<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2">Originally posted by NoStressHere:
...The award mgrs can now report to anyone that cares that a HIGH PERCENT of available award seats leave the gate empty, so why are people complaining? The can also up the percentage of award seats that are available on each flight, even though few people will look for them iside the one week window.
Yikes!</font>
Then a more accurate view (which therefore WON'T be shown us!) would be the number award seat-days available on a flight. For example, a seat released 10 months before the flight date would be weighted more highly than one released 3 days before start of travel.
However more than likely the conversation would never get that far:
airline to public: "X number of flights went out with Y amount of FF seats, there's no shortage of FF availability."
public to airline: "So you flew X number of flights with Y empty seats, you let a resource (seat on a flight) perish without getting any money for it. Maybe your economic problems are because you can't sell seats."
airline mgr to public: "There's an entire issue of yield management to deal with. It's not necessarily best to sell a seat for any amount of money."
public to airline mgr: "So there's a lot more to the siuation that just whether a seat is empty or full."
Jeff