Someone tweeted this today...makes UA out to look pretty good, and US and DL are HORRID. Granted, there is not much info on HOW they did the study, but this is what Ma and Pa will hear about. http://www.theatlantic.com/national/...e-chart/61371/

The only surpise to me is that there is actually someone below Delta.

Some surprises:

1. US Airways at bottom: I have been able to get some good awards from them. Some examples include:

A. 2 offpeak Biz tickets LAX-MAD on US metal @60K each.
B. 2 LAX-DTW-LGB open jaws @25K each.
In earlier years, I was able to get 2 Biz LAX-Australia/NZ open jaw w/stopover on QF when US was their partner. Got first choice of dates.

2. AA below UA.

A. Last year, I put on hold 1 Biz seat @125K on Quantas using AA miles. Nothing available on UA or partners in Biz. Starnet blocking in full effect.
B. Got 2 Biz seats on LH but only 1 set of dates within a 60 day window. Lots of availability on ANA site for LH (lots of dates--some dates had 4+ Biz seats available). Decided to burn UA miles before devaluation of 2009. No problem getting 2 Biz seats on AA for my choice of dates.

3. DL doesn't surprise me. Difficult to get awards. Only have 97K on DL. May go with AS itineraries with DL miles. Found 2 FC seats during summer 2010 on AS going from LAX-ANC. (didn't go but nice to know for future reference).

4. CO: Found a trip for this summer but 3 segments each way and the return are all RJ's. Oh well, I only have 4K left on CO. Plan to get 1K more in account and move to Amtrak.

Anyone can come up with specific examples that will contradict any study. But without knowing their methodology, it's hard to even determine the validity of the study in the first place.

there seems to be no information related to how they got these scores.
That said, Aeroplan is pretty good at seat avail. and mileage cost.

This study equates "highest award seat availability" with being the "highest ranked program." Now while this may be true for some people, it is simply not the only factor for most frequent flyers. In fact, other important factors may be % of upgrade successes, quality of inflight service, quality of customer service, among other things. I, for one, will avoid flying Southwest Airlines at all costs. Let alone join their FF program and try to rack up Rapid Rewards. The fact that they ended up #1 on this list will not change that.

Fully agree that we'd need to know the methodology. This paragraph seems to sum it up, though clearly more detail would be needed:

"IdeaWorks made 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."

Here's the link for the press release from the company that conducted the study:

http://www.ideaworkscompany.com/pres...ailability.pdf

Like chemist661, I'm also surprised that UA ranks higher than AA, even given that it seems like the methodology excluded the ability to get award flights on partner airlines (and therefore didn't take Starnet blocking into account). Could be a product of specific routes that were checked or other aspects of the methodology. Also, I believe that AA does save more award inventory for EXPs, which could skew the experience of some of us here.

Delta results no surprise. From what I've read about the US program here, I'm surprised by how low it ranks, though maybe the more favorable reports involve the availability of partner airline flights using US miles, as opposed to US flights themselves.

I'm not that surprised. While Starnet blocking is a big negative for UA, it's really the ONLY negative about the program. I find award availability is as good as AA or better; it allows one-way awards (Ok, so does AA but many others do not...and I do lot of one-ways); and there are no last minute booking fees (unique in that regard among majors). For someone with my travel patterns - mainly domestic, mostly redeem on UA, lots of oneways, lots of last minute travel, rarely try to get int'l partner itins - UA's program is head and shoulders above any other for usefulness.

Of course, YMMV as I realize others typically use their FF programs differently!

The general results are not too surprising - it is not too hard to get seats on WN when the schedule opens outside of a few peak dates. I think Alaska ranks pretty high as well for US carriers.

However, if AA is below UA then the study is clearly flawed. Even if that were true, UA's deceptive *net blocking should drop it 20 points, not to mention the complete dearth of C seats on many international routes.

The methodology explains that bookings for 2 travelers were attempted in February for the June-October time period for 10 long haul routes and 10 city pairs <2500 miles. Unfortunately that doesn't provide enough information to be useful. Were these 10 random city pairs or SFO-JFK, LAX-ORD, etc.? Did they attempt domestic economy (probably) or the more coveted international business class (unlikely)? The timeframe is also pretty broad, June-August is generally more difficult than Sept-Oct.

In the end, I would much rather see greater transparency and consistency as to release of award inventory rather than surveys which may be based on useless hypothetical bookings.

These surveys are overly harsh due to them not taking elite status award booking into consideration.

It looks like they are looking only at booking on the airline's own metal, not partner awards, or at least not partner awards that require a phone call vice web booking. My understanding is that the people who sing the praises of US are doing so mostly because of relative ease and flexibility of *A awards on US.

I haven't even been finding that WN has great award availability anymore. Certainly sinice the introduction of two tiers, and esp. lately. I've made repeated attempts with a very flexible schedule to redeem an award to no avail. Not at all like the old days of WN, and my (albeit limited) experience with them lately makes it appear their awards allotment has become DL-esque. Maybe they're just really popular out of LGA now that they're serving NYC...

I just booked an award trip on Delta this Fall that will give me 4 nights MAD, 1 Day AMS, 3 nights VIE, all for 60k. My layovers are 44 minutes in ATL going over, and 1.5 hours in AMS going back.

Is there another airline reward program out there that will let you multistop with that much flexibility (without exhaustive layovers) for 60K miles?

you mean "versus web booking" or is vice web a pun?

^^