jerseytom
I haven't seen that be the case. Nothing looks fundamentally different to me.
For example, looking at DFW-FCO two days from now, I'm seeing 27k economy and 62k business class. As far as I know, those are basically the floor for redemption rates to Europe, on AA metal anyway.
I suspect the advance purchase requirements are only for domestic awards at this point and I have noticed them for quite some time. Advance purchase requirements on the domestic revenue fares are typically at 7, 14, and 21 days marks (3, 10, and 30 day advance purchase requirements can also often be seen in domestic revenue fares). These are all baked into the fare rules (it goes beyond controlling pricing by inventory bucket availability which is another aspect of how airlines control pricing).
Delta just copies the advance purchase requirements from their revenue fare rules to their award fare rules (you can get award fare rules online on delta.com just as you can get revenue fare at the checkout page). They also have award buckets that are equivalent to their revenue fare buckets (NV = V, NX =X, NT = T, and so on). Although inventory in award buckets doesn't always exactly match their revenue buckets, they are generally pretty close even when they don't match. Delta also has awards with roundtrip booking requirements on routes that have revenue fares with roundtrip booking requirements.
Below is an example of AA awards for DTW-MSY where you can see awards with no advance purchase are 15.5K, 7 day advance purchase awards are 11.5K, 14 day advance purchase awards are 11K, and 21 day advance purchase awards are 10.5K. Again, pricing can also be controlled via bucket availability, so these are just the floor for award pricing based on advance purchase.
You can see the same advance purchase patterns in revenue fare pricing at 7, 14, and 21 day marks below. You can also see below there are separate revenue fares that require Tue/Wed travel at $111 (they also have a 21 day advance purchase requirement). Delta even replicates revenue fares with day of travel requirements with award levels with day of travel requirements (such as the Tue/Wed fares below) which is how their awards so closely follow revenue fare pricing.
Here are the first part of the fare rules for the $111 Tue/Wed fares where you can see the requirements in the rules in the Day Time Application section of the fare rules.
