I looked, so I'll be the one..."told you"

It totally depends on the route and other factors but EK is also not looking to "give away" these seats when they think they can sell them for cash (which they often can).

If they can sell them, so be it. But going back a few years, it was much easier to find F awards on all sorts of routes, including the really popular ones like JFK-DXB, ORD-DXB. Now, you can't, unless very close to departure. And I'm assuming that Emirates didn't have trouble selling F seats back then either. So something definitely changed.

Yes, Emirates got smarter.

Seems like the days of picking up 3F awards BOM-JFK-BOM are long gone...Sigh!

One issue is that that it's simple to get status and a large chunk of Skywards points without actually flying for US based people.

Isn't that the point of the constant devaluations and silver status requirement? Making it more difficult for U.S. based people?

But that seems like a minor issue compared to the fact that EK just isn't even making awards available until very close to departure date. EK is becoming Lufthansa: constant devaluations to the point of worthlessness, extremely high cash surcharges, and availability only found close in to departure date.

The devaluation didn't improve ex-US F award availability based on my experience. But I was able to get two DFW-DXB F awards for 2027 last week; but the days of readily available SFO-DXB are long gone.

It just takes work to search the calendar, day by day, and different iterations of city pairs until you find something. I don't search ex LAX/SFO anymore.

Nice work on DFW-DXB F for 2027. I also never look at LAX/SFO, only ORD. But even looking at routes outside of US, for example, GIG-DXB F, I couldn't find anything. And that was an exhaustive search, at least for the few months that would have worked for me. Same thing with other routes. I'm sure people are going to say GIG-DXB is a really popular route, as that seems to be the general reply these days, but most routes that people want to redeem miles for are going to be at least somewhat popular. Doubt many people are interested in redeeming for flights to Lagos.

I'm Emirates gold (via credit card) and on May 20th I was able to book 2x F JFK-DXB departing middle of June. Not saying you're wrong or that availability improved, just providing a dp. I never looked prior to May 19th as I was initially booked IAD-DXB in J (and was hoping to upgrade at check-in) when it had the A380, I only looked at JFK-DXB once the IAD-DXB schedule was updated for June and the A380 still hadn't returned.