Austinrunner

Award availability is dynamic. Here today, gone tomorrow, here again the next day. Y milesaaver award seats are now available MIA -> MVD nonstop on both December 2 and 3. But they could be gone tomorrow.

AA does not fly MIA -> MVD 7 days a week. When they do, it's only one flight. Do you know how many milesaaver Y seats were available in the 4-14 December time frame until today? I'd wager not very many.

A lot of us book award seats as soon as they become available, even 330 days out.

From aa.com about its Admirals Clubs:

ExpatExp

I just want you to know that I was highly entertained by this sentence.

masonp123

Me too! Made me grin. Who knew I was posh!! Yay!

VickiSoCal

My experience has been that they don't load at Midnight, unless you live in Hawaii. They load sometime between 4 am and 6 am eastern time. But YMMV. If you are checking at midnight and then going to bed, high demand flights for high demand days are probably gone by the time you get up. Booking Maui for the whole family for Thanksgiving was a nail biter last year but it got done.

Swellfam

+1000
The holiday period is just part of the problem. Anyone who's been looking for MileSavers to Europe this summer has been out of luck since last summer. There were a number of threads on this topic last summer and fall, too. I can't swear they were technically "embargoed." Who knows, maybe they made one seat available for one day at the one year mark. But it is quite clear that AA has decided to charge its most loyal customers double for the privilege of using the miles we've earned.

When you're in bankruptcy and have reduced overall capacity to raise fares, the pressure must be high to take non-rev seats off planes. A dangerous game to play with your best customers.

Austinrunner

You didn't say which cabin, but that was certainly not true in business or first class. See, e.g.,:
http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/17067304-post255.html
http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/17067467-post260.html
http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/17008211-post166.html
http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/17050678-post237.html

tom911

I have three coach seats LHR-LAX-SFO on the same flight in August. I booked them the very day they came on line (330? 331?). There were quite a few other flight options, too. Maybe London just has more availability because of the number of AA destinations served from there. I also have three F seats going with a different routing, though only two of those showed on the web site around 320 days out.

EsquireFlyer

+1

You keep saying that AA has "a special script" that overrides its award loading for Christmas or Thanksgiving. Guess what? Pictures or it didn't happen. Given the numerous reports that this thread now contains of people: (1) being able to get award seats during the holidays at 330 days out, and (2) seeing that the remaining award seats are gone within a few minutes or hours after they book them, the fact that you see no award seats at 325-329 days out is no proof that AA is embargoing the seats or blacking out the dates. The seats could have been loaded, and taken by other pax, and you would have no way of knowing that that happened, and instead assume that "a special script" zeroed out the award space.

The people who would know are the people who really did stay up until 3am on T-330 days--and those people have consistently reported in this thread that the award space does appear, but is quickly booked by these people (and others) who stayed up all night waiting for it, so that little or nothing is left for people who check a couple days later.

I certainly believe the claims that AA has reduced its saver award availability, during the holiday periods and/or across the board, but that's entirely different from saying they have "embargoed" the entire Thanksgiving and Christmas periods, if there actually are a few seats available (but are booked quickly by early birds) during those periods. And I still can't see how you've managed to convince yourself of the existence of a "special script" which deletes all the award inventory after the normal loading process (versus that normal loading process just automatically loading fewer seats on days when revenue bookings are likely to be highest--like, you know, right before Christmas).

I have previously been a member of several Asian carriers' frequent flier programs--if you want to know what a real embargo is, take a look at those airlines. You can't even book an award seat on a blackout date, whether you're booking 330 days out or 1 day out. Even if the plane is completely empty on the day of departure, the airline won't give you an award seat or let you standby for the flight. Award travel is embargoed that day, so if you want a seat on the empty plane, you have to buy it with cash. Period.

GUWonder

Even AA's DEQM and other measures to try to attract/retain elite customers don't move me that much to be a better AA customer when AA is trying to hit me with double the mileage ticket price (even relative to some competitors at the same time of the year and even sometimes for the same city pairs) and/or fuel surcharges.

I'm fortunate that I have huge mileage balances with a variety of airlines and can otherwise toy around with AA's program and adjust the way I redeem miles with AA, but I would be far more critical of AA's changed ways if I had ended up far more dedicated to AA's program than I have been over many years and noticed how much more relaxed the other airlines are with standard (SAAver-type) priced mileage tickets around holiday periods.

AA has changed in this regard for the worse. Some can't acknowledge (for who knows what reasons) while most others haven't yet recognized it and may never recognize it despite the extent of the customer-unfriendly change AA has instituted.


Example of falsehood: claiming the quoted section included in the above post is a statement. It was a fraction of a statement, clipped from a sentence in a far broader context than the above post conveyed.

pkerr

This past Thanksgiving, I had 2 mile saver awards booked thru BA (STL - SNA) on Thanksgiving day.

Booked in Aug for Nov.

iahphx

I feel like I'm arguing with people who insist the world is flat. We can make this very easy: find us domestic coach saver award seats on the "embargo" ("blackout," or whatever you want to call it) days. Any city pair -- your choice. If there's no embargo, it should be easy to find something. The idea that, suddenly, everyone is staying up to midnight or 3 am or whatever to book every loaded seat in every obscure market for these specific dates (and not others) is beyond absurd. It's truly a "world is flat" argument.

The current Holiday embargo appears to be November 14 to 26, and December 13 to end-of-schedule. (Somebody claimed to have found domestic saver coach on Thanksgiving Day, but I think that might have been AS flights).

We do know that, eventually, AA is willing to "override" the script in a handful of unusual markets. Like I think last year someone eventually found some saver seats out of EGE before X-mas. And there might have also been some weird exception for 3-class flights. To find exceptions, I would look to "pure business" routes like DFW-LGA where Holiday leisure travel patterns don't apply and AA might be inclined to manage the route individually (although, currently, EGE flights aren't loaded and DFW-LGA is fully following the Holiday embargo dates). I'm also a little surprised that AA doesn't just randomly load a few meaningless seats in a couple of obscure short-haul markets just to give the "embargo deniers" some fodder.

But if you just want to argue with me that this embargo is mythical, save your keystrokes. Find us some seats. Any seats. I will happily acknowledge the error of my theory.

chazas

I agree with those who say that AA can and should do whatever it needs to do to survive. I also agree with those who say that it something different is going on. Award availability for fixed periods around the holidays is clearly being restricted in a way it is not just outside those fixed periods. The award calendar gives a very good visual depiction of this.

Take a common routes that commonly has a lot of availability - I picked DCA/DFW, in November. The chart shows all bright green/light blue, but for a completely gray period 11/15-27 (for economy) and 11/15-26 (for first). I tried some other routes, basically the same result.

It may or may not be an "embargo" or a "script," and it's not the end of the world, but there is something going on and we shouldn't be afraid to talk about it. FT is about frequent flyer programs and strategies, after all.

iahphx

Yes, this is the obvious way to identify the embargo, script or whatever you want to call it. Pull up any domestic market on aa.com, and you will find it. I would note that the restriction on DCA-DFW flights is actually 11/14 to 11/27, consistent with the previously posted information.

BTW, I almost fell out of my chair when I saw saver coach availability for those city pairs for Dec. 15, which is an embargo day. But the availability is actually on AS, with a DCA-SEA-DFW routing. If you really need to use AA miles for coach travel on the embargo days, see if you can snatch these limited AS seats (they will go quickly) even if the routings are less than ideal.

BTW, AA is not the only airline that quietly "embargoes" travel. Last I looked, AS refuses to load their lowest category award seats for summer travel from DEN east, even though they make seats available for their Western flights. This has not prompted a "denial movement" among AS loyalists.

NashvilleKat

I have been looking for months for a pair of first class awards to LHR with no luck. I have never had such a problem before. However, I do see from the PL that the non revs are clearing and the flight is leaving with empty seats in first.

bruinfan90

I was one of these people. I can vouch for the fact that American is never loading saver inventory on dates around the holiday. I did stay up 'til the wee hours on multiple nights (both last year and this year). Saver inventory is not materializing at any point. The award space (systemwide) is most certainly NOT getting 'gobbled up' within minutes of release. There is no release of seats. (Think about what you are saying ... Every seat in every market gets booked between 12am and 6am on day T-300? That's not happening.)

It's really obvious the the de-facto domestic systemwide MilesAAver embargo (or whatever one wants to call it) has been in place now for 2 years ... but for those of you who choose to close your eyes to this change in AAdvantage practice, it's no skin off my nose. Think what you want. However, I share my findings on this board to help those who want to learn from my personal experiences -- and possibly add to the complaints with American.