Microwave

If this is a sinister plan by AA, can anyone explain why US availability hasn't also completely and entirely disappeared as well? Anyone?

It seems that those who believe this is all the same issue have glossed over the fact that there's now one management group, and if the decision has been taken at the senior level to gut awards, it would have impacted both airlines. @:-)@:-)@:-)

cmd320

Based on recent experiences, I would say perhaps the management group simply didn't think about the next step before taking an action and will need to be reminded that they are still running another website. Rather than updating it they will probably just close it entirely.

outfox999

and nothing on for the next year
PVG/PEK/NRT-ORD or DFW

Microwave

An unrelated post discussing AB award availability has been removed. The topic of this thread is definitely confined to availability issues booking AA metal awards.

~Moderator

bernardd

I don't think there's any doubt that AA have made a change to their systems. They probably didn't intended to foul it up to the point that anyone noticed, but this is almost certainly part of aligning the AA & US systems so they create award bucket availability in the same way, perhaps even on a common system.

I'd be VERY, VERY surprised if they aren't taking the opportunity to tweak the algorithms to be smarter to help their business goals.

The end result of that change, once it settles down, will almost certainly be tighter controls on certain routes at certain times, and perhaps more availability in other areas we haven't noticed.

They may very well also be paving the way for more radical changes we haven't seen yet.

But the bottom line is they almost certainly haven't go to this amount of effort to simply re-implement the previous AA scheme.

JonNYC

But all sheer speculation based on absolutely nothing, I'm sure you'd admit.

bernardd

As indeed is the speculation that this is a simple mistake which is getting slowly fixed.

Knowing more than a little about software systems and backups, the first reaction to a "simple mistake" is to restore to the last known working version and start again. You have to ask why that didn't happen quickly and cleanly in this case?

Mark_T

With high volume real-time reservation systems the concept of 'backup' and 'restore' is not as clear and clean as the sort of systems you may be familiar with.

The consequences of rolling back database changes to fix problems even if they are spotted immediately can often be worse than slowly fixing them over time.

So for me at least, the explanation is entirely consistent with my reservation system experience.

AA777

What you missed is the complexity of running a brand. Simply put US and AA are still separate brands to the majority of the purchasing public. With so many differences and a whole host of issues that will not be resolved until the companies are TRULY merged.

Therefore, you will continue to see things done differently at US and AA on a number if fronts for s myriad of reasons.

Cheers,
AA77$

AA777

But to view this issue in a vacuum of "database intricacies" is the cause not that they implemented a new set of rules that has some wicker than intended consequences can be putting our heads in the sand.

Cheers,
AA777

Microwave

Confirmation bias will always make it easier to find facts to buttress one's beliefs. I personally don't have a horse in this race; if they're gutting awards, shame on them, but if they're not, let's give them a chance. I'm not defending AA or angry at them, I am simply saying that a preponderance of the facts doesn't fall on the side of intentionally gutting all awards overnight.

There definitely are a lot of things going on behind the scenes. They may well have been working on updates to the way RM/YM systems release award seats. Those updates may have gone exactly as expected, but I doubt it; rest assured that a senior leadership decision to drop to zero the number of awards overnight could be implemented on both sides of the business. Every day that passes where US doesn't gut their inventory in kind is further empirical evidence that this isn't an intentional gutting. It seems far more likely to me that AA was updating a system, changing some settings, altering a process flow, or doing some other such thing, and things went bonkers. The slow trickle of reappearing seats we're seeing could be an attempt to appease angry members after an intentional gutting of the programme, or it could be the result of a manual fix because the automated system isn't working.

In the end, it's all sheer speculation as JonNYC points out. I'm just willing to give the company in the middle of an airline merger a bit of time to sort things –one thing I do believe is that this won't be the worst integration mess to hit us when it's all said and done.

JonNYC

One of the things that's being ignored was the flurry of posts in the middle of the thread from several members reporting that availability that they had seen before this glitch had most definitely completely disappeared (thus the impetus for the starting of this separate thread) and had then reappeared.

A good half-dozen of so members reported (obviously paraphrasing here) "back to normal for the awards I was looking at" With the "normal" still, in some/many/most cases being anything between "dismal" and "almost adequate"

Then there are those who are reporting lack of availability not related to any of this.

And, for sure, a few members saying "hey, the availability that most definitely -was- there on [the 20th or so] has most definitely -not- returned"

But that first group is certainly the majority.

uncommonsensical

yes, i can explain.

the most severe devaluations in other programs have been to premium intl awards. seems no small coincidence that is where we can't find any availability.

i was searching for flights to asia today. i was so confused by the lack of saver availability that i stopped for a couple minutes to try to figure out what i was doing wrong. then i googled and found this thread along with others.

i haven't really looked at awards on AA metal for about a year and expected to see a plethora of options. instead, it was like a worse version of delta.bomb- something i didn't think was possible.

i am no fan of UA. in fact, the treatment i got checking into my last UA flight was so bad it was illegal (seriously)! along with the horrific cs, they eviscerated their F/J award chart.

all that said, if you want to fly their metal intl, generally, you can- and at the saver level. with AA, their CX and JAL availability, even close in, is nothing relative to what it was a year ago. so now, AA metal is AWOL and partner inventory is a fraction of what it was.

JonNYC

I do see that in some markets people are still seeing wholesale "blank (calendar) pages" of milesaavers that -do- seem to have not returned to old (a month ago) levels-- still a little fuzzy there.

sporadic

I realised one thing while searching for award seats - for example, if I check Sept 12 for CDG-JFK on AA45, the booking system will tell me that there is no J award space. However, if I search for CDG-YYZ or CDG-SJU (via JFK), system will show that there is J award space on AA45. Perhaps if one starts a booking ex-Mexico, Canada or the Caribbean to Europe or vice-versa, those seats will appear.