Need availabilty to book award XC SYD - LAX? I'm cancelling my booking soon
 

I'm currently holding a reservation for 2 one way award XC from SYD to LAX on UA for 12 Jan 2011 on UA826. I'm going to cancel because I found availability to return later. If you want to book these seats, please PM me to co-ordinate me cancelling so you can book. Please PM me so we can sync up on my cancellation. If I don't hear from anyone by tomorrow 10PM PST, I'm just going to cancel it.

It might be worth a shot, but there's no guarantee that your cancellation will leave any XC open. They could (and probably will) leave it at zero.

Very true, but like you said, worth a shot, and I'm willing to help someone try

Award seats are not separate inventory on UA (that has been the case on some foreign carriers).

The only time I have found the inventory goes back is when it is canceled soon after booking (and well before the flight). Even then sometimes it goes back right away, sometimes it takes overnight.

Let us know what happens.

Will do. We'll see if anyone wants it, and their success if any when they try to book.

i have done something similar to this before and it has worked. (with UA)
also tried it with SQ and it didnt work.

Sure they are (for saver awards). They have separate buckets for each award type (XF, XC, XY, NY) that are all managed by Inventory Management.

What I meant was UA doesn't decide once up front that 4 of the C seats on the flight will be for awards and the rest for revenue. Award buckets, like revenue buckets, are adjusted dynamically by IM based on sales and expectations of sales over the period the flight is offered for sale (normally 330 days on UA).

There are (or were) carriers that simply segregated (e.g.) 4 C seats on each long haul flight for awards. On those carriers, canceling an award would release the award seat back into inventory directly. By the same token, once the 4 were booked, no more would be allocated, although they may have had manual adjustments during the last few days or weeks.

What's NY? I thought UA only had NF and NC for upgrades.

NY is special Y inventory only available to 1K/GS

I guess we'll never know now. No one wanted to try it. I'm going to cancel now.

Why don't you check after cancelling and see if they come back?

I cancelled 3 one-way LAX-OGG economy saver awards on December 15th and immediately, 3 NY award seats became available. NY has been non-existent since July.

Interesting, it shows XC1 now, not sure if he canceled yet...

You don't happen to have any SFO-OGG you want to cancel for 1/6 - trying to get my nephew and his wife on (they have SFO-LAX-OGG now) :D

Very interesting. I spoke to the 1K desk to cancel the return, but they said they would have to cancel the whole itinerary, and rebook the outbound as a one way. Having been screwed over once before doing this going to Europe (granted a *A itinerary). I was very hesitant to do this fearing there would be no inventory when rebooking. The agent said she would soothe over my worries by booking the ow LAX-SYD first, then cancel the rt booking I have. Maybe there was extra XC inventory as she was able to do it. The weird thing is that I checked Expert Flyer this morning, and LAX - SYD was XC 0. I'm not sure if the 1k agents have some way of opening up XC seats, but it was done, and my heart is no longer racing.