Award Availability and when to book?
 

I have now amassed a bunch of miles, but haven't started looking for flights yet. My question is this: Say I have a destination in mind, and I want business class, but there is no availability on the dates I want to fly. Q: Will availability ever open up if I wait - or is it gone?

I guess my question is do you have to always book really early to get award seats?

Thank you for your experience!

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Unfortunately, the answer is: "It varies." Not all airlines open up award space at the earliest possible date. And even those that do might -- or might not -- open up more award space later on. Cathay Pacific, for example, is known to open up more Business and First Class award space several days before departure if it anticipates not being able to sell those seats.

The most common times awards open up in my experience is 11 months out and within 2 weeks. For many that means practically speaking earlier is better. But availability does open up at sporadic intervals.

Also, how do you even know there's no availability? Many common methods of searching don't show all the possibliities, and thus just because an 'easy" online search shows no availability doesn't mean there's no availability.

But, again, how you work around this varies.

Is this regarding the same trip as you posted about a week ago here:

http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/infor...australia.html

?

In there, you didn't say you had a boatload of miles, you said you had a decent amount of Chase Ultimate Rewards points (which means UA miles or BA miles or Southwest points) and then "fake miles" ponts from Cap One and Barclays (which are useless for business class flights, because they're proportional to the cash cost of the flight).

And BA is not practical way to get from DEN to anywhere west of there. And Southwest doesn't fly anywhere in or across the Pacific. So that pretty much leaves UA. (Unless there's other miles you have that you didn't mention in that other thread.)

And in that other thread you said you were looking for 2 seats, while in this thread you didn't mention that. The more seats you need, the harder it is to find awards. And if you don't mention you're looking for 2 seats, people won't necessarily assume it.

Welcome to FT!

To get the best advice, it's wise to be as specific as possible about your "bunch of miles" and your plans for using them. Otherwise it's very hard to offer useful comments.

Welcome to FT!

As has been mentioned, there's a limited amount of help that we can give you because availability of award seats, and their release date, is a bit of a black art. Short of the (somewhat obvious) advice that you should start looking ca 330 days out, and then on a regular basis, there's not much we can do.

The best is to have a few destinations in mind, and the carriers that will get you there, and then check availability on a regular basis. A bit like buying a house in a desirable neighbourhood, when something comes up, you need to be prepared to pull the trigger instantly.

Another thing that bears repeating, is that if you're checking on a carrier's website, please remember that not every alliance or non-alliance partner shows up on that search. Some require more steps to ascertain availability...

This is all very good advice. Thank you :)

As to my words "amassed a bunch of miles" was, relatively speaking, an overstatement. I did post earlier about my miles total, and flying to Australia, Maldives, or Indonesia, and found that my miles probably wouldn't be enough to get there. So now I am working on getting bonus miles in AA and hoping that when the turn of the year comes around, I will have "amassed" a large enough pool to get me out and back (maybe on different airlines). But then I run into the problem of all of the airlines possibly being out of award space - so to make my question as unconfusing as possible, I let on that I had enough to get where I wanted to go, just needed to know if there is a possibility of "being too late getting to the game".

SO stating that, my plans now could be Fiji! Again this is for a late March departure for 2 people. But, sadly, I think I am too late in the game and may need to wait until next October (next vacation time) to use the miles. I will probably be popping in and out asking questions (and reading a lot) on this forum.

Thanks again for your time and help!

I normally try to book a year in advance and i get my tickets with no problem but sometimes you can get the cheap award ticket a few days out so it depends.

As was mentioned above, it's hard to know for sure if there's availability. Certainly you can't tell anywher near all of AA's partners' availabilty from aa.com, and I you can't tell all of UA's partners' availability from united.com. Some routings that may have availabity you can only find about through calling, and only if you know the routing to suggest.

For alliance partners only, as a FlyerTalk member, you can do some free searches on AwardNexus.com by providing your FlyerTalk info. But that won't let you search on non-aliance redemption partners like Air Tahiti Nui for AA, for example.

So what you really need to is figure out which airline's miles you might be using, and then go to the forums for those particular airlines, and learn how to search for availability on all the partner airlines that might get you to a particular destination.

(I know from reading threads in the AA forum that connecting through Tahiti sometimes works well for award trips to some other Pacific destinatons, using AA miles, when all the "major" airlines don't have availability. I don't read the UA forum much, so I don't know what the possiblities are there in that direction; I'm only familiar with UA's partners for getting to/around Scandinavia.)

Just another quick question. I've seen that it is possible taking Chase UR and transfer them to another Chase account, but is this possible with Citi AA and Barclay USAir credit cards. That is, I believe Citi puts points directly into my AAdvantage card (correct?), but if my wife gets a Citi AAdvantage Credit card, can I get her points earned into my account?

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"if my wife gets a Citi AAdvantage Credit card, can I get her points earned into my account?"

No, at least, not unless she is merely an authorized user on your Citi credit-card account. But she can redeem her own AAdvantage miles for a ticket for you, and vice versa.

No. Chase UR points are controlled by Chase. AA miles are not controlled by Citi, they're sent by Citi to the cardhoilder's AA account automatically. And AA itself does not allow free sharing (they do have something called "sharing", but it's almost as expensive as buying miles in the first place!).

But you can get 40k from a US card from Barclay, 53k from an AA personal card from Citi, and also (wihtout actually having a business) 53k from an AA business card from Citi, and you'll then have 146k (by mid next year, when US and AA miles combine), more than enough for two people one way in business. And each of you can do this. And so if you want to go both directions using AA miles, one of you can book the one-way outbound for both of you, and the other of you can book the one-way coming back for both of you. And you'll both still have AA miles left over.

(53k = 50k bonus on $3k minimum spend, plus the normal 3k on that $3k spend).

And, btw, unless you only want to do one trip ever, it's good to have miles left over from one trip, as that gets you a head start on your next trip. You cannot repeat these signup bonuses all that often (12 to 28 to 26 months for the Citi AA personal 50k for each person, perhaps about the same for the Citi AA business 50k for each person, and the US card from Barclays will not be availble for new signups by mid next year). But the earlier you get them the first time, the earlier you're ready to repeat for a future trip.

Just know how to keep your miles expriing in each program that you have them in, and you'll always be able to use leftover miles from one trip for some future trip.

As others have noted, your wife's miles can't be put into your AA account. But your wife can use her miles to book flights for you or for herself (or anyone else, for that matter). Since AA awards are one-way, it can be possible to draw on two accounts to obtain a RT ticket. In your case, it might be possible to draw on one account for 3 one-way flights and on the other account for 1 one-way flight.