aamilesslave

Do you mean T-3 hours and T-24 hours? 3 hours in advance seems awfully close to flight time, so that's why I ask.

naustin

This must be a tired tale by now but I'm searching for anyway to get from DC to Rio leaving on December 27th. I've tried almost every combination imaginable of DFW/JFK/MIA/LAX-MVD/SCL/GIG/GRU/EZE/LIM with zero luck, even for a return flight on the 11/12/13 of January.

I've been sifting through the posts here and have been utilizing both expert flyer and KVS to try and hunt down any and all availability for my trip with no luck. I know there has been significant issues with LAN releasing availability to AA, or at least having it show up but wanted to check in and see if any new developments might be forthcoming.

Heck I even went and tried United out of EWR/IAH/IAD etc and was only able to find one seat(need 2) for those dates.

If anything hopefully this at least provides a data point to anyone else having trouble getting to SA.

rrgg

Sorry. I wasn't implying AA doesn't do that. I only said that UA seems to have the upper hand now on availability in general (for awards that interest me), and that seems to have changed in the past 5 years.

About T-3, I can only assume does T-3 but don't have any information about this. I switched from a AA Y award to J at T-1 before, but that was a while ago.

richarddd

FWIW, about six months ago I checked expertflyer and aa.com frequently to see if AA released J or F milesaaver awards close to flight time JFK-LHR. During the time period I checked, they never did, even though there usually was J and F inventory available for sale up until flight time.

I have heard a few reports of people switching flights from one time to another despite the lack of award inventory.

cesco.g

IME - on UA, if it happened - it was more like T-72 hrs (3 days) up to T-24 hrs.

linglingfool

Just a data point: I have an award booking this fall that I wanted to make a date change to, but no SAAver inventory was available. I tried calling last week to see if RM would open a seat for me on a flight a few days earlier that appeared (at least to me) to be even more wide open than the one I was booked on so I could switch the flights, but no dice.

aamilesslave

That would make a lot more sense.

Paulchili

Don't hold your breath. I waited for J awards from Rio to SFO via any routing for full 330 days with EF alerts - never happened. There seems to be better availability to GRU though and then you can buy a ticket (or get an award) for GRU-GIG.

Explore

One recent example of UA T-3 was a peak Sunday evening departure I'd hoped for from BOS to IAD, connecting to a transcon award I'd secured earlier. VERY convenient. It usually happens.

anabolism

-You can have as many itineraries (not just awards) on hold at the same time as you like, provided the flights don't conflict. If you book multiple itineraries where it isn't possible for you to fly all of them, AA will usually automatically cancel some of them. You don't even have to have enough miles for all the awards you have on hold.

-You do need to call in to add segments. I don't believe itineraries on hold can be modified online.

I'm sure there is lots more advice we could offer on holds, but you might want to ask more questions to prompt it.

I don't see how that's even a technical violation. You are entitled to use your miles for your friend and if the two of you want to swap seats, so what? You could also just use your miles plus copay to upgrade your ticket, but then you wouldn't have your friend coming along. If it was me, I'd do both: upgrade my paid ticket and use miles for my friend to come along in F. More fun that way.

I've checked LAX-JFK and found very poor SAAver availability for F. Even the expanded EXP availability hasn't turned up anything.

If the goal is to get a sense of AA's practices in releasing award space last-minute on flights that have available inventory, it might be better to use EF's flight availability and award availability queries in chunks of six days (+/- 3). Setting EF alerts for award space is exceedingly tedious when one is flexible over a long period of time, compounded by destinations with multiple routes. (You'd have to set an award for every segment of every possible route over every possible day, and even then could easily get false positives because award space might be available on one segment but not a connecting one.) EF's award alerts are best when one is very constrained regarding days and routes.

From what I've seen, no, AA does not routinely do this (not to say they never do it, but I don't believe it's a routine practice).

Austinrunner

AA considers other factors when deciding whether to make award seats available on a particular flight. Whether lots of seats are still available for sale is not the sole consideration.

Austinrunner

Even if it were not a violation of AAdvantage rules, it may be a violation of rules that require passengers to sit in their ticketed cabins.

anabolism

In my experience, this rule is more about passengers visiting friends in other cabins than about swapping seats. I can't recall a single time when I've been asked to show ID during or after boarding. It's common to be asked to present a BP during boarding, and on rare occasion afterwards, but if two passengers swapped BPs, I doubt anyone would care.

PSPandBA

Tried to book a saver coach award in Oct. Not one seat from late Aug to early Dec from DFW, MIA or JFK. 5 non stop flights and no saver seats in any class. Checking the seat map on AA paid reservation site on random dates during this time, there are only a handful of seats reserved. The seat maps are wide open. This is almost three months in what AA calls "off season". What's going on? Is AA going to be as bad as Delta with virtually no saver availabilities?

JDiver

Revenue Management seems to have changed how it is opening MileSAAver awards - sometimes seats may be released at 331 days out, and those may be taken up (or no seats may be released, depending on predicted sales). Seats may be released from time to time, up until close to the light date.

Seat charts really are pretty meaningless; they merely indicate the seats that have been assigned. There might be a cruise-ship load of people on group or cruise fares that do not have seat assignments, for example. ExpertFlyer, KVS and other tools indicate available fare bucket listings (up to ~7 per) and might indicate release of seats into award classes if there are many seats in the most highly discounted fare buckets.

And AA may have tightened up - the intent is to sell the seats for money, and if not for higher numbers of miles (AAnytime awards). It may be that which has contributed to AA's actually making money in Q1. Those who report success here generally are patient and persistent. Read upthread. And good luck.