I'm not sure if this is the right place to post this but I thought the information was pretty interesting.
I found a good article on Smarter Travel about a study on the percentage of awards availability to be found on the major carriers. For some, I don't think there will be too many surprises, e.g. the paltry 10.7% availability on US Air. This company performed 6,160 booking queries at the websites of 22 frequent flier programs during February and March 2010. Travel dates spanned June through October 2010; 10 long-haul routes and 10 city pairs under 2,500 miles were checked to assess reward seat availability. The company has created a guide (for the small price of $399 LOL) but there is an overview of what they discovered here.

It's not a surprise that DL is at 12.9%, just barely above US. In fact both DL and US are so far below the rest of the competition, as to be laughable.

AS, CO and UA are the best among US airlines with intl routes all in the 68%-75% range, or of course WN at over 99%, which has no intl.

There is no program in the world that offers 99% availability on standart redemptions. Look at all the complaints on WN board. Did they include WN freedom award in it by mistake?

What they didn't look at and maybe should've is availability on US via another *A carrier.

When I do a search on USAir I rarely, if ever, get saver level awards. As soon as I use the ANA tool or the CO website, BAM!, availability everywhere at the saver level. So they sell cheap to other, non-"loyal" customers and sell dear to those who are "loyal".

Normally I would cringe at using other *A miles for US redemptions, but for a multiple cents/mile return on some caribbean routes it ends up being worth it.

Then we still have the US miles for international *A redemptions, so it all works out in the end I guess.

Too bad they won't let their own members reasonably redeem on their own metal.

Interesting numbers. Was this study sponsored by WN?

my thoughts exactly. there is another thread on this as well already. anyone can bias a study to make the results look as good or as bad as they want.

Your question made me wonder as well, so I went to IdeaWorks website and they note their client list as follows:

Our international client list includes the hotel, airline, marine, railroad, and consumer products sectors: AirAsia X, AirTran, Alterra Coffee Roasters, ATA Airlines, A.T. Kearney, Amtrak Intercity, Baboo Airlines, Baymont Inns and Suites, British Airways, Esprit Airways, EzRez Software, Flybaboo Airlines, Flybe Airlines, Forever Resorts, Fosshotel of Iceland, Frontier Airlines, Hawaii Superferry, Kalahari Resorts, Kwik Trip Petroleum, Lacek Group - OgilvyOne, Lake Michigan Carferry, LAN Airlines, Malev Hungarian Airlines, Marcus Hotels and Resorts, Marcus Theatres, Martinair, Mondial Assistance, Ogilvy One Worldwide, Pegasus Airlines, Radixx International, TransBrasil Airlines, Virgin America, Visa and Vueling Airlines.

Of course, this, too, could be manipulated.... but I really think the company is more inclined to want to be selling their more 'detailed study' book as well as some developed software. There actually is, on their site, a 2009 TATL reward study... equally as interesting.

From what I have seen about redeeming US awards, I honestly don't think they manipulated the stats too much in that direction.

At first blush I'm sure most are skeptical. And there's always room for criticism. But to me the results seem fairly representative of my experience (with DL at the bottom and AA/UA/CO many times higher).

Interesting study.

It appears that they counted partner reward space as long as it could be searched online, so that means airlines that do not have partner searches online would tend to have more dates available than these figures indicate. Without a lot more information it's very hard to tell how important that would be in the figures.

I don't understand how they searched the same dates for WN. According the WN forum wiki here, the WN schedule ran through August 13, 2010, until it was extended to October 30 on March 23, which is well after the period they said they did their searches. If they waited until the day the schedule opened it would bias the availability upward, potentially a lot.

Highly interesting that only two USA airlines stand out at the low end: US and DL. And by a huge margin.

From reading the article, I did not think that it is saying that 99% of all flights have availability. My take was that 99% of DATES had availability, i.e., for the dates/routes they searched, there was at least one flight that date that had availability. That would be much more reasonable.