<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2">Originally posted by TrojanHorse:
Right now (today) I'm looking for IAD-TUS and am not finding squat for the timeperiod I would like. So step 2 will be to call OP (YUCK) and see what the partners may or most likely not have available </font>
TH, when are you looking to travel???
This is my strategy, to be honest: ASSUME you won't find availability on CO, and plan to combine other partners to get where you want to go. My experience is that partners (i.e. NW, Alaska, KLM, COPA) have more award seats available.
To check DL availability, you could log into the Dl site with a SkyMiles number then poke around from there.
Awards have the extra bonus flexibility of allowing you to combine partners-- you could, in theory, fly TUS-IAH on CO, IAH to MEM on NW, then MEM-ATL on DL if that's the only thing available. On a revenue ticket, that many different airlines would mess up the fare.
The site
http://usr.v7.com/wpaa/ allows you to check NW, CO, KLM, and AS availability one week at a time. Note that if you have CO elite status, it is worth logging into continental.com and checking day-by-day as special award inventory is available only to CO elite members.
Good luck!