susiesan

Also, no J or F awards all year for
DFW HKG
DFW NRT
DFW EZE
DFW SCL

I did not check any other DFW departures yet but will post what I find as I check them out. I prefer to fly the partners to Asia, but if going to Hong Kong it would be nice to fly direct from DFW since I start in MCI and always have to connect somewhere to get to the west coast for CX flights.

236Dakota

No AA J or F awards from DFW to EZE or SCL seems normal for the last year or so.

JonNYC

Agreed. It's not an issue of "what awards aren't there" (which is a real and very concerning issue-- but a seperate issue from this one.) It's an issue of which awards that generally or even sporadically WERE AVAILABLE but then suddenly disappeared weekend of the 21st/22nd/23rd.

There's no relevance to -this- thread to checking now/today/tomorrow and reporting what's "not there" unless one saw such availability before that weekend.

<redacted> as far as JonNYC is concerned (yes, I just referred to myself in the 3rd person) this issue is solved and closed and I'm moving my efforts elsewhere.

Thanks to all here for the help in getting it resolved!

Laura782

Thank you!

AA777

Well for those of us go don't think the issue is closed and that s bigger issue is being missed, I for one am glad to see reports of J and F AAsavers being avail......routes that "some" members believe have never been there did INDEED used to have saver awards. They have been slowly ripped out since a certain someone took control.

Throw a frog in boiling water and he will jump out, slowly bring it to the boil and he won't budge. Award availability has been slowly removed and restricted more and more over the last 6 months. I'm sorry if some don't believe this, but a ton of international routes have DRASTICALLY been reduced. So I think part if this issue was not a "glitch" in the sense they didn't want to do it, but a glitch in the sense that everyone caught it and it was more drastic of a change than then anticipated.....

There seems to be a lot of frogs out there......

Cheers,
AA777

Microwave

The issue in this thread is indeed different and distinct to the issue you're describing. That's not to say that there hasn't been a decrease in award inventory over time–I'm not saying that at all. I'm just saying that this is something different, which is clearly getting "fixed" over time.

Nobody is on a high horse here, we're just trying to keep these topics distinct so people can track them separately. If you're frustrated at the decrease in saver award availability that has undoubtedly been happening over time, there are threads for that, but this one won't be hijacked to be a general complaint thread for generally poor availability.

rjw242

Not to mention this myth, while quite popular and evocative, is a myth nonetheless

upinsmoke

That's not correct. Before the glitch, there were plenty of AA F Saaver awards from DFW/MIA/JFK to EZE, for almost all weeks (except January).

J Saaver awards were harder to come by, but were available in April, May, September, and a few here and there on Tuesdays and Wednesdays in the June-August timeframe but not during the winter vacation time in Argentina.

upinsmoke

If <you are> correct, then as far as upinsmoke is concerned, this is a massive devaluation for those that used premium cabin awards to LatAm. Yes, even after the bloodletting of 2012, those awards were available. Now they are completely gone.

bernardd

I think AA777 was making a very valid suggestion with "So I think part if this issue was not a "glitch" in the sense they didn't want to do it, but a glitch in the sense that everyone caught it and it was more drastic of a change than then anticipated....."

Think of it this way:

AA doesn't have an army of people continuously adjusting award fare buckets. It's quite likely they use a rules driven approach with their reservation system periodically scanning flights and using the rules to decide the number of award seats to make available in each bucket.

If they decide to make a change to the rules, or maybe even to overhaul the system to change the foundation of the rules to a smarter approach, they might very well introduce the update at the weekend.

Now suppose either the new rules were only those related to international flights or they made a mistake in one or more of the rules they could easily get a situation where all international availability disappeared.

Once the revenue managers and/or coders get to work on the problem and fix the gross mistakes many of the routes will return to +/- a small difference the availability we were seeing previously.

But behind all that it's very possible there are a new set of rules running which have significantly changed the availability on certain routes, in certain seasons etc. etc.

All of that would fit fairly closely with what we've seen and the way rules based systems work for these kinds of applications.

hillrider

I am very glad that I dumped my Citi AAdvantage card at the beginning of this year.

Since I started searching in September, I haven't been able to find a single flight with 2 J-cabin standard (U) award seats on AA metal on MXP-JFK for the entire summer (June - August) next year. Some sporadic availability of a single, lone seat, but never 2. Nada, Nothing.

AA is however will be happy to sell a business class seats on that flight in July and August for the equivalent of USD 1990.00 a head, or 270,000 miles (on a weekday) and USD 57.90 cash. That's a value of 0.72 cents per AAdvantage mile.

On a weekend, they want 360,000 miles and USD 57.90 -- that's a value of 0.54 cents per mile.

Obviously I can get much more in cash-back on a different card (1.5 cents per dollar -- and it's in cash, which is much more valuable as it's not limited to travel), so the Citi AAdvantage card has turned into a complete waste -- plus it still has the 3% foreign fee.

After 28 years, it's kind of sad to part ways due to how bad the AAdvantage program has become, but I guess that moving on was indeed the right thing to do.

IWontRegretThis

I have been seeing significantly reduced or no availability at all for Instant-Upgrade Intl on my AAirpass (books into C or A, same as using a SWU) to lots of Destinations for many months, from DFW-HKG [little obvious on this one, but I did it back in July], LAX/DFW/MIA/JFK-LHR, even routes like DFW-NRT, when May of this year I was able to book 3 in a row.

hillrider

The math is incorrect because the paid business class trip earns you 11,985 miles. You have to compare a cost of 270,000/360,000 miles plus USD 57.90 vs -11,985 miles plus USD 1990.00.

The true value per mile is 0.69 and 0.52, respectively (and 0.67 and 0.51 for EXPs given the 100% bonus miles on flown).

AA777

You seem to miss my point: that the issue discussed in this thread is not different----AAU just told you it was and everyone believed it hook, line and sinker. The mistake is it was implemented too fast, due to a glitch and they realized everyone caught on and fed you a story. That is what I was attempting to state, not derail this thread.

Cheers,
AA777

AA777

Fair point

Cheers,
AA777