I'm not certain that specifying an arbitrary trip length is the best approach. We may want to treat a round-trip as two one-way journeys when checking for award availability. That way we will know if award travel between two cities is more difficult to attain in one direction than the other. (This may not seem logical, but I believe we will find differences there based on some anecdotal information posted in various FlyerTalk threads. From what I recall, award availability on CO has been reported by many as being more difficult to attain from Hawaii to the mainland than vice versa.)

While I would like to see award availability for other than top U.S. cities, we do need to start somewhere and those are the most popular. In my view, we can get to the less popular destinations (SYR and the like) once we have things rolling.

I think you may want to have two categories of award index: Coach and Premium, where Premium would include either J or F since most all domestic routes only have one Premium cabin and many US > International routes also only have one Premium cabin. This would also indirectly address my issue of including elites since, in a very general sense, they would typically have more miles to go after the Premium awards.

It also addresses the issue of whether the award availability for a particular route might be skewed by the airline for a particular cabin, i.e. maybe you can always get a coach seat JFK-LHR but never a BC/FC one. Or maybe the reverse is always true on another route. Does it vary by airline or by route? Gather the data and then spend the time minimg it looking for patterns by airline/route/time of year.

As far as getting data, why not have a registered list of volunteers just call the airlines at preset intervals and ask for specific award availability for a pre-defined pair of cities. Rotate the city pairs for a particular volunteer so the airlines don't catch on who's doing the polling. Post the calling/route schedule for the volunteers on a username/password accessed web site that uses FT screen names so all the volunteers know who's doing what and when. They can then post their results to the same database. Maybe a giant Excel sheet or something. I'm sure some IT wiz can set something up. Just get a domain name and host it on a web service for next to nothing/month.

This could turn out to be the Nielsen ratings of airline awards and, just like the Nielsen's, have an influence on them.

Quite frankly I don't think there's anyway you'll be able to get a fair sample from all the major US airlines that has much meaning (unless you could do it all in one day, which would be near impossible logistically considering the number of samples you are talking about) and I think all you'd end up doing in the end is wasting the airlines' resources in responding to the hundreds and thousands of requests you are considering generating.

Well, Beckles, I'll respectfully disagree with the above. In my view, this is not a one-time thing, but an on-going study. We don't need to know, and most people probably don't care that much, about award availability to Podunk. By limiting the effort to popular destinations and focusing on availability from hubs, we cut down on the number of inquiries and the amount of data that has to be managed. I do agree that calling the airlines with numerous requests is probably unrealistic and that utilizing the on-line systems almost all the airlines provide is the way to go. If we can get the volunteers, it is doable.

My vision is to establish "route leaders" to coordinate all activity for a particular airline on a single route (both inbound & outbound for each two city pair). Award availability checks would be made on a daily basis (on-line) on that route for that particular airline. The check would be for each of the agreed upon timeframes. For example, the route leader for CO EWR/HNL would go on-line today (day 1) and check the following award availability for both EWR-HNL and HNL-EWR:
330 days out
270 days out
180 days out
90 days out
60 days out
30 days out
14 days out
1 day out

That's a total of 16 (8x2) award availability checks. The check would be for both BF and Y seats, and we'll assume non-elite. I don't think that is too excessive for one person to handle, but it will depend on the extent of data we want to capture (Do we want number of flights? What about number of available award seats? Or total number of seats flown on that route by the airline?). The route leader could enlist other volunteers to handle and report on the same information for each elite level. On day 2, the "route team" would repeat the same process over again. Day 3, same thing. Thus, the database builds over a 330 day period.

This approach has the benefit of not having to specify arbitrary trip lengths, since each direction is treated separately. It will also minimize day of week impacts, since over a full year we are likely to capture all days at some point.

It isn't perfect, but it is a start!

The only problem with this is that a number of airlines (AA, for one) allocates seats based on mated-pair availability -- there could be a seat available SEA-DFW and DFW-MCO but when you put the two flights together SEA-DFW-MCO there woud not be a seat available for frequent flyer awards.

You need to choose a variety of markets -- hub to hub, hub to non-hub and non-hub to non-hub.

Greg

That's incorrect. AA does allow you to book international award travel via their website.

Greg

That's what I was trying to say above, but GregL said it better.

Beckles, the intent is to do datagathering via websites whereever possible, so we won't be tying up the airlines' human agents with availability checks.

MileKing, in your "rolling compilation" model, is data-polling an ongoing effort or do we conduct our efforts in a short, hot sweeps period a la Nielsen? (You know: the November sweeps, the February sweeps, etc.) I tend to favor the sweeps/"snapshot" approach, 'cos that lends itself better to a firm index/ranking.

I stand corrected. I thought AA had pulled that capability when they changed the Award chart recently, but I guess they did not.

I view it as an on-going effort. Conducting the study as a short sweep would have a much too narrow focus since we are looking out over an extended timeframe and award availability changes over that timeframe. In other words, if I conduct the June sweeps today I am only getting a single view of availability on a particular route as viewed from today. By checking each day and forming a rolling compilation, we will be able to better judge award availability over time as well as in the aggregate.

I understand mated pair award availability (although I don't know how extensive a problem it is) and concur that we may want to include non-hub locations as well to mitigate some of the issue. If we cut down on the number of popular award destinations to check (maybe the top 10 U.S. destinations), we can increase the number of origination points to include non-hub cities.

I am particularly interested in feedback on the rolling compilation vs. snapshot approach. My own feeling is that a snapshot is much too limiting to be of any value in drawing conclusions about award availability on a particular route for a particular airline.

In the fullness of time, though, you'd have trendlines develop from sweeps period to sweeps period, etc., etc....

Two questions: how much human horsepower would we need to pull together to enable the rolling approach? And how would it yield a concrete comparative index... in other words, how would you format and report results? (I don't much fancy curating daily or weekly updates.... ) I think if you look at other credible indexes, from Lundberg's gas price watch to the CPI, the numbers are reported weekly or monthly -- but I don't know if the survey methodology is "sweepy" or "rolling."

I personally think conducting this several times a year would be enough. After all, we don't want the airlines to be constantly pounded by requests (electronic or phone) for seat availability.

I'd vote for perhaps four times per year.

Greg

Three quick thoughts on this subject:
A) WOW - about time; kudos to those who think they can wrestle this to the ground and best of luck. The dynamics are so varied, I can hardly see how one could conduct an object, thorough study.
B) I and many others have directly and indirectly been begging Randy and Inside Flyer to try to expose the system, good bad or ugly, for years, starting back when Contonental's Nonepass went sour. It is inconceivable that a leader in the ff world that Inside Flyer purports itself to be (and I believe it to be)....visibly avoids all discussion of this subject of award availability, the essence of what makes or breaks a reputable and reliable affinity program, year after year. Gosh - an anecdotal count of thread topics alone put the issue of award availability, whether hotel or airline, in top 2-3 surely, year after year. And Inside Flyer avoids all discussion of the issue ? Even to expose the worst sinners of them all, Continental ? Where is the beef, Randy ? Qantus just got slapped by their own politicians for screwing around with award availability, so *maybe* US Governmental intervention is in the near future (not sure that will be good, or bad, but can't hurt). I believe AA's milesaaver initiative should be the absolute straw that broke the camel's back, so I call for the industry leader Inside Flyer, to take the lead on this initiative. You've got people lining up to get involved and even to structure the parameters for such an investigation. Still, Inside Flyer and Randy, specifically, has the publishing medium to keep us all informed, the ear of the politicians, the ear of the airline CEOs, the ear of the affinity partner that is the conduit to earning miles, and the respect of the ff community, both issuers and earners.

===> RANDY, NO BETTER TIME THAN NOW FOR INSIDE FLYER TO TAKE UP THIS CALLING. The situation simply gets degraded and diluted year after year as airlines execute takeback after takeback, butloathe to "giveback", and the givebacks certainly don't counter the takebacks even then.

C) The major airlines themselves could pre-empt this by simply making their system more translucent. What the Aussie govnm't is making Qantus do - be more forthcoming on their web site about award availability on all flights - would be a good start for US domestic airlines. No, I don't expect 25% of a given flight to be award seats, nor do I believe 1 seat and zero seats (ie the milesaaver model) per flight is fair either. Award allocation should logically be PROPORTIONAL to the total awards they issue and miles they sell per year vs flights. Simple math, really.

Well, I feel for Randy, understanding a little bit about his business model, and I know he's in a very difficult position. As a consultant to the airlines themselves I don't think he can be expected to back an objective indexing effort that could expose some of his own clients to criticism.

Because Randy is so well connected within the industry we get good, bankable guidance from him on earn-or-burn questions, rumors of changes in program terms, etc. In return, this forum, which we don't exactly pay to use, constitutes incredibly valuable data for us and market research for the airlines.

The man's got to make a living. Considering what he knows about loyalty program dynamics and the energy he brings to his work, he deserves to make a good living. And, even if you subscribe to InsideFlyer, he's not making much from us. This doesn't apply to anyone taking part in this thread, but I'm sometimes appalled at the scathing criticism FTers level at Randy; he's not obligated to us at all. Quite the reverse in fact; we are playing in his sandbox.

It is true that award availability is the elephant in the drawing room, but consider Randy's position. He has found a graceful way to provide client airlines with his expertise... and us with an almost completely uncensored forum. He hasn't sponsored Save SkyMiles ads in the papers or spread the word on $60 mileage runs to Iceland... but he hasn't stopped us from pursuing those things either. I'm hopeful that he'd adopt the same view of this Award Availability Index idea -- neither backing nor inhibiting us.

I did happen to see this. In some ways, I'm a little troubled since what is asked here is really old news in InsideFlyer. As for the top city pairs for award redemption..... at InsideFlyer we created the very fisrt index for that. Consumer Reports contacted us later to ask if we'd be offended if they used our "concept." Knowing the editor, we had no problem at all. The index is located here:
http://www.webflyer.com/company/pres...city_pairs.php

Want to know the top 100 city destinations, including award percetages? Well here it is:
http://www.webflyer.com/company/pres...top_cities.php

Over the years I have spent a whole lot of money of this type of research which if you were a long time reader of InsideFlyer, you'd get to know.


As for your idea for an Award Redemption Index, you might want to simply contribute to the existing Index for this and upgrades which WebFlyer has maintained for several years:
http://www.webflyer.com/programs/award_upgrade_index/


Anyway, let me know what else i can assist you with, including letting me know how i might get your reading business.... HA!

I'll throw one more variable into the mix. What constitutes availability?

Randy's index looks for getting "first requested date". But I think it really should go beyond that.

Ideally, I'd say there are about 4 possibilities:
- first choice of flight
- first choice of dates
- comparable dates
- no availability

And choice of flight does matter. On a recent DFW-LGA weekend trip, AA had the Sunday return I wanted, but of the dozen or so flights that had that day, only the 6 a.m. had award availability.

And note that "comparable" dates may vary by situation. If I'm looking to go to Hawaii for 8-9 nights, 6 months out, then I may not care exactly what week I go, but I don't want midweek flights. But if I need to visit family for a medical crisis, then that needs to be right now, and a "comparable" date might be +1 or +2 days. Next weekend doesn't help.

Just food for thought.