The rules of the game - when are seats released?
 

When I play a game, I try to at least know the most important rules. With seats for award travel on popular routes such a limited commodity, I figure it makes sense to know when seats are actually released for award travel.

I've heard all sorts of different things, from so-called experts to NW agents - and I've spent quit a bit of time attempting to decipher things on the NWA website. None of these seem to agree.

I often hear the "331 days" rule - that award travel seats become available 331 days in advance. Yet it appears that you can book award travel more than 331 days in advance on Northwest's website (sometimes, to some places); in other cases, it appears that seats for award travel have not yet been released 330 days from now.

Does anyone really know what the deal is? When exactly do seats become available? I'm looking at booking some award travel for about 350 days in advance, and want to be ready to jump when the seats are actually available - if only I could figure that out.

Thanks.

PS: Sorry if this is answered elsewhere - I looked for it and didn't see it.

Curious game, for sure...
 

I just "played" this game earlier this summer and "won," (sort of) but by luck. I called NWA Elite line almost every day to check on when seats were released. I started at the 331 day mark and kept at it. I was looking SBN-AMS/OSL. I never found seats all the way to OSL and ended up booking FWA-LGW and will take another airline to OSL.

The DTW-AMS flights run very full and are very popular. I was told, looking DTW-AMS that it was the "flight across the water" that was the issue in why I couldn't get seats. I'm not sure if the seats on those flights were ever released. We had to find the less-travelled DTW-LGW route for our seats. Even then, an agent told me I was getting the "last two seats" on that flight. However, two weeks later, my sister was able to cash in miles to get another seat on the flight.

I think they're released incrementally and (apparently) randomly. Persistence and creative rewards! There is a nice thread on here on creative ways to cash in miles for NWA across the Atlantic, using the many partners. It certainly depends on which agent you get when you call NWA too.

I'm not sure if that is always true. I was fortunate to book two standard award trips for next May and July, DTW-AMS-MUC and DTW-LGW. The problem was with LGA-DTW. In both cases, the LGA flights were not available, but EWR-DTW was. The trek to NJ is not the best so I'm hoping to make platinum in December and possibly change EWR to LGA.

Seats are released when NW's yeild management decides that there will be unsold seats on a flight. So really, there is not answer. If flights are selling well, why give away seats if you can sell them?. If there are open seats, why not give them away? I am sure there is a algorithim that determines when seats are released, but it is going to be impossible for anyone to figure out. You would also need to know many variables that only NW knows (unsold seats, which buckets, historical sales data, ...). Each flight will be different for each day. Flights can be booked 331 days out, but if historical data shows that flight is 100% sold in a high fare class, they are not going to give away seats until closer to departure, and only if it does not sell well. Elites can also get better availability, so the formula will change depending on your status with NW.

The standard answer here seems to be check often and try alternate routings, dates, airports, etc.

Good luck on finding what you want.

352 days in advance NWA (330/331 DL CO)
 

try to use NWA award search past 351/352 days in advance and you will
get a notice about too many days in advance.

of course (barring platinum status) that typically means 352 for your Return flight, which complicate things.

by playing around with the # of passengers you can get a sense of how
many seats are available (ie you'll be pushed to rule buster status when your
# pax exceeds number of seats)

I used DL sky miles to book NWA awards and thats why i know about delta having a shorter lead time. the made a "one time exception" and held those seats until they were available to delta. this was critical as we needed to have four seats and we already had 3 booked with nwa using WP miles

that being said we ended up getting two seats on a tuesday night, and two more on the next flight (approx 50 minutes) that was DTW-AMS june 2006.
there were ONLY two WP seats on each of these flights (at least at that time
available to Silver elite)

with an open jaw we got 4 seats from Paris to London (6:00 pm friday, air france) and finally 4 seats from LGW to DTW on July 4th.

we got all four tix at 50K each.

additionaly, i found i could not "trust" the award calendar - sometime seats were available when the color coding indicated they were not.

brad