Weird AS/Partner Award Availability
 

I needed a one-way F seat on AS from MSP to SFO. I have no status on AS if that makes a difference.

AA wanted 25k miles.
DL wanted 30k miles.
AS wanted 50k miles.

All for the same AS flight.

Thoughts?

Why is that so strange? All these numbers correspond to difference mileage "currencies": AA miles, Skymiles, and Mileageplan miles.

Because AA and DL don't have access to AS "anytime" domestic F inventory at 60k. If an AS domestic F award is bookable on AA or DL, it should be bookable on AS at 25k miles saver.

OP: did you actually try and book the flight on AA/DL? Would not shock me if you couldn't complete the booking due to "phantom" availability...

Do you have access to expert flyer? In my experience, the seats that airlines make available for partner redemptions are only the ones available at the saver (or lowest) level, and not their "anytime " level. If AS has made that seat available to AA and DL, I would expect it to be available to their mileage plan members at the lowest level and would be puzzled by this as well. Perhaps systems haven't synced and if you tried to redeem on AA or DL it wouldn't actually go through.

It's certainly upside-down in terms of the respective FF miles valuation...

AA - 25K *1.5 -> $375.00
DL - 30K *1.2 -> $360.00
AS - 50K *1.9 -> $950.00

(from PointsGuy April valuations)

Are you sure you were looking at an actual AS flight? They don't yet fly MSP-SFO (it's coming in a few months), and domestic F awards on AS are either 25k or 60k.

I would guess you were looking at a DL flight available through AS, which charges the full round-trip price for a one-way, and is the only domestic F award that comes in at 50k miles one-way.

Uh, no. The second mileage number in the attached screenshot is for a first class seat. Saver F is 25k.

Since when does aa.com show DL award availability? :confused:

Good point, fixed. But that's still not 50k one-way. DL flights are the only ones that show up as such on an alaskaair.com search.

Not sure what the OP was looking at in the first place, which is why I asked. I don't see a single saver-level F seat on aa.com for MSP-SFO through end of schedule. Although the Alaska flights are loaded for when that service starts in July, they all come up as refundable F awards for now and hence don't appear on aa.com either.

Neither did I. Until yesterday.

And I used 25k AA miles for a late summer AS nonstop today.

Excellent catch. ^

Low level availability normally matches between aa.com and alaskaair.com, plus or minus some temporary offsets when inventory changes don't sync up immediately - and that's where it's more likely to fail when proceeding with a booking. Perhaps that's what happened for your search? Getting it to ticket through is a nice piece of luck.

Are you sure you didn't accidentally select round trip on AS, or two passengers?

AS has no 50k one-way redemption on its own metal domestically:
but it certainly has 25k and 2x25k=50k.

I stand corrected to the extent that AS was 60k rather than 50k. But AS does show DL metal for 50k.

FWIW, and as of this morning:
AS 60k
DL 30k (and I went all the way to the payment page)
AA unavailable

Makes yesterday's 25k look even that much better.

From/to, routing and date ?

Sound like AA is gone because there is no saver and 30K seems way too low for a DL award (of course they don't publish their chart anymore so its impossible to tell) but if 25K AA award is not available, i dont know how DL is selling it since they have the exact same inventory access as AA

Contrary to popular myth, DL still has award levels and despite the lack of an award chart, a number of us have been able to document the different levels. DL metal domestic F one-way awards start at 25K and go up to 60K. Here are the DL levels for domestic F. Note that the D1 transcon routes have different levels (unsurprisingly).

FSM250 25K
FSL325 32.5K
FSD375 37.5K
FSS450 45K
FSK550 55K
FSKP600 60K

The 30K pricing that OP is seeing is for partner metal domestic F one-way tickets. There is only one such level and it's fare code is FSM300.

Not to hijack the thread but I have had some weird reward partner availability as well.

I am booked PDX-LHR/AMS-PDX (all DL) and was searching for a return out of LHR. I found LHR-SLC-PDX on DL using the AS website with the last segment in Y. Since I already have the reward booked, I called AS. They could not find the SLC-PDX DL flight even though the website was showing it to me. My only option was to spend the night in SLC and fly Horizon the next morning. I ended up just booking LHR-SLC to at least hold that seat.

This has happened on other searches recently as well. I am not sure why the phone agent's view of availability is so much different than the website.