This morning I looked for availability for a departure tomorrow. Imagine my surprise when I could get either a first class or coach award at the standard rates. I thought to myself that there are plenty of award tickets left after looking at the flight and seeing it wasn't very full. I went back an hour later and there were no standard awards available, only rulebuster.

I was curious if anyone has noticed if Northwest ever releases award seats within 24 hours of departure if the plane is obviously not selling out.

Any feedback on fluctuations in award availability would be appreciated. Thanks.

NW's main tendency is to withhold seats on popular routes until time is getting short and it's obvious the flights won't sell out, then dump them to the award bucket.

This being low season to almost everywhere, it's actually easy now to get standard award bookings on short notice. Just do a 7-day availability search at WPAA Lister - http://usr.v7.com/wpaa/ - for any route you like and it's probably available on 5 or 6 of the next 7 days. But when you scan the week after that, you're likely to get zero because the yield managers haven't given up yet.

This easy availability will get shorter and shorter. In the spring season it's typical to find standard availability for one or two of the next 3 days, then nothing after that. In summer, standard award bookings on popular routes almost never happen -- Paris or Rome might show up about once a month -- because that's when NW tries to force everybody to pay double with Rulebusters.

On "ordinary" routes, the ones that don't attract tourists, you can usually fly any day in the near future around the year. And, unlike Continental, NW doesn't have the gall to charge a "service fee" when you take a sure-to-be-empty seat within a few days of departure.



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Wright Brothers Were Wrong

I am trying to do MEM-SEA in late May. Best flights are not open, though there are some options available. I did the checking for flights over the next week or so and found LOTS of availability.

Amazing how they dump award seats at the last minute into the system.

There is something strange that will happen at corporate with this. The award mgrs can now report to anyone that cares that a HIGH PERCENT of available award seats leave the gate empty, so why are people complaining? The can also up the percentage of award seats that are available on each flight, even though few people will look for them iside the one week window.

Yikes!

That is an excellent point. Typically unfair.

Then a more accurate view (which therefore WON'T be shown us!) would be the number award seat-days available on a flight. For example, a seat released 10 months before the flight date would be weighted more highly than one released 3 days before start of travel.
However more than likely the conversation would never get that far:

airline to public: "X number of flights went out with Y amount of FF seats, there's no shortage of FF availability."

public to airline: "So you flew X number of flights with Y empty seats, you let a resource (seat on a flight) perish without getting any money for it. Maybe your economic problems are because you can't sell seats."

airline mgr to public: "There's an entire issue of yield management to deal with. It's not necessarily best to sell a seat for any amount of money."

public to airline mgr: "So there's a lot more to the siuation that just whether a seat is empty or full."

Jeff

There are no circumstances in which an airline loses money by filling as many empty seats as possible with award travellers, as soon as it's recognized those seats will be empty.

The miles accumulated by frequent flyers are a financial liability to the airline, just like the billions owed to banks and to Boeing. The airline can earn a substantial profit by letting an award traveller have a non-revenue seat for 25,000 or 50,000 miles, at an incremental cost (actually net cost) of a few bucks for ticket handling plus any consumables served on board. (And remember it's not the airline but the passenger flying "free" who has to pay the cash for taxes, airports, security charges etc.)

The consensus is that the value of a mile is about 1.5 cents. So paying 25,000 or 50,000 miles for an award booking is like paying $375 or $750. By making unsellable seats available for awards as early as possible, the airline is retiring this debt for pennies on the dollar

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Wright Brothers Were Wrong

Yes, the airlines show these miles as a "debt", but that is considerably different than the debt they owe the bank.

1 - There is no interest factor building. In fact, since the value of a mile declines over time due to higher award charges, the airline wins the longer they stay on the books.

2 - If the lack of award seats results in the passenger actually buying a ticket,especially last minute, they airline gets REAL revenue.

3 - If the lack of award seats for a flight with discount seats encourages the passenger to buy a ticket instead, they again get real revenue.

4 - If the airline files Bankruptcy, they may have to deal with Boeing, etc to pay off debts but may well skip out on the customers with lots of miles. Same if they just close the doors.