These are award tickets so they don't earn any miles.

I believe you're thinking of using pay with miles, which means purchasing a normal FC ticket, for instance, and then using some miles to reduce the price at a rate of approximately one cent per mile with some rounding. To do this you must have DL AmEx caredit card IIRC.

I think this may have changed.

I was looking at EF and am finding lots of flights with R/N/O availability via the EF search tool but they are only showing as standard when booking on DL.com. Could EF be lumping them all together (R, RN, RD) rather than showing just R availability?

AFAIK EF doesn't show award inventory for DL. Has this been changed recently?

I was surprised when I saw it this evening but EF seems to think it can show DL award space.

http://i.imgur.com/SWSfKdz.png
http://i.imgur.com/lVN9gUc.png

Of course, when you try to book that SLC-CDG flight on DL.com it comes up as "standard" and not "low".

I wonder if this is our back door into seeing SWU/miles upgrade inventory. Recall on the SWUs, instructions for travel agents were to book O class.

On some SkyTeam partners, low award and upgrade inventory are both class O.

That could be. The numbers I am seeing for "O" availability are higher than what people usually report of J award space.

Another thought might be that EF can't determine the sub-fare classes allocation and just lumps all O availability together. So in the example above, there may be a total of 7 in O but those are allocated like this:

O=0
OD=2
OK=3
OP=2

Well I found some flights that said upgrade available, but no O inventory on EF. So it doesn't seem to be for comp upgrades.