Exactly. The WSJ "study" is interesting, but not a real surprise. We all know that the base 25K economy saver awards are not that hard to find - the big carriers have so many flight options that you can usually find a connection to anywhere you want on or around the days you want (holidays excluded).

But international C & F availability - particularly to high demand destinations like US-Europe and US-Australia in their respective summer seasons - is close to nil. See my recent post about zero C class saver seats to Sydney for UA's (and its partners) entire 330-day schedule.

Ditto. Though it would be somewhat challenging to compare apples and oranges given the various higher fare requirement (UA) and co-pays (AA,CO) - one would have to calculate the total cost (miles & $) and compare to availability.

The numbers to Hawaii are particularly telling - zero avail. at the saver level. And that's just for a coach seat to HNL.

The numbers for Europe are not really useful - September is the shoulder season, and the carriers usually start running sales the last week in August, so I'm sure they are happy to fill up coach seats with a few awards.

I find that highly suspicious. However, from what I've read across FT, it appears many airlines are now zeroing out J awards from the inception of the schedule until just weeks or even days before the flight, at which point they release some "saver" upgrades or saver J inventory. So the airlines can technically claim that they have a high inventory of J seats at saver levels, but effectively there are zero seats available to anyone who wants to book a trip well in advance using miles.

Not to many people are willing to gamble that J seats will become available last minute for a long international trip. So they are forced - as a matter of prudence - to buy tickets in advance or cash in miles for the much less valuable coach seats (assuming Y is available at saver levels - which is not always the case )