Is it possible we may be thinking too much about this, believing that maybe it's an ethics issue and not a simple business practice. For example, "Lands' End offers one of the simplest guarantees in the industry — GUARANTEED. PERIOD.® — which allows customers to return items at any time, for any reason, for refund or replacement." If I buy a bathing suit, or underwear, wear it for a year or so, and then am unhappy with it then, I can return it. You could almost NEVER do this with any other store (making it past unethical), but with L/E, it's perfectly acceptable. Even though to other companies the practice seems foolish, and to some people unethical, L/E probably figures the added revenue of people buying their merchandise because of this outweighs what it costs them to issue refunds for returned merchandise they probably just through out or donate.

I think it's US that offers only a 24hr hold on award reservations, but Delta doesn't see a problem with that, as their window is 14 days (down from 30). Similarly, Northwest 'locks' your miles when you make a reservation, so if you only have 25k miles in your account, you can only hold one US48 reservation. Again, Delta doesn't seem to have a problem with this, because they don't have that policy.

I have to imagine it would be incredibly simple to add a flag to reservation/booking that says, "Before I confirm this itinerary, let me see if the traveller has any other itineraries, and if so, that there are no conflicts on flight times." It seems so simple to detect that the fact that we can do it makes me think it's acceptable behavior.

I hate to have to use the, "That's the way the system works" phrase, but it may be applicable in this case. I remember a previous thread about a traveller who called up the airline reservation line about 11:50p, asked some infomation about his FF balance, had the agent I think price out an itinerary, basically b/s'd with the agent for 10 minutes until midnight, at which point he asked, "Can you check FF availability for these dates..." Was this unethical to the people that maybe really needed to buy a fare by midnight that night, and didn't get connected to an agent soon enough? Was it unethical to other FF travellers who started calling up at 12:00a, got connected a few minutes later, only to find no award availability left. Or is it just the way to get things done within the (FF) system that the airline has established?

Jeff