best way to find award availability
 

I've got 50,000 miles to burn and need to book by June. I'd like to travel from Denver to Vancouver but both flying blue online as well as the phone agents say there is no availability.

I've also tried through Seattle and I'm out of luck. So I need to find a new destination we'd like to visit, but I'd rather do the research myself than ask a FB agent about 10 different destinations and dates. Is the website availability the same as availability when you call? I don't seem to have much luck finding available rewards...

Hello,

I am guessing that you are looking for award availability on Delta. The bad news is that there are not that many award seats available on DL for Flying Blue members.
A tip which was given by Mokshu is to deselect "my dates are flexible" when looking for seats. This should help.

Other than that may I suggest using your award miles for one promo-awards in Business or two promo-awards in Economy from the USA to Europe.
The current offering can be found here but by the end of the month the new set of destinations should also be available.

Gajan

I have found the online tool to be very unreliable. In some cases the overview matrix shows availability for DL for 12.5K points, however when selecting the days only 25K fares are available for instance.

Unticking the 'Flexible' option only seems to allow to jump to days which show as 'unavailable' in the matrix, and still select flights. That might be something you could experiment with. Still its a guessing game though..

Also I noticed that the DL awards have some crazy routing in some cases. For example SFO-NYC, which I imagine to be a popular route. Only offered as DL award with stopover in Minneapolis and Detroit or LA and Detroit. Insane!

Bottom line...the booking engine online seems pretty messed up. Seems to require mostly luck to be able to book DL metal.

Hi Xandrios - it's not insane: it's just that the JFK-SFO and JFK-LAX of DL are very popular and very often booked so very rarely have availability for award tickets. By contrast, and SFO-MSP is more likely to have seats available and thus award availability.

In my experience, the award tool is usually fairly accurate in showing availabilit on DL flights, which has become scarce since DL, like all US airlines, has drastically reduced capacities on many domestic routes as a result of the crisis and flies many planes with loads of 100% (or more ie overbooking).

I want to book a one-way award ticket in mid-Feb for OGG-MSP-AMS-BHX, most of which is a DL route w/KL codeshare. I search on DL's website for award availability, and there is (at least for DMs).

Is there any way I can persuade FB to make this award booking for me using my FB miles? The first time I phoned to ask, the agent said there was no availability.

Not so many seats for delta members also