Empty First Class, and no award seats?
 

Well, this has happened before , but it is still frustrating....

For many (if not all) of us, we know that award seats become available on UA 331 days prior to departure for a specific flight. Knowing that, I called 331 days in advance to book a F class award trip for my wife and myself to Paris next fall. No problem with the outbound seats - 2 first suites on UA 960. The UA reservation rep recommended that I call back in 9 days to book the return.

9 days later, after checking UA connection and seeing that first was totally empty, I called UA reservations and requested our return seats in F class and received the unfavorable reply of "I'm sorry sir, there are no seats available". I knew this was not correct, and asked if there were seats in the system, to which UA replied, "yes, there are seats available for purchase, but there are no award seats available." When I inquired about connecting flights, I was told " There are no first class award seats available between Paris and SFO on this day."

I asked politely to speak to a supervisor, who quickly told me that not all flights offered award seats - well, was I surprised to hear this! I asked if this was a new capacity control program, and she told me that UA was not "fond" of giving up such valuable seats prior to UA having the opportunity to sell them. I asked her what we should do, since we could not really spend the rest of our lives in Paris (though that would be nice!). She offered to put us in business class, charge us the full 200k miles for the F class awards, and if 2 f class seats opened up, they would move us. What if the seats did not open up? I was told they would not refund the extra 40k miles for the ruturn trip, since UA does not offer a one way f class/1 way C class award. I was told "it is up to you." I booked the c class return, and am now waiting to see what happens....

I am 100% sure that F class will open up, but after having this happen on nearly every trip to Asia and Europe over the past 5 years, I am growing tired of this. Bottom line - if UA has some sort of unwritten rule that does not release "valuable" seats 9-11 months in advance, they need to document this and allow their passengers to understand and plan accordingly. I know that UA's job is to make money, grow the investments of their investors and fill seats, but if a loyalty program is used solely as an advertisement, and not a program to reward loyalty, UA will find themselves in an unfriendly waters as more and more people are exposed to these types of situations .

SFOPremex

This has happened to me on almost every UA F trip I've ever booked. Eventually it clears. But for there to not even be a single award seat when the cabin is empty... don't get me going.

A good agent will try and force connections... building a PNR piece by piece. See if there are any award F seats to the US from CDG through any gateway. Good luck... I thought I was gonna be "stranded" in europe after new years, but everything cleared last week.

Usually, there is a certain release date when they open up particular cabins for award seats...Especially in premium classes...Similar experience for me:
http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/Forum50/HTML/003642.html

I wasn't even offerer a waitlist at first...

In the olden days--which, I think, were only about six months ago--you could have them done a split award... XF on the outbound, XC on the return, charged for 40k for XC and 50k for XF. And, this would have been on an exception basis.

Repeatedly--and to the point that I now believe it--Reservations is saying that they will no longer make these exceptions. You must ticket at the higher award level.

DO make sure you request a waitlist of the class of service you've paid for-- your stand-by priority for that (if you don't clear in advance) will be ahead of all upgrades. You paid for the better seat, after all.

Just a minor technical point. Apollo can look forward 331 days, so it is impossible to book or check availability any farther out than that for _any_ kind of seat, paid or award. THAT is what the 331 day mark is all about. I don't believe that UA has ever promised specifically that award seats are going to be available at that point; only that it is impossible to have availability before then, because it is impossible for all types of reservations. (The fine print if they are smart will say something like "You can book award travel up to 331 days out..." which is technically true -- you _could_ under ideal circumstances; those circumstances just never happen.)

Like you and the other posters, I have almost never had any luck getting an international XF seat 331 days out; UA inventory control simply does not allocate them that far out, period. One trick that has worked for me several times is to get XF on a crazy set of connections that no one would ever actually fly, but eventually gets you to your destination, and then wait for the itin to become impossible due to the inevitable schedule changes. At that point even a low level res clerk, but certainly a supervisor, is forced to respond to your phone call of "I was confirmed to my destiantion in XF on that day but you eliminated the flight; now you have to put me on the nonstop". It has worked for me 2 or 3 times, but does require nerves of steel!

This is interesting. Any other FTalker with similar experiences and work-arounds please let us know. They are valuable information.

------------------
I fly therefore I am!

SFOPremex: I was wondering, have you aksed about a return via IAD, ORD or LAX? I realize that this requires a stop/change of plane, but at least you could get the return award booked now and then work the direct flight return in the future. What I'd really like to know is if UA is somehow making it impossible for us to book the award ticket we want, or am I being too pessimistic? If you couldn't get a return through IAD, ORD or LAX I'd be very, very disappointed.

Conspiracy Theory:
This is United's way of taking back some of the bonus miles they have or will have given out for the "Summer of Hell" http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/wink.gif

"DO make sure you request a waitlist of the class of service you've paid for-- your stand-by priority for that (if you don't clear in advance) will be ahead of all upgrades. You paid for the better seat, after all."

IK-SFO, although this would be true with SFOPremex, UA's system is very sloppy and it's very likely that because of THAT, he would NOT be ahead of upgrades for the return unless he baby-sits that waitlist and then gets to the airport several hours ahead of time to be sure he's put at the head of the DM list when UA drops the ball if he doesn't clear before flight day..

I had the same experience, where I was assured by UA reservations that I would be ahead of all 1Ks who wanted an upgrade at the airport when they did the DM list..at the airport, the gate agent gave me a dumb look & said "gee, you're not ON the list." I had paid with miles to upgrade both myself & my wife. It turned out that only 1 FC seat remained so I let him give it to one of the long list of those wanting to upgrade..

My feeling is that the waitlist does NOT carry over to the airport control DM list (or they screwed up big-time in my case). Unless you get to the airport hours early, you'll only get a spot on the DM list from your check-in time. And unless you make a stink about it, they won't give a rats ... that you already paid for the upgrade..

Yes, and why is this? There is no transition between WL and DM, they don't "talk" to one another and it's a bummer!!

I wonder how other airlines do it?

Transpac - When I spoke to the first UA rep, and then the supervisor, I asked for "any" routing from CDG that had 2 F class seats available. Both, almost in harmony, told me that there were no F class seats available on the the non-stop, or thru LAX, IAD, ORD, FRA etc.....Looks like inventory management thinks CDG-US will be quite busy next year.

Geroge J - Same thing almost happened to me coming home from LHR last year. I booked the tickets 8 months in advance, got 2 first suites on the outbound, but could only book C class on the return. I called nearly every day to check on f class availability, and knew that there were at least 6 out of 11 seats open (my local UA rep confirmed my view of UA connection for that specific flight). When we checked in for our return, we were told the flight was very full, but we could use the F class lounge while waiting the flight. Nothing cleared, so we boarded in C class, and then 1 minute prior to the door being closed, we were moved to F class. We were very happy to get moved, don't get me wrong, but were very unhappy to find 6 out of the 11 seats filled with uniformed and deadheading UA employees. And to top if off, they all had their own "party" on the way home - lots of loud laughter, running around etc. Not exactly what we were expecting out of F class....So my assumptions were correct - unless they invisibly blocked those seats for deadheading crew, there were seats available for weeks and weeks prior to departure.

Hope this does not happen to us again for this trip, but who knows!

SFOPremex

[This message has been edited by SFOPremex (edited 11-21-2000).]

As I wrote at the Award Center section of The Unofficial United Help Desk: The situation of no Saver capacity controlled award seats being available the moment a flight goes on sale is nothing new and is often the norm. Until the Yield Management system gets some sales booked and some time passes so that it can make it's first "assesment" of the flight, they often hold back all awards seats on flights early out. And yes, many of United's most popular flights might never have advance Saver space allocated to them.

Patience is your only option when dealing with a Saver Award. If you find you don't have any patience or time to play the Saver game, then an unrestricted capcity control-free Standard award may be your only viable option.

[This message has been edited by PremEx (edited 11-21-2000).]

I didn't know this referred to a Saver award (but I should have I guess). I got alarmed because I thought that there were some capacity controls on Standard awards (now, thanks to PremEx I know that there aren't) and that SFOPremex couldn't get a Standard award. Nevermind, I understand now.

The below is from my brother, to whom I sent a link to this thread. He did some in depth work on this topic several years ago.

Updated by The Brother:
__________________________
Wow, that's quite a B-board. Makes me really appreciate that I am no longer
a precious-metal-card frequent flyer!

There are some astute people there. Not many people are aware that Covia/Apollo has 331 days in advance hard-wired, much less that the airlines don't bother setting levels for F until a few months before departure.

It's interesting that plutonium-card flyers know more about the system than some res agents, but not surprising since they can focus deeply on a narrow subset of rules whereas the res agents require broad knowledge of a vast system. Presumably all readers of this board recognize the value of being nice to the res agents, who are doing the best they can in a tough job.

The economics of yield management (actually Revenue Management is a better term) for F (which is generally trans-oceanic for UA) are simple: the downside risk of turning away a paying F because seats were booked by freebies is huge; hence it is optimal to reserve large numbers of seats for paying F-class pax, even if the probability of selling those seats is small. Then fill up the cabin with whoever at the last minute. (As an aside, the crazy mix of pax in F makes forecasting F much more challenging than Y unless the data gathering systems are bulletproof, which is rare.)

If the airlines assigned a $ value to the bonus miles they took in (and made it greater than the miniscule marginal cost of carriage), they could include that in the RM algorithms and would likely reserve in F for frequent flyer miles. However, they have to move gingerly in this regard because miles are not taxed as income nor are they carried as liabilities on the airlines' books, and if they assign $ to them then a huge can of worms opens up.

So an interesting question is would people like to have the miles taxed as income but have more seats available? I think we know the answer to that!


[This message has been edited by TravelinWilly (edited 11-22-2000).]

Travelin Willy, thanks for the info. So how did SFOPremex get the SFO-CDG (outbound) F seats so easily (331 days in advance)?