fly747first

That and Air NZ's Revenue Management is barely releasing any award J seats on this route to Star Alliance partners.

However, I have seen much better J award availability for AKL - NAN. In fact, I got a J award last year and by the time we departed, the J cabin was only booked to 50% on the 772.

IADFlyer123

Just checked availability on UA.com for PVG-AKL award seats for June and July 2014 - plenty of business class available. Now, I am not sure if it is Phantom or actual: but seems like they are available.

kmfdm91

The PVG route must be some of the only flights with availability, since I looked for the first half of August (I know, N.America Summer Break) and there wasn't any C availability at all for any of the pacific flights at all, and not great Y redemption either.

I was considering an option to the region, given the cheap UAMP redemption options, but had to scrap them when at least a 3+ hour flight would have been in Y, plus perhaps the flight to New Zealand, plus of course all the connections coming from Asia

-jeremy

crimsona

NRT has decent space too, but PVG is definitely the king

fly747first

PVG gets the 767-300 with recliner J seats so I wouldn't recommend it.

crimsona

Hopefully by next year it'll be using the 787-9

On the other hand, that might be the end of available seats too.

I had an equipment change from 772 to 763 NRT-AKL last year I was a little depressed...

crnk

Ok--so let me clarify--as far as I can see from pulling some random weekdays, there are about 2-3 widebody NZ trans tasman flights per day. 1-2 of those are AKL-SYD and another is AKL-BNE. SYD flights are in 24 seat cabins and the BNE is either 26 or 44. No matter how you slice it, from what I can see there might be 100 NZ J seats trans tasman a day. Each of those widebodies has 200-300 seats on them, and the A320 is the most common narrowbody with over 150 seats. With what I would guess is 10+ flights daily, you'd see that there are somewhere around 2k Y seats and less than 100 J.

So if you're picky and want J on SYD-AKL, no wonder it is hard--they have 25-50 J seats a day on the nonstop vs about 1000 in Y.
I see why they wouldn't release these seats to partners--why would you when you don't have many and you can probably fill the few you do have?

weirdlyndon

I just booked this for late 2014 - it's showing as a 789. Whether that actually happens is a different story.

fly747first

Fingers crossed, hope you do end up getting the 789. ^

fly747first

Right, but it's both market and flight specific, and even the directionality and booking window counts. If Air NZ RM team sees that they can actually sell all seats, of course they won't release any award seats.

Say that last year on a particular day, Air NZ had two 772s flying SYD - AKL - SYD. On the SYD - AKL direction, they had 8 unsold J seats between the two flights and zero unsold seats on the AKL - SYD direction.

Naturally, the RM analysts are going to set the inventory for AKL - SYD at zero award seats, but they may release 1-2 award seats on the SYD - AKL direction depending on the booking curve of these flights and whether there were cancellations or not in the previous year, as well as other factors.

It's not really about the number of J seats per day per se since often, RM analysts are forced to handle a multi-cabin aircraft simply because Network Planning assigned it to them primarily for cargo reasons, not because there is actually a high demand for F or J, though of course in the SYD - AKL market there is actually decent demand for J.

weirdlyndon

Thanks!! You and me both.

If the 789 doesn't enter service by then, I'd consider that a big enough 'schedule change' to rebook my award ticket and make UA honor original pricing!

ironmanjt

They are, and a good amount of NRT-AKL as well. I booked a couple to use up my miles ahead of Feb 1.