I don’t expect anything, but I expect a certain level of fairness when I sign up for a mileage program. When you have a cabin that is completely empty, and not a single soul has bought a ticket, it wouldn’t be a crime to release at least one saver seat. Go look as I said above, at the availability to San Jose from Seattle in the next few months and look at the flight loads. Their award offering is really ridiculous, and cannot be right. Judging by my story that I shared when I spoke to RM, I think it’s obvious their RM is very messed up, especially with the award changes, and now with the burden of the merger. I couldn’t have said it any better than how SFOPeter did.

But I think now we’re going in circles and were just rehashing what we just talked about above. Just to sum up, obviously there shouldn’t always be saver space whenever the customer wants it. That’s not realistic thinking. But they’re also shouldn’t NEVER be saver space just because it’s last minute, or because they’re software is flawed or whatever the silly reason may be. There needs to be a fair formula put out by RM which we are not seeing, and you even admitted it for F. So if there’s a problem with the revenue management figures for first class awards, which you’ve admitted, I really doubt that this problem is just benign and confined to that.

geez... If SFO is worse than Seattle this is bad. This is a serious problem that RM at Alaska really needs to address. I don’t know if they want to address it?

Despite some in this thread just saying everything is hunky dory and nothing has changed, this is not true. Flights that have always been easy to find saver space close in to departure which was traditionally many routes that others know of. The ones I always always could find saver space was SEA-ALL OF CA, now it’s all 20,30k for coach and 40-70k for F.

If you do get lucky and happen to find saver award space, it’s usually only an AA segment or a combined AS, AA segment. If this is permanent, or just a hiccup because of the merger, it’s a big deal. It does devalue the miles greatlyW for some, depending on how you use your miles. But the fact that AA is releasing a much larger number of saver award space than AS is disturbing considering this has never been the case and AS was notorious for always being generous (at the very least reasonable) with releasing saver space on at least one day during the week.

My guess is if enough people bring this to AS’s attention things will change. There’s never an excuse to have less saver space than AA.

My theory all this time has been that RM’s revenue per seat mile formulas break down for the airbus fleet and have some sort of cliff that ends up zeroing out most flights. They have been systematically rerouting the airbus fleet on most of the slots for the west coast and now conformed upgrade space and saver awards are almost non existent. They originally said upgrades on the airbus fleet wouldn’t be official until later 2018/early 2019. I think they won’t correct this until the aircraft have the new configuration of seats and they can standardize their formulas across the fleet. I’m betting this is a rocky year and sticking with them, just sucks it’s the year I have 75K and a lounge membership and based in SFO. All this with the AA split and no SFO domestic lounge has basically made it impossible to give all my loyalty to Alaska unfortunately.