Is KE restricting partner award availability?
 

I am seeing KE economy award ticket availability on routes from the US like JFK-ICN, LAX-ICN, etc, on most days in the next couple months for 35k miles. However, when I search for award tickets on those same routes through Delta, AF/KLM Flying Blue, and Emirates, they don't show up. Is KE restricting award availability to partners now, and if so, is it more restrictive for premium cabins, like SQ (though it seems like even the economy award availability on partners is extremely limited)?

It is well known that KE restricts award seats to the partners. It has become better recently but KE still bans weekend redemption to the partners. By the way, just a few days ago KE released a ton of award seats on its own system and I believe some of them will eventually release to the partners.

Absolutely horrible availability for partners even within SkyTeam. As Bobby said, they did release a bunch of ECONOMY seats because my flights in June opened up in ATL when they were previously just 1-2 seats left.

good luck trying to find business/first class from LAX. Pretty much impossible to find so these points are useless you fly economy

They literally only release 3 seats in biz these days, so you gotta snap em up 330 days in advance the day they're released.

I don't know that they are even doing that. I am looking for 2x JFK-ICN-SIN and it is completely impossible a year out. I am seeing one seat on the JFK-ICN segments but never two except for occasionally the very first day the flight becomes bookable. As for ICN-SIN all I ever see is economy... and it used to be the other way around (easy for the SIN flight, hard for the JFK). And not a single first class for even one passenger a year out. And this is using KE's own miles.

What is the best strategy here? Is it possible to book the ICN-JFK in biz online then call/chat with KE to have them add on the ICN-SIN segment in economy, then I keep checking for biz to become available? And what about round trip? Looks like the only way is to book a one-way then wait and separately book the return. I have a suspicion this increases the "carrier imposed fees".

Thanks
DAK

I found out the 3 seat rule when I was looking for a surprise trip this June....I saw that there were seats only available the day released and they never came back. Like literally, you need to be ready at Midnight Korea time when the calendar opens up.

You should be able to book online because there is an all classes button and JFK and SIN are both KE destinations. Not SkyTeam award. You can mix and match classes easily if available....that's the problem though.

My guess is that it's a mix of the limited number of flights being fully booked (Korean Air recently harshly criticized the government in the press for still restricting the number of flights to 25% of usual capacity), and also people having being accumulating credit card miles for 2 years without being able to spend them.

I'd expect availability to get better as flights increase but demand will be really high, especially before the 2023 program changes...

Do they still restrict partners to just being able to book a single seat? Delta et al. are showing me 2 available seats in business class, yet when I try to book the second one I get an error message saying that Koreanair wouldn't release the seat... was very disappointed to have transferred in miles before finding this out!

I ran into the same problem trying to book my family of 3 from IAD to DPS for next spring. I never saw more than the rare 1 biz seat available here and there when released a year out. To avoid the coming devaluation and simply be done with it, we decided to just use the KE miles for upgrade awards from econ. I was seeing availability for up to 4 of those for the trip on some days and almost always at least 2 were available. Not the best or cheapest option, but it got us in biz for such a long flight and for our preferred time frame.

That may be worth looking into. I assume you need to buy within certain fare classes? How did you go about that as most booking engines force you into the cheapest fare bucket?
Thanks
DAK

You have to buy into the HIGHEST fare classes - you should search on Korean Air website itself for the available seats. They'll show "mileage upgrade possible" or not.

Like Mike said, you'll have to buy the full fare rate for whatever class you're upgrading from.

However, to help check the number of available upgrade slots per leg, I used the "Purchase & Upgrade" tool on the website. It only works currently for domestic and individual segments to/from ICN and GMP so you'll need to search each leg separately, but it will indicate how many seats are left that can actually be upgraded. If there are some, it'll say the points needed plus full fare cost (ignore since even combining these per leg will be over the real amount of just connecting). If there are no upgrades left, then it will say "Seat upgrade Sold out". If you searched only with the normal tool just for full paid fares, you can still see seats that are technically possible for upgrade, but there may be no upgrades left and you'd likely be wasting money if you bought them.

When you see two legs that have enough upgrades then either book the full flex fare online using the standard search to get the full trip on one ticket, then use the upgrade option after purchase (I presume this would work). Or, call in and have a rep do it and pay an extra $30/ticket for the service. I did the latter to be absolutely sure the upgrade slots were there for the full itinerary, and so they could hold them to be sure all went smooth. ​​​​​​

Thanks for the pointer to the purchase and upgrade choice in the booking tool. You are right that you have to buy a pretty expensive economy class ticket, almost as much as you can buy a advance purchase/restricted business class ticket on another airline (for my route)