Award Seat availability seems to be tighter and tighter. I realized that is the case recently when I tried to book WBC standard award tickets to Europe next April and found there was no availability for the next 365 days when I called in Jan. I understand award availability may only open up at times when it appears seats will not be sold. The challenge I see as a Plat Elite, which other frequent travelers may experience, is that I do not want to use mileage to obtain free tickets for myself because I want to gain EQM miles to requalify. I like to buy a revenue ticket for myself and a free mileage ticket for a companion.

With complete flexibility, the award system to the European destinations I fly does not allow me to obtain a companion standard WBC award ticket months in advance so I can buy a revenue Z fare in advance. Instead, I end up having to buy the Z fare with a 50 day advance purchase and then wait for last minute award availability to open up for a companion.

Recently I caught one award ticket via AMS with a 24hr 15 min layover, but NW Elite services would not allow me to use the ZHGOFORFUN fare because the layover exceeded 24 hours by 15 min. I could buy the Z fare on the more direct flight, but they would not allow me to buy a revenue fare on the only flight connection that qualified for a standard award ticket because Z allows no stopovers and the layover counted as a stopover because it was 15 min over 24 hours in AMS (and a 15 min. transit on the day of arrival in AMS is undoable).

So we ended in a catch 22: I didn't want to split the travel, where my companion took the circuitous route where there was award availability but with a routing that had a layover 15 minutes too long to buy a revenue Z class accompanying ticket and I did not want to fly alone in Z class on the more direct route where there was no award availability. So in the end NW lost the revenue ticket I wanted to buy for myself, and I called DL and booked two Skysaver Award business class tickets to Europe with DL mileage as a DL BASE member; So much for PL Elite award availability.