Originally Posted by seoulmanjr
It is relevant and there is a point to it. Read any given airline FF program forum on FT and you'll see a *ton* of complaints on finding Saver/RuleBuster/etc award availability. The point the OT is making is that if it was tracked and published, the airlines couldn't as easily get away with advertising "Only 35,000* miles to Hawaii" when it costs the overwhelming majority of travellers 50 or 60k to get there on miles. Requiring the on-time statistics has made the airlines a lot more diligent about planes going out on time than they used to be. I would think that this kind of reporting would have a similar consumer-friendly effect on mileage availability, or at least honesty in advertising.
Exactly my thinking.
On the cost of administering this, airline DO know how many seats they make available. The date is there. It is simply that it is not published. All I am suggesting is a duty of disclosure on the airlines. As to the cost of publication, let us be serious for a minute here. The cost is absolutely negligible.
Yes, you are right that there can be some discussion as to which set of statistics are more useful than others. Nonetheless, this, as an argument that we should have no statistics, is a non-starter, precisely for the reasons mentioned by
seoulmanjr in the quote above.