sbjnyc

I see AF occasionally but have not seen KLM in several years.

bajrbajr

I guess I can't blame AF and KLM for not offering much availability... why should they offer-up their seats when DL holds all of theirs back.

The same trend is happening with UA... I have been looking for UA availability to Europe this summer, and all I see is partner availability.
UA used to be pretty good with Y and J availability.

RealHJ

This is becoming more and more the trend. Multiple award levels or not, more and more airlines and reserving more award inventory for their own FFPs and releasing ever less to others w/in the alliance. It's like a death of alliances in very slow motion.

KL/AF, GA, KE, SU, and I believe some other SkyTeam airlines - obviously also DL (that is what started all this, arguably) - are restricting ever more award availability to others (e.g. KE to 1O/2X per flight on Mon-Thu, with Fri-Sun usually totally blocked).

Same is true in other alliances also. Want to fly on LH? Don't even dream of booking it using UA, AC, or other *A miles during anything close to peak season. With LH miles, however, availability is good.

AA normal availability is abysmal (even worse than DL; however AA 2nd tier availability is priced at considerably less than DL and has somewhat decent availability often). UA is also getting worse.

So, it'll become increasingly important to bank miles in multiple FFPs, including airlines w/in the same alliance. Of course it's also defeating the whole purpose of an alliance, where you could fly 8 different airlines in a single RT trip and get much better routing on an award than you ever could on a revenue flight. But, that is the trend. It's very slow, but very surely, moving toward this.

nomiiiii

KLM is pretty reliably available to canadian cities (YEG and YYC in particular), so I make that as my gateway city if I need to fly KLM. And then KLM is again pretty reliably available to DXB/AUH/BAH etc if you're going to middle-east.

sbjnyc

What's weird is that when I looked at booking my flights on AA, I found plenty of availability on BA but little to nothing on AA (using either avios or AAmiles).

I guess whenever I looked at TATL flights from US I never tried forcing a change specifically in canada. Once in a while I'll see a transit option in YUL but that's about it. Thanks for the tip.

RealHJ

Well, that is because of two reasons:
1. AA releases little if any normal priced availability (it's even worse than DL on that), and
2. BA charges crazy high (like ~$500) YR/YQ surcharges, so BA awards are booked much less, if at all - usually as a last resort. Therefore, BA "awards" (which sometimes may cost more in fees alone than a revenue ticket) are more generally available.

sbjnyc

It's a matter of value that depends on the route. JFK-LHR in J on VX is about 35k miles more than BA but BA charges about $350 more in fees (BA charges 80k miles and about $500 in F).

akcae

I see this often in your posts, so wanted to point out that VX is (was) airline code for Virgin America, now folded into Alaska Airlines. If you mean Virgin Atlantic, the correct code is VS.

Kacee

Apologies for the very basic question here, as I'm new to DL award bookings.

If both SFO-TPE and TPE-BKK are available, putting them together by phone for SFO-BKK will price out at 95K rather than as two separate awards for 135K (95+40)? I ask because with UA you can no longer do this without it pricing as two separate awards.

RealHJ

Yes, it should. Don't take no for an answer.

You need to tell the agents how to do it in their system (most are not trained how to use it).

If they do it segment by segment it'll be additive.
If they search origin to destination it won't show.

They need to go to additional/advanced options before search and specify Taipei connection and China Airlines and then it should show up and price accurately (as long as the connection is <24 hours, that is).

sbjnyc

Whoops, thanks.

Zorak

FWIW, as noted in another thread I specifically asked whether the agent was doing anything differently (they produced the below itinerary fairly painlessly) and they said "no" ...

... so maybe this varies with agent competence, or they did it naturally and didn't think of it as special, or who knows.

I mention it because there have been other discussions (in general) about whether sometimes appearing to have too much "inside baseball" knowledge can backfire, so I might just start asking them to price XXX-TPE-YYY and go into more detail about the mechanics only as necessary.

However I agree overall with RealHJ's overall point that this should be possible but you may have to be persistent to get it :-/

RealHJ

Agreed 100% on this. I've had different agents accomplish the same thing using very different means (I asked each in the end how they did that), each doing what the other specifically claimed did not/would not work. So I think there's different ways to make things work and each agent has their own workarounds the buggy res system.

HUACA is unfortunate - I really don't think customer should have to do that, but sadly too often unavoidable. Sometimes just get a dead useless agent, like some who won't even check flight availability, claiming that "all non Delta award availability is not really there and is not bookable, so I won't even try to search for the flights you want."

angra

Is Expertflyer still useful in this regard? I'm seeing O availability on flights that DL.com is charging 3x the "low" rate for.

RealHJ

Did you try to search from a different browser, computer, IP address in private mode? If not, you should. If Dullta knows who you are they may give you a higher price. Only login at the very last moment when you have secured the inventory space at the best price (which is often only available to an infrequent traveler/new customer, since DL likes to charge its FFs more).