Trans-pacific awards

I find that it's easier to find award availability on SQ using UA miles than on CX using AA miles in business class. In fact, one can even find award availability on SQ in first, especially on the LAX-NRT route.

I've noticed that CX has tightened up award availability quite a bit over the past year.

UA's business class award to Asia is an excellent deal at only 90,000 miles. And you get to mix and match some of the best airlines in the world including NH and SQ.

I have had many good experiences redeeming miles on UA; as recently as last week, I booked an award trip from SNA (Orange County) to YUL (Montreal) for Labor Day weekend 2007 with ease on United. Given the limited United service from both SNA and YUL (Air Canada, Star Alliance partner, was as usual not being any help with availability), and the fact it's a major holiday weekend with a Friday departure involved, and the fact the 330 day advance window for booking these dates had already been open for about 8 full weeks, I'd say that's worthy of commendation, as the O.P. implied. ^

In contrast, I probed Delta, and got next to no options for the same dates and adjacent ones as well. One outbound option they offered had me connecting in CVG and spending the night there at my own expense.

I also agree that AA is good, based on one recent experience.
The worst, IMHO? Got to be Northwest, hands down.

Another factor that mainstream media will never consider: which airlines make it possible to actually view the award inventory buckets yourself in a way that makes it easy to view a wide variety of options all at once?

For example: with UA, there are several widely-available tools/sites that allow you to easily look at award inventory (at least on UA metal). By the time I log in to United.com to actually redeem an award, I already know exactly what flights I'm getting. Even if it's an itin that requires a human agent, by the time I'm on the phone I already have all my data.

If these outside tools didn't exists, there are awards that would either be difficult or impossible to find doing a long series of United.com queries. So in my mind, the outside tools in and of themselves make UA award availability somewhat better.

I think similar tools exist for AA...not sure about the others. I'd be really interested to know if there are any good sites for querying partner award availability.

Right, the data says that.

But there's something screwy about the data, because it is generally much more difficult to find Skymiles award seats. Everyone's individual experiences are anecdotal, but try it yourself: take a domestic city pair a few months in advance and try it on Delta and United. See what happens.

The only thing I can think of is that more people are trying to book award travel on Delta, or are willing to pay more miles for the awards.

It's also possible that Delta is better at making seats available close to departure time. As I indicated, I generally book award travel months in advance.

With the usual caveat that this is anecdotal, I think you are absolutely right on both accounts:

(1) Booking a domestic or Canadian itin months in advance, it appears to me to be far easier to book an award on UA than DL. Unless I'm flying to fly around a holiday, UA's whole schedule for the day will be pretty much available.

(2) DL seems to open up seats close to departure time. My DL awards have been int'l, and those pesky MCI-ATL segments - even off-peak flights that are less than 50% full - clear two or three weeks before departure.

It sounds like you agree with me: it's frickin' annoying.

For my purposes (and inclusive of redemptions on partners), I still have it that AA ranks higher (and significantly so) than UA/US; and, in turn, UA/US ranks higher than DL/NW/CO when it comes to award availability space. However, for my purposes, the award availability gap between UA/US and DL/NW/CO has significantly narrowed, narrowed to the point where sometimes (i.e., with that "sometimes" being increasingly frequent) DL/NW/CO passes up UA/US if willing to tolerate a few more connections.

Looking at this from award rules flexibility, I'd place AA first, followed by DL (although DL is slipping a bit but not enough to make it worse than UA), then UA followed by NW/CO.

Overall, I rank AA's program better overall than the other major US carriers that fly intercontinental long-hauls. And While UA wasn't so far behind AA for my redemption purposes a few years ago, UA is now increasingly further behind AA for my redemption purposes. I'd say it's still:

1. AA
2. UA
3. US
4. DL
5. NW
6. CO

.... but, over time, the gap between AA and UA has widened while the gap between UA/US and DL/NW/CO has narrowed to the point where I'd say it's:

1. AA

with 2. UA as a distant second
with 3. US riding on UA's coat-tails
with 4-6 DL/NW/CO behind but gaining quickly on UA/US

I think Randy's quote from the WSJ story sums it up:

"The data can be misleading," said Mr. Petersen, founder of InsideFlyer.com. He'd like to see more data, including numbers on how many customers made requests but couldn't find seats.


Of course, what would be really meaningful would be a promise of at least X seats per flight in each class. But airlines will be loathe to do that absent congressional action.

As for personal observations, I would for the most part agree with GUWonder. I have had little trouble booking free trips on AA or UA; however the rest including US lag far behind.

A couple of years ago I tried to book a free coach trip on US from SFO to PIT to do a midwest baseball stadium tour. Now PIT is not exactly Maui or Europe, and my dates were flexible. Lo and behold there were zero flights available (incl. redeye). Not a single seat on a single day in July or August. Basically US customers in SFO were unable to to book a free trip during those months to a US hub (even tried going through CLT or PHL). So I would have to rank US near the bottom, though on occasion you can find *A awards via UA.

Isn't the 8% figure the number of tickets redeemed...not the % made available?


And I really do think the #s we have seen are misleading.
Say I call AA once for a good redemption value and get it 1st try. Say I redeemed 25K for a $500 ticket.

Then I call DL for a similar ticket. Nothing. I repeat this five times over the coarse of the year. Nothing. Finally, I give up and use 25K DL miles for a $150 ticket to STL.

My DL miles are basically worth 1/3 my AA miles but the number would still look the same.

As for my experience (about 5 million miles in 10 different programs) I rank them as follows:
1. AA
2. UA
3. DL
4. US
5. NW
6. CO

I agree UA to Asia is an excellent value.

But I have redeemed AA miles for CX F about 3 times, and CX J another time when I couldn't get F. All California-HKG-XXX Every time booked about 1 week in advance. That makes a big difference avail wise.

I think it's AA who wins for many things and that is including flights from say, BOS-MAUI...

-You can reserve and hold an award ticket
-You can get them to understand and assist with missing or late mile postings that would normally give you enough to fly said award (and I have had them front me some too!)
-They actually HAVE award seats on flights I use!

UA is ok but I have seen tons of glitches on their site, which I find to be the worst one for booking flights and more limited with creative itinerary options... Once I literally SAW it change/update 3 times when I was on it while trying to book an award with a friend who was on the phone also refreshing it so we could get the same itinerary. I find them to be a very class heavy airline. If you have status, you get priority. If not, see ya!

NWA is our choice for BOS-AMS as they fly direct. We have usually gotten the flight we need and if the site does not have it posted, you can call them up and they may even still have some seats even if you must pay that stupid $15 fee.

Definitely agree with that re: UA. I don't know if it affects the specific topic at hand - award availability - except at the very top level (1K), but throughout the entire UA customer service experience, they go out of their way to make non-elites' lives difficult. As a 1P now, I have a pretty positive experience, but I sure hope I never fully cycle out of UA status. As much as I enjoy the status, I'm not sure I'd go through that 25,000-mile grind to reacquire 2P. I see how non-elites are treated and it sucks.

As a non-UA elite, I agree with you: the overall "experience" in booking UA award travel can be unsatisfactory. I recently had a problem with a UA-partner cancelling my award travel flights, and just finding a competent customer service representative to understand the problem and rebook me was frustrating.

But that said, getting back to my original point, it seems that most flyertalkers agree with me that AA and UA are better than the competition in making standard award seats available. It would be my hope that they will someday be recognized for this achievement. As we all know, miles you can't actually use at standard reward levels aren't worth much.

As far as the overall customer experience goes in booking award travel, I'd have to give the nod to AA, because they have an almost entirely US-based reservation staff. As we all know, it's a rare award trip that can be handled entirely over the internet, and being able to reach a competent rez agent is invaluable in the process. I am not being xenophobic when I say that the typical US-based rez agent is significantly better at booking award travel than an outsourced, foreign agent.

Since UA outsources a significant percentage of their rez center staff, they earn a demerit in this regard. In many respects, DL offers the worst of both worlds: poor availability and foreign rez agents. For the non-flyertalker (aka, the vast majority of the public not familiar with the tricks of the ff trade), that would be a toxic combination.

I've had trouble in the past with UA's availability during ski season.

I've been with the frequent flyer programs from the start. Things have changed over those 25 years and I have found that there are considerable differences in award availability at any given time between the programs. However there seems to be a bit of a rotation in who has the most availibility at any given point in time.

I've been elite with four airlines. First with US, then TWA, then AA, and now I'm gold with Delta. First and foremost in today's system, elite status produces availability. When I went from no status with DL just two years ago to gold now, I went from very difficult to redeem to pretty easy.

The OP raises the question who is best if all things were equal. That's just not possible to answer. It depends on your home airport, where you fly, what time of the year, and status. However I can rate my experience with the airlines as a non elite member for each. To do this I will exclude my recent DL gold experience and rely on 2004 and older experience on them. I will also only use recent experience on Southwest since they changed to limited availability. This ranking is for availability to go anywhere in the USA domestic routes. International is very different since Southwest would not even be included.

My list is as follows:

1) AA
2) WN
3) UA
4) DL
5) US
6) NW
7) CO*

*Limited experience.

For some reason the OP ignored Southwest. They are becoming more and more important for non stop domestic service. My home airport is TPA and WN is number 1 there in departures by a wide margin over number 2 DL.

WN is obviously an important carrier, and the principal reason I excluded them is that data is hard to come by since their recent conversion from an "any available seat" to a "limited availability" award system. They also only allow folks who have already qualified for an award ticket to search award inventory (I won't qualify for my first "new" WN award ticket until next month, so I've never been able to search). The anecdotal (and preliminary) information from the WN board would suggest domestic availability is at least as good as AA's or UA's.

That said, there are obviously some significant limitations in WN's program over those offered by these other carriers. The biggest limitations are that you only get 2 years to earn your tickets and, once you do, the redemption clock starts ticking: 12-months "use it or lose it." Given these limitations -- which obviously limit the number of free tickets out there -- it would be pretty shocking if WN didn't offer better-than-average availability.