KE award availability
 

As a loyal DL customer, I have gotten used to either (a) calling 330 days before the trip, or (b) calling with great hesitations and feelings of guilt, requesting "seats from anywhere US to anywhere EU from the week of 6/19 to the week of 7/11," and fully expecting to have my request denied.

Imagine my surprise when I tried to secure an award with KE for mid-May, and the agent admonished me to provide her with exact dates. KE seemed to have seats available on pretty much every flight. Have I been exceptionally lucky, or does KE have amazing award availability?

KE has lots of flights on jumbo jets from the USA to ICN. Once you get to 2 months before flight time - seat inventory can be reassessed and airlines open up more reward seats if the flights are light.

i'm glad you post this as I'm trying to book a award seat in Biz class in Oct and having no luck.

This is my experience too, happily. I just got an award seat (via DL) for a few weeks from now, ICN-DFW.

With limited experience, I have never had a problem with award availabilty on KE. I've also always had great service.

I previously had no problem on two different trips booking business class award seats on KE using DL miles, but I have struck out trying to get two award seats to BKK for next May. Flights from ICN are available, but I can't get to ICN either on KE or DL. I went ahead and booked on China Southern, but would prefer KE. Does anybody know if award seats open up on KE as the departure date gets closer?

You might find some US-ICN seats later if you really wanted to switch to KE. I guess it depends on what biz configuration would be on the KE flight but I'd probably just stick with CZ. The new KE biz might be worth switching for but on CZ their biz is their old first class and they turned the old biz into premium econ. Now if you were in coach then that would be a whole different story.

For the record.. i'm a KE skypass member... I had originally a M class(Student Discount) ticket from ICN-TPE on 27 Dec... but I was able to use 10,000 miles to upgrade to C... also on the return ICN-TPE-LAX.. I have a full fare C ticket... maybe that helped in me getting to use my Miles to upgrade.. since I did it in person when I was booking my tickets.....:confused::D^