Reward Seat Availability
 

I'm always amazed to hear that people have difficulties in finding reward seats. I've redeemed 6 rewards over the past year, and have gotten my 1st choice of travel days 5 times, and my second choice once.
Checking the website, I see that CO redeemed over 140,000 rewards in the month of March. That's an average of over 4,500 rewards redeemed per day, for the month.
Another reason CO is my carrier!

I too have had good luck with reward travel. But having said that I think these figures are slightly misleading because I believe CO includes elite upgrades in the numbers. Last year I got a reward statement and it contained the number of upgrades I received for the year, this was included in my reward redemption total.

4,500 rewards redeemed per day sounds like a lot until you compare it to the 2,000+ flights a day that CO operates. That means that there's an average of a little more then 2 reward redeemers per flight, a percentage of which are traveling on reward upgrades to paid fares.

We're so happy that you get the flights you want, but not everyone is so lucky.

And keep in mind that after your first choice, second choice, third choice, fourth choice and fifth choice are all unavailable, and you do an "easy pass" for your sixth choice, spending twice as many miles as you should for a stinking round trip.....The only statistic that CO keeps is you reedemed one award. They don't record anywhere that you pulled your hair out and overpaid.

I used many awards over the last two years. I tried to use CO miles first and they were never available. My preferred dates were always available om AA. Hence, I used my AA miles and not CO miles.

Therefore, I am buying more tickets on AA this year. Who needs CO miles if you can't use them?

I swiched from AA to CO in 1992 after I couldn't book a reward ticket to Guatemala. All I wanted was to travel for a 7-10 day duration within a 3 month period. The best AA could come up with was a 3 day turnaround. A friend who was flying CO at the time suggested that we swap some miles if CO had seats, they did, no problem with the exact dates I submitted on my first request. I figured why play a frequent-flyer game if you couldn't use the miles you earned?

More recently I've had good luck requesting last minute flights for friends with need for emergency travel.

Advance vacation travel has been more difficult, I usually have to book around my desired travel dates and try for the wait-list, even when looking for mid-week departures to off-season destinations.

Times change, I guess CO thinks it's so wonderful that they don't have to give anything back to their frequent-flyers, we'll see how that works out in the long run.

Fetchem is right. What's the real advantage of the 100% or 125% elite mileage bonuses if you can never redeem miles for standard-level awards anyway? You earn more, you spend more. I just spent a frustrating hour or so trying to get a CO award seat SEA-TPA for the weekend of June 1. CO had nothing at the standard level, nothing in F. DL meanwhile had multiple choices at the 25k saver level -- and visible on the web, too.

So I have this big wheelbarrow of OnePass balance sitting there like post-Armistice Deutschmarks... about as valuable and about as useful. Why make the effort to collect more?

Perhaps Berk504 could reveal to us what routes he was able to redeem Onepass rewards with so little difficulty.

Maybe we just need to be "told where to go" http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/wink.gif

I for one have had lots of trouble finding any CO award availability. I am somewhat flexible with regard to dates, etc., but when the agent tells me there is no availability on non-stops, 1-stops, or 2-stops, I begin to wonder. These trips have all been between EWR and SLC. I understand that there may not be much availability during the ski season, but during the shoulder season it's a different question.

My balance on UA never stays up above 100k since it is so easy to use the miles for my benefit. I was never able to use the miles EVER on CO last year and balance would have remained close to the 300k mark if I hadn't been able to redeem a AF Concorde award for later this year. Perhaps this is the type of award that B504 keeps making? I got my first choice of dates for the Concorde too http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/smile.gif

The airlines can make the award statistics say just about anything they want. In COs case, it appears upgrade awards are included in the reported totals so we have no idea how many awards redeemed are actually free seat awards. There is no breakout of saver awards (25K domestically) vs. Easy Pass awards (50K domestically). There is also no breakout of awards by class (Y vs. F). Finally, we don't know if the free seats were on CO or a partner airline.

I flew to Italy in March on UA. When the mechanics strike was pending, I started calling around about a month in advance to the airlines looking to book alternate award travel plans. AA was able to accommodate me on the exact dates I wanted, although it was coach, the flight times were less than desireable and I had to leave from BWI rather than IAD or DCA. Still, they had something which would allow me to get to Italy without too much trouble. US Air came through with two business class seats on its partner, Swiss Air. I only had to leave one day earlier than planned. CO had nothing. Nothing in any class of service, from any of the 3 DC area airports. The best I could do was NW to Amsterdam in coach.....from there I was on my own. If I wanted to go two weeks earlier and return in April, then they could accommodate me to Italy.

I have had a few other problems with CO awards, but have always been satisfied with AA and UA.

There's never much in terms of rewards from WAS. Try asking for them to give you an international reward from EWR and then see if you can get them to do the domestic add on. You never know. . .

They did check from EWR.....nothing. Actually, availability from WAS to EWR was fine.

I did a DCA-NRT r/t on a 100K award last month in BF. Funny thing was that when I made the res. I was waitlisted for one of my flights, EWR-DCA, which was wide open. I did get the UG in the last 7 days, but really now, how many of the 12 seats in FC do they need to hold for non-rev's.... I'm the one who's "paying"

i only use my CO miles for partner awards. since i can see availability at nwa.com, it takes the guess work out of trying to get an award ticket. besides, i like to think that in some small way, my using partner awards costs CO money somehow!