Civil aviation authorities in some countries, such as the FAA in the US, keep and publish statistics of on-time performance for various airlines on various routes or at various airports. That information is useful to the consumer to form an informed choice as to which carrier to use or even which flight.
Award availability is a critical aspect of an FF scheme. Yet, it is shrouded in secrecy and we have nothing else than anecdotal evidence to compare FF schemes on this.
Shouldn't airlines be required to disclose and publish award availability statistics? There can, of course, be discussion as to which kind of statistics would be most useful to consumers. However, any kind of statistics would make a start at helping us comparing the value of different FF schemes.

There wouldn't be a point to tracking award availability since you can, get standard awards on most airlines (provided you're a member of their program). I could never really understand the resistance to using the miles for a standard award (most people that work at the airlines consider it a very good use of miles).

It is relevant and there is a point to it. Read any given airline FF program forum on FT and you'll see a *ton* of complaints on finding Saver/RuleBuster/etc award availability. The point the OT is making is that if it was tracked and published, the airlines couldn't as easily get away with advertising "Only 35,000* miles to Hawaii" when it costs the overwhelming majority of travellers 50 or 60k to get there on miles. Requiring the on-time statistics has made the airlines a lot more diligent about planes going out on time than they used to be. I would think that this kind of reporting would have a similar consumer-friendly effect on mileage availability, or at least honesty in advertising.

I see that you fly UA where Saver awards require only 60% of the miles that Standard awards do - do you not see the value in that difference? For the same price, would you rather have three free domestic RTs or two? three trips to Europe or Hawaii or two?

Most people that work for the airlines don't know or care much about how flyers value FF miles because they have different ways of flying for free themselves. That and it obviously benefits the airlines for you to use more miles for fewer trips on Standard instead of Saver awards, so consider your source.

peace,
~Ben~

Just who exactly would pay the government to keep these statistics in your scheme? Last time I looked at my 1040 a big chunk of my money went to the government paying for a big chunk of nothing that is a bit of importance to me or my family.

Surely a much better proposal would be for parliment to enact and 'fund' it. It would have 100% support from me. @:-)

Why don't we eliminate the bajillions of dollars in free money that we hand out to the domestic airline industry each year and use some of that? Then we could track this and there would be less taxpayer money getting blown away to support bad management at private firms.

As for taxes going to programs you don't use, I'm sure other people feel the same way about programs you use and they don't, but that whole part of the discussion belongs on OMNI, in my opinion.

peace,
~Ben~

Then go get some free 10Ks and find out how many awards are given out each year.

If airline A gives out 2 million awards and we the government tell you that 25% of them are standard awards is this going to be any more useful to you than the anecdotal evidence that some people get standard awards to Hawaii and some don't.

If airline B gives out 1 million awards and we the government tell you that 50% of them are standard awards is this going to be any more useful to you than the anecdotal evidence that some people get standard awards to Hawaii and some don't.

Oh wait lets also find out what percentage of those awards go to the elite flyers as opposed to those whom only earn mileage from non-flying. Must be a large segment of the population who want that information.

Find your recommendation that my response to the OT (believe you meant OP or TO) whom suggested we the government fund his scheme was OMNI to be a distasteful opinion. YMMV

Exactly my thinking.

On the cost of administering this, airline DO know how many seats they make available. The date is there. It is simply that it is not published. All I am suggesting is a duty of disclosure on the airlines. As to the cost of publication, let us be serious for a minute here. The cost is absolutely negligible.
Yes, you are right that there can be some discussion as to which set of statistics are more useful than others. Nonetheless, this, as an argument that we should have no statistics, is a non-starter, precisely for the reasons mentioned by seoulmanjr in the quote above.

It's very simple: they don't publish the real stats because the people would discover that the emperor has no clothes.

Ever see the movie, Logan's Run? The system works so long as most people believe the myth that airlines release free seats for every flight and you can use your miles to get those seats if you book well in advance.

I said this:
In response to this:
Simply because I thought that debating the merits of our tax system in the general terms you used would take this thread off-topic and make it pretty politically charged. What if I responded that your fiscally conservative stance was "distasteful in my opinion"? We'd be getting nowhere fast in this thread.

Back to the topic at hand:

The airlines have this information already and the government could force them to publish award availability in terms of % or seats available per season per specific route -- the way that they require the same of on-time percentages by route / flight number. I think seeing that a particular flight is only 45% on time is useful. If the system for on-time percentages worked the same way as your example above, then airlines would publish a statistic that says out of a million flights, the airlines operations are 85% on-time, which would indeed be useless. It's not a good example or fair comparison.

I think that the cost to the government to tell airlines to publish information they already have would be low, and most likely negligable. How much do you think it costs taxpayers for airlines to publish their on-time stats for flights? It's not like a team from the FAA is going to sit on availability tools all day and collect award info.

peace,
~Ben~

Also, the government doesn't currently report on-time statistics and nobody is suggesting that they collect and report award availability. The suggestion is that the government tell the airlines to report on data that is collected and known, but presently hidden from consumers, a la the on-time stats.

I think its an awesome idea.

peace,
~Ben~

I agree with transparency, and I touched on this very subject a while back in another thread and also in another forum. I think what should happen is that the airline should be able to tell you when you call that, yes, there are 5 seats left for awards in this or that class, or 17 awards left and if you change your routing to this city, it will actually jump to 22 or something like that.

This WOULD help me not only know who to fly, but also, I would be less inclined to complain about never getting on a plane with my miles.

That would certainly be less of a strain on the airlines themselves, because they would not have to devote so many man hours on hearing complaints, reading and responding to letters and emails of complain, and they would be less frustrated over all when most of their mile-holding passengers now understood the process more clearly over all! Certainly there is a huge savings on everyone's part and you don't even have to involve the government or the IRS! It is simple common sense for any executive to do a cost analysis on!

As well, I have mentioned elsewhere that some sort of "waiting list" should and could occur in the world of award planning, whereas customers could get on the list to be in any award flight and use their miles if the seat they want opens up. It could be set up where you could get off the list later on based on certain conditions, but you couldn't just simply 'stack the deck' and abuse the system either. I do not know exactly how this would work, but the idea would attempt to get rid of that problem many people have who hear the common phrase, "well sir, you will just have to call back and try for an award seat again later--every day--until some other passenger changes his plans or something. We have nothing for you now."

You see, a waiting list mentality would enable the airlines to maintain you as a customer because right now, I aint calling back to that airline after so many tries where the CSR tells me to call back blindly tomorrow... No, I am going SOMEWHERE ELSE, and that airline loses my business!

Now, some here may respond to my waiting list thing and say that all it will do is make it easier for people to put themselves on every waiting list even when they don't want to fly (that's sadly why the airlines instilled those change fees for award tickets and that sucks!) but I think there is a far better way to handle that problem too. Stacking the deck is bad for the airlines and it has ultimately hurt all of us, but workable policies could be built in to prevent this if someone does some real thinking out of the box. What the airlines really need first, is to hire THOSE types of people!

I don't quite know what it is yet, but there has to be a way to do such a system, and I bet we can help come up with it if we really tried!

THEREFORE, I appeal to all of you--the fellow customers--to not complain about it all the time, or blast on each other's ideas and input, but rather, to collectively come up with these very ways and then maybe, just maybe, we can send a message to the airlines from those of us who fly them! This may actually get things done. Think about it!

I am eager to see the positive replies to, and enlightening expansions on this one!

In that case we will have to agree to disagree as my adjective to the idea is different than yours.

Admittedly am more in agreement with how you have formulated these proposals than when you discussed them in a previous thread.

As for your wait-list idea the logical answer would be that one could only wait-list up to the amount of miles that one had in their account. Does give a preference to those whom are able to plan ahead though

American Airlines says the following in their marketing materials:

Maybe the SEC should have this more fully disclosed so that investors can get a better understanding of the airlines' businesses -- including the segment that is the frequent flyer mile business.