This survey was released a few months ago...my immediate reaction was that I wanted to know the methodology in excruciating detail. I'm pretty sure Flyertalkers would quickly pick apart inconsistencies.

WN's 99.3% number is clearly for Freedom Awards. While we all know that DL and US are awful, did they really fail 9 out of 10 times to offer up a 50,000-mile domestic U.S. option on the same queries?

If somebody out there really wants to do this study properly, they need to involve Flyertalkers. Everybody else will hose it up.

It isn't English at all. It's perfectly good Latin which you can feel free to use in the middle of some English if you so choose.

Well, somebody wins the Powerball once in awhile, too, but that doesn't make Powerball a good retirement plan. I'm glad you got a great award but most people express high frustration trying to redeem DL, especially overseas, double-especially in Asia, triple-awful-especially in premium cabins.

For what it's worth, I've done open-jaw and stopover travel with other alliances as well. It's not just a Delta thing.

Fall is usually a good time to book European award travel - I've done quite a few premium-cabin awards or paid+upgrade trips. I'd expect that it's at least reasonably open, with a couple months' notice and some date flexibility.

I doubt it, given that no one automatically gets Freedom Awards. (You have to convert two Standard Awards.)

But it could have been due to another anomaly: Southwest doesn't open their schedule anywhere near the 10 to 11 months that other carriers do. So if the booking window was near the Southwest schedule-opening window (which would be a less-than-optimum time to look for awards on carriers which open up 10 or 11 months ahead), then the 99.3% number could have been in large part because they have many dates for most destinations right after they open a new section of their schedule. (Their schedule is opened in "burst", as the threads constantly asking or mentioning another schedule extension in the Southwest forum attest, as opposed to the majors where it's more or less daily a certain number of 300+ days out.)

Another factor: Southwest flies point-to-point, not through hubs, and has many (although some very inefficient) connections for most city pairs, and the initial award availability calendar shows whether any conneciton is available that day. If that's as far as they looked, Southwest would have come up with a great score. My beef about it is that much of the time when you click to expand that to show the actual award flights available, it's some awful time (or awful roundabout connection) that I don't want to take.

(Of course, I've also had the same issue with AA and UA sometimes, with them only finding me redeyes on eastbound transcons. But that issue would go away if the study didn't search eastbound transcons!)

So it makes a huge diffeence whether they just gave dates and accepted any time of day and any routing on the flight, or if they had a time window and a total flight duration limit...

Not Just, but usually the worst is Delta. All of my top of the line bad experiences are with Delta.

Malaysia Airlines' Enrich should have been on there so US wouldn't have had to be last.

I'm aware of how Southwest opens their schedule and how they display awards. I still question whether 1000 randomly selected June-October itineraries, half of which are by definition transcons, queried in February, would truly yield 993 successes - even allowing for weird routings.

I suspect the 7 failures are the result of July 2nd and July 5th queries.


(For kicks, I queried today for a couple transcons in Feb/March. The schedule opened through March 11 today - at first glance I saw good availability on a day basis - maybe 80-85%. Very good, but not 99.3%)

As much as I enjoy bashing DL, recent data suggests that those guys are in the process of making some serious (positive) changes;

I just checked SW today myself for a reward flight and was able to get a great flight time non-stop. Of course, it always helps to check the day the schedule opens up.

i know exactly what you mean....

+1

"Vice" is used to mean "versus" quite often amongst military members.

Very true.

US's partner availability is quite nice, which makes Dividend Miles pretty useful. In my limited experience, Skyteam partner are not so generous for use of skymiles, so circumstances which mitigate trouble with DM is not so present with skymiles.

I'm surprised to see American as low as it is. Maybe it's just because my last two award tickets were fairly last minute domestic tickets but when I traveled a check of AA/UA/US/DL only gave me options for the cheapest award on AA. YMMV I guess.