SW I'm contacting the DOT regarding lack reward space for the original rewards
 

Has anyone contacted the DOT over this? the lack of award space for the original rewards is almost non-existent.

I haven't seen this.

My experience is that award space opens up quite nicely in the last week or so before travel. Far in advance on peak dates you will find nothing, just like with other airlines' saver awards.

You're wasting your time.

DL removed its award chart altogether, arguably to preempt a DOT violation.

Does DoT do any thing with consumer complaints other than report how many there are?

:D Exactly. Does about as much as the DOJ does with merger / antitrust reviews. Lots of nice paying government jobs with little effect and outcomes.

It's not worth the bandwidth it takes to file a complaint. And that presumes you have an unlimited data plan.

DOT has uniformly stayed away from whining about FFP availability and focused on things that matter to consumers.

$300,00 in fines doesn't count?

Southwest Gets Hefty Fines for Advertising $59 Fares That Didn't Exist

How many standard awards can there still be out there? Anyone know the official Sunset date?

OP: Try calling customer relations to see if they can book something for you. Word is that they are doing this for A-Listers; worth a try even if you're not.

At the minimum, it will likely be more productive than filing a DOT claim.

Gotta be around 5/12/16, right? The last day to top off a seeded SA a year ago.

SW I'm contacting the DOT regarding lack reward space for the original rewards
 

My last available SA expires on 5/13/2016.

If you are A-List Preferred,the Dallas CS# will override and book for you.


Interestingly, after they did this for me last weekend, my flight showed that I used a 'Freedom Award'. On the day of travel, standard award availability opened up.

I cancelled the 'freedom award' override booking, hoping it would redeposit as a freedom award. No luck--went back as a standard award.

Do file a complaint
 

I do think you have a very legitimate complaint, and would definitely file with the DOT. I have had the same experience. SW has rendered the legacy awards almost impossible to use with very little availability. Even on flights that have the lowest fare buckets available for awards, there is often no award availability. If you are not A list, there is no chance of an override.

I think a strong case can be made the impossibility of using these awards amounts to a breach of contract. As other posters have noted, it is true that availability is often low for many award classes on other airlines. But, there is a huge difference. On other airlines, your miles don't expire, and if you can't use a reward this year, you can use it next year. This is not the case with the legacy awards. If you can not find a flight by the expiration date, they are gone, and there is no chance SW will offer you an extension.

Will a complaint help you personally? it is possible, but not likely. When you reply to the DOT, SW does have to respond to you personally, and cc the DOT--so sometimes it prompts a better response. But usually not. Still--you should file out of principle. If enough customers complain about this, it is possible it will prompt an investigation. And the DOT complaints rates are used by the media to compare the customer service among airlines--and a complaint at least gets SW a well deserved ding for their less than honorable actions here.

I don't expect to gain from this, just for the DOT to metaphorically slap SW on the wrist. Airlines hate DOT complaints (except the UA Denmark mistake complaints which wasted everyone's time) and I think it's nasty what SW is doing regarding availability of those old legacy awards. I'll do it tomorrow - I've been busy. As you say, if enough people complain, hopefully SW will open up award space prior to their expiration which is all that I want anyway. I typically fly UA in the US at the moment and currently they have great award availability (IMO). nothing ventured nothing gained....

I have been using standard awards regularly for well over 10 years. I have seen no deterioration in availability over the last several years. Furthermore, I believe the allocation algorithm has not been modified in recent years.

I don't doubt that you are seeing tight availability for the flights you want, but I do doubt that you would have seen anything better a year or two earlier under the same circumstances.

People here would be enthusiastically agreeing with your observations if they were the rule, so they must be the exception.

Never a problem finding award travel on WN..

who are they trying to Kidd.

? so what is that algorithm

All the savvy fliers I know rarely fly SW and only a few of them have legacy awards - Quite frankly it is not worth their time to complain (I've brought it up) - it's not as if you are going after a first class LH from FRA.......It's somewhat the principle and I would like to use them if possible.

I think you & I have had this discussion before and may have concluded that its highly airport/route dependent. SA availability dried up out of ISP many, many years ago coupled with their tremendous service cutbacks. Had it not been for the A List+ override secret, I would have been stuck with many of 6 AirTran 2 step awards I created at that deadline. As usual, YMMV.

But its all moot as they all go away 5/13/16 anyway to a tiny subset of those who seeded a final award...

Nice way to ruin your credibility.

As I understand it, an award seat is opened on a flight (per flight number, not per one-way trip) if and only if a WGA cash seat would be offered at a fare of $X for that flight. The value of X does NOT equal any cash fare bucket price. It is probably at or below the low end of cash prices.

For a flight from A to B, X is computed as the anticipated fare earned in the A-B market averaged over all customers on flights from A to B. If 90% of the customers are on $49 fares from A to B the average fare earned will be a little higher than $50. If 50% of the customers are paying $80 to fly A to B to C, then the A to B portion might earn only $40 from those customers, pulling down the average.

The algorithm is far from transparent, but my experience is simpler to summarize. If a short haul flight would sell out at $100 minimum fare that flight is not likely to have standard awards open. Think Friday and Sunday peak hour flights. These flights earn above-average yields so they don't get award seats.

If a long-haul flight would sell out at $200 minimum fare, same thing. That kind of fight has above-average yield. You can get an unpopular flight with a standard award, especially late in the game when the pricing engine decides that the flight is not going to sell out for cash fares. You will not get a seat on a popular flight that has high yield unless at the last minute the pricing engine decides that cash purchases have come up short of expectations.

I believe that other airlines allocate their saver award seats very similarly, except that premium class awards sometimes get no last-minute boost to inventory even if the sales fall short of expectation.

I don't know anything about this matter (for SW) so your post is interesting to me.