Fairly common, in my experience. Award floodgates briefly open at EOS, only to have all the award inventory pulled back shortly thereafter.

-FlyerBeek

If the ability to change/redeposit awards (with reasonable notice) remains a fixture going forward, that that is a legit unironic enhancement for me.

This has been my experience.

I check WN, B6, DL, UA, and AA miles booking options for every trip.
Over the past 3 years, planning 30+ domestic trips for my family and friends, AA has been the best value 2/3 of the time.
For international trips, AA miles have only occasionally offered the best value, in my experience.

Web Special have often been a nice bargain booking far out.
I have booked several domestic first trips for less than 20K miles/person each way (15K being the lowest).

Free redeposit makes it work to book far out and cancel/revise over time.

I don't think it is being pulled back. I think people are booking at EOS - like me. I got a 57.5K one way to Europe in late May - not the date I wanted but nevertheless. AA never opened inventory on later dates - as I tracked day by day. And the date I am booked still has inventory on some AA routes - not what I have.

What I can tell is AA opened inventory until sometime in late May and since then they have not opened any J seats for the cheaper reward. In fact they aren't even offering J at any level of miles - not even double or triple. Maybe demand hit and they disabled releasing more inventory.

On the other hand if you look at UA - they are so much better than AA - (lowest is 66K versus AA of 57.5K and UA is around 72-73K for partners.) but way better availability. And one big plus for UA is you can do an intra Europe flight and an open jaw and the intra-Europe flight is free at same class as the first main segment.

Yes.

End Of Schedule.

:)

I think it’s a case of both. Didn’t mean to imply that all AA flights have award space released at EOS and definitely agree regarding the greater flexibility using UA (and *A partner) awards towards EOS more reliably than AA, in my experience. But, I have seen cases on AA where a large swath (sometimes upwards of hundreds of award seats) simply disappears simultaneously when they were available in inventory for several days - which makes me think it simply isn’t just people simultaneously booking them but rather some other RM logic at play.

Correct. End of Schedule. Sorry for the unexplained acronym.

-FlyerBeek

I could go both ways on this. Whenever I book a trip 330 days in advance, people think I'm crazy. Why so far out? I explain that it's usually done to secure 2x or 4x premium cabin seats together on the same flights, usually on a top alliance partner carrier.

Seems odd to me that, out of the blue, a spring trip to Europe would suddenly be tough to get....unless a systemic change was made. There are too many flights, too many routes, you'd see the seats steadily disappearing over time perhaps, but not all at once.

AA is limited - most destinations go through LHR and the connecting segment is on BA.
I have seen the same on UA - at EOS - certain flights were available for reward, now they are not. Again I am only looking for business class. Travel on AC has good availability now - but I don't think you can travel through Canada right now.

I generally book all of my reward travel 330 days out - to get flights - particularly true for partners. AA might release more seats later, but the partners usually don't unless right at the end. UA is good for opening seats later - say a month before - and you can always change to a better flight if you want.

There is no harm to book in advance. On AA - if you make a change - you have to cancel the reservation and rebook. But there is no fee or penalty to cancel reward travel now - even for non-Elites. But if a roundtrip you lose both directions -- so for AA it is always best to book oneway reward ticket now.

UA is better in that you can modify each flight destination - separately and retain the unchanged flight and the number of miles paid for that. The UA booking is so much more flexible than AA.

Will the UA site let you book the AC connections? There certainly won't be any problem with that connection in mid-2022. I've only flown AC in J a couple times and it was a pretty good experience.

Star Alliance definitely gives you more total options to Europe thanks to having multiple big partners and multiple hubs on the continent. I've long wished that Iberia had more award possibilities, but I never seem to be able to route anything through MAD. It's always LHR.

What is also frustrating is that AA.com will often give different/more options at lower points values depending on whether you are logged in or not. I have now gotten into the habit of clearing my browser cache before searching. Just yesterday this resulted in a 3k miles saving

Did you do a mock award booking for the same trip on UA or DL? You'll likely find that the AA redemption rate isn't much different. Maybe even better...The grass is rarely greener.....

Maybe I'm just disloyal but to me, it never made sense to try and stick with one FF program.

Lots of variables but in general, I prefer Star Alliance miles to Europe and Africa but One World miles to Asia and Australia.

For domestic travel, American miles have been by far the most useful in recent years.

(I also keep on trying to use my Turkish miles to fly United due to the amazing value of 12,500 miles each way in first but United has almost never had availability for 3 people in saver first over the past year, booking way out, while American almost always has, with some flexibility.)

Yeah, I'm mostly the same. My regular business travels over the years have bounced back and forth between UA and AA, so I've had one foot in both for a long time. That's been my primary pattern as well - always start TPAC searches with OW, TATL searches with *A, and that's what I end up booking. Main exception has been when I've accumulated BA Avios - I use those for Ireland on EI metal.

In terms of oddball *A miles, I still have some A3 (Aegean) from back when I used that to pick up easy Star Gold status. I've never redeemed any of those miles...but now have enough to for a few domestic hops. (Athens to/from islands. Looks like 1.5 cpm, which is probably as good as I can expect on a smallish amount of miles.)

TUS-DUB was wide open in business May and the EOS in June. Wide open - for 4 seats 50% of the days. I watched it every day as I wanted to 'walk' my hold out a few days to a week. Overnight every one of those seats are gone. When I could throw a dart and get 4 seats at 57.5k each now there are two days at 110k and the rest much higher. This was a total pull back of inventory. I'm happy I booked the tickets I did at the time I did.

So I got creative. What does ORD-DUB, DFW-DUB, CLT-DUB look like? All high mile tickets. DFW-DUB has some BA tickets at 57.5k but for some reason they can't be combined with the AA saver domestic tickets to get to DFW. The domestic flights (TUS-DFW, TUS-CLT) still have plenty of milesaver inventory. I didn't imagine this and no, overnight we didn't get hundreds of people that booked up all AA metal saver inventory. I can live with the tickets I have, but I've been flying AA 20+ years and never seen all saver inventory disappear overnight for an entire month block. I expected to see new inventory (even 1 seat) open up at EOS.

Did a little more searching. Not one ORD-CDG business for under 135k May / June. JFK-CDG 135k+ May/June. JFK-LHR is wide open with 57.5k tickets ... so it isn't all inventory but if any route has discount tickets I guess it would be that one with how many planes fly. I'm not going to bother with every route, but it seems one day schedule was kind of normal for 330 days out and then someone realized they were running the old algorithm and fixed it.