mikesaidyes

So I finally hit my lifelong dream goal. 125,000 miles round trip biz class to Atlanta. In Korea, they don't give out miles like they do in the US (and I don't have any of the US cards) - so it took some real work!

However - THERE IS NOTHING LEFT!!!! I am being a little bit picky - non peak season, go at the end of a month (I'm a freelancer so no work means no cash) when I can split one week End of Month A / Beginning of Month B. There are actually a lot of these months in 2021. I settled on Oct 23 - Nov 7, 2021. There are NO SEATS, ONE SEAT, or TWO SEATS ONLY. It's this way the entire year. In fact, I had to adjust the period because some days have no business class seats. F isn't sold on ICN-ATL. Literally one year out and it's already all gone....

Everybody really is burning them to be safe! Personally, I expect the program to stick to the changes for April 2020 so that they can save money with higher redemption rates.

benji2227

Hard to burn those miles when most flights are cancelled and the self-quarantine is still in place (which means no travel for me).
And I'm sitting on multiple trips worth of them.....

mikesaidyes

Oh yes I mean I'm aware of that BUT I just meant that it's not easy even now in this situation.Obviously, I won't be taking my trip if I have to quarantine back in Korea etc.

I could wait until April to burn when the change will be official, but by then even MORE people will be burning miles.

sleuth

It’s possible (likely) KE hasn’t released award space for October yet. They may be waiting until they firm up the schedule. Using Skypass, i’ve rarely had trouble finding award space to the U.S. Chicago tends to be the easiest one but I have had success to Atlanta twice. Yes people are becoming antsy and want to travel, so grab what you can when you can. I just found business class award space on JAL next summer.

mikesaidyes

I know usually KE has a ton of space - but even for April etc it's SLIM pickings only 1-2 seats the whole year....

sleuth

I’m guessing the spring schedule isn’t set in stone yet. All depends on a vaccine.

hurnik

So for April 2021, we had booked ours in May/June of 2020. Back then there were at least 5 seats in F on almost every flight for our Maldives trip. 7+ in Prestige. Obviously since then, things went south real fast, and now there's nothing (or very little)

Note that I was not having much luck (1-2 seats in F) going ORD or ATL to MLE. (I wanted the Kosmo 2.0 suites, so either 747 or 777-300 v2 or whatever). So we ended up doing MLE to ORD, but KE didn't have any flights except SIN to ORD for when we needed them.

I did mock bookings for Oct/Nov 2021 and you're absolutely correct in that there's diddley squat (but then again we're looking specifically for MLE or CMB).

nerdbirdsjc

KE has softly nuked much of its summer 2021 intra-Asia schedule (Zeroing out availbility for most flights but not actually canceling them). The potential good news is that if/as condition improve, KE can add availability in an instant (versus waiting for some time to reload schedules anew). But, for now, it makes booking anything with KE segments a major PITA.

mrdovenb

I noticed this as well while searching for a Delta codeshare flight from MSP to SIN in October 2021. I assume this is all Covid related and the inventory will resume if/when these areas get back to normal. Anyone know the plan there?