Newbie question - Award tickets availability start?
 

When do airlines post their award ticket flights for the year? Is it at the beginning of the calendar year or few months before?

First posting of award seats for any flight is generally 330 days from the flight date. After that, awards seats are released at unpredictable times (possibly with a slight increase a week or so before the scheduled departure date of the flight, if the airline still has significant numbers of unsold seats on that flight at that point).

So look early - and after that, look often!

Most airlines start releasing award seats between 330 and 365 days in advance. (nothing to do with the calendar year)

However, there's no real rhyme or reason to when or how airlines release award space, at least to us outsiders.

Start looking at approximately 330 days out, and continue to check or set up alerts with one of the services to notify you if they release the seats you're looking for. The availability could pop up at any time.

EDIT: Looks like Artemis beat me by a minute. Sorry for the duplication.

Thank you both for the responses! What are the services I can sign up for to notify me? I need to try KVS tool when I get home from work today.

Air Tran, Southwest and Frontier open availability on different schedules. Try dummy bookings (lots and lots of them) on the airline you plan to fly as practice, and you will get a good idea of what is likely to become available and when.

Depends what airlines you want to search for.

Some AAirlines you can search for awards from their website.
Some airlines (and alliances) you can signup to a particular FF program for free and search.

I'm primarily interested in AA and US Airways. United flights have pretty good availability, but AA ones really suck at it and it just happens that I have most miles on AA

awards
 

From my experience it is very hard to get awards from BA on any of their partners.

AA releases awards no earlier than 330 days in advance afaik. That does not mean that they will load them at 330 days in advance every day and never change it.

You can search for AA awards directly on their website, without even logging in.

BA only controls awards on their own flights. They (like all OW airlines) are at the mercy of each others award inventory. The BA.com search is also poor and often doesn't work well with connections. Also note AA only releases MileSAAver awards to other OW partners.

Spend some time here http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/us-ai...ad-merged.html for using your US miles on the United flights you are finding. You have to call in to book them.

You may get some helpful suggestions if you post some specifics: Origin, destination, date range, number of passengers, class.

I don't use it (yet), but I believe ExpertFlyer can send you award availability alerts.

One big headache is that the AA website doesn't show all Oneworld award availability (and I'm not aware of any Oneworld partner which does, either). So just checking AA's website won't show you all your options. A lot of folks recommend using the Qantas website in conjunction with AA's for that reason. Otherwise you're going to need to use more specialized tools like the KVS Tool and ExpertFlyer to track down all the available award seats.

Also remember that if the destination is one that AA flies to on their own metal, you always have the option of booking an AAnytime award (for twice the points, of course). It won't help if you need to go somewhere that only other Oneworld airlines service, but it's a useful option if you're going someplace AA services (especially if you don't have much flexibility in your travel schedule).

If you don't mind a paid service, as noted above, ExpertFlyer will let you set up alerts that will e-mail you automatically if "at least X seats are available on flight 123 from JFK to LHR" or whatever. The alerts seem to check availability daily until the date of the flight; occasionally I'll get pinged by old alerts I set a while ago where seats just became available.

If you want to do it manually, Qantas and BA offer reasonably decent search tools, so you can use those to search oneworld award inventory (including AA). As noted above, AA only includes some partners online. Obviously you can call in to AA to have them search all partner airlines, but this will take much longer.

I find United's search tool to be good (enough) for Star Alliance, and (despite having a glut of DL miles) don't really fly SkyTeam that much, and when I do, I use ExpertFlyer.

Hope that helps.

I will check out that thread and ExpertFlyer. I see on AA website that off season flights in Europe are 40k points RT, how much are they in season? 60k?

You will find that most people on FlyerTalk are happy to help, but get frustrated at questions that could be answered with literally two minutes of work.

Google: "American Airlines Award Chart"
First result: http://www.aa.com/i18n/disclaimers/f...ward-chart.jsp

That chart says, from North America to Europe, each way:

Off-peak
20,000
-----------
MileSAAver Peak
30,000
-----------
AAnytime
60,000

You are right; an off-peak round trip is 40k. Peak r/ts at the SAAver level would be 60k, and AA always allows you to redeem at the "AAnytime" level for 2x the SAAver price.

In-season RT flights to Europe are 60k, but the system calculates on a OW basis (30k in-season, 20k off). You would pay 50k total if one flight in-season and the other off-season. If you're interested in AA award travel to Europe, you should be aware 1) that IB award travel can't be booked online but requires a phone call to AA and 2) that award travel on BA is best avoided because of exorbitant fees. In addition, remember that US will eventually be incorporated into the AA program, a development that will certainly affect award availability in numerous ways.

@crimson12, thanks for the link and apologies for not googling. I should have known how many miles it takes.

There is also some good information over at MilePoint about booking award tickets. May be a little outdated but it still contains a lot of good information.

http://milepoint.com/forums/threads/...rum-more.8684/

I love KVS because I don't have to toggle between different airline websites.

I started scanning CX availability for a trip a couple weeks out, and woke up early at 331 days out and scored the tickets I wanted for December.

Good luck!

How about AwardNexus
 

I notice no one mentioned Awardnexus.com. It is a free and works much like ExpertFlyer and KVS except it only does award searches. There are paid versions which offer more functionally, but if you are a newbie it is a good tool to help you start looking for award availability across all 3 Alliances and a few extra airlines. You have a limited number of searches when you first signup, but the free version should give you enough functionally to look for city pairs across multiple Alliances.

I try book tickets for my big trips 300-330 days out. I've had the best luck with super early bookings. Yes, I might get some award availability later on, but I just want to plan it, and be done with it.

It really depends where and when you want to travel. If you're locked into school calendars and want Hawaii at Xmas or Europe in the summer you need to plan as early as possible. Off peak season and destinations are much easier. We have found AA and oneworld partners to work very well and are able to avoid BA and their surcharges. The more flexibility the easier.

Important point. I get my tickets a year ahead of time because I like to travel right after Christmas every. That's peak season everywhere.

I use Award Nexus. For the past 2-3 years, we've booked two major award trips per year instead of a lot of smaller ones. So their points system for the free version works fine for me.

Last year, I had a large, intricate award trip...multiple partners, multiple countries in Asia...planned close to 330 days out on Oneworld. Then, 5 days before the trip, we junked the whole thing, redeposited the miles, and flew an equally-intricate award trip the opposite direction around the globe using Star Alliance miles.

So my Oneword 330-day experience was good. And my last-minute Star Alliance experience, using US miles as a US Gold member, was also good. :D

Ended up using the BA Avios for Europe this summer. Availability was good in November (so 250-ish days)...many dates were wide-open for ORD-DUB and BOS-DUB, although we had to buy paid tickets onward to the continent from there.

Congrats and enjoy your CX Award!

One thing I haven't seen mentioned is AA (and United) have 12.5K mile one way flights available.

This is good as it lets you grab a one way flight the day they are available as opposed to waiting for your departure and return flights to open up for you to book R/T. Award seats can disappear during that time.