Best way to check *A award inventory???
 

What is the best way to research Star Alliance award inventory using Dividend Miles? When I called the US Airways 800#, I reached a CSR in Mexico City who was unable to provide much help. The ANA website has an excellent award search function (including *A awards) but the inventory doesn't seem to match what USAirways is showing as available. For those of you who have booked complex international award itineraries (I'm planning a trip in C or F to NRT & BKK) please let me know your experiences.

For award aviability on UA-operated flights, you could log into united.com using a Milieage Plus account - even if you have a 0 balance and use the the award search tool. Make sure you have the settings in your profile set to "advanced" so it will show you exactly how many award seats are available. It seems that US agents can't access all the UA award seats. They can only book them if they're showing N5 or higher. Has anyone had any luck getting UA to release their award seat inventory to US?

ExpertFlyer doesn't display UA award seats.

It's a bit confusing to me, but as near as I can tell (and someone please correct me if I'm wrong):

• The UA website seems sometimes to omit award availability on flights that Air Canada (AC) or All Nippon Airways (NH) website(s) show as available.
• The AC website seems sometimes to omit *A award availability if AC flights are available to fit the search criteria.
• The NH website doesn't seem to show Swiss (LX) availability (When did LX join *A? - perhaps not loaded yet?)

So you probably want to check each.

As for Expertflyer, IMHO: among *A carriers, only AC's award code(s) are shown.

MisterAviator-

I just booked a *A award trip to BKK and let me tell you, it was not easy. You might want to take a look at my recent posts to familiarize yourself with some of the shenanegans USAir might pull along the way as you try to book your trip.

In the end the trick to getting a ticket was to keep calling back over a series of days or even weeks. Depending on when you are hoping for a ticket may depend on the ease of booking. Also, you may want to consider whether or not you would be willing to fly into a different city and buy a ticket to your final destination. But if you do that, plan carefully. Buying ticket between BKK & NRT will cost you $400-700 depending on the season. But buying tix between BKK and SGN, HKG, etc would be pretty cheap.

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Arrrrrgh, Sorry. I have access to their ticketing system through work. :p

strange, i found ANA spot-on for my BKK award with US miles for late-06.

I used the ANA tool to book an award ticket in Oct, out of my desired routing it didn't match on 1 segment out of 8, so I think it's a good tool to at least get you in the ball park.

I'd been hearing about the Star Award search tool on ANA's web site so I went and registered for an account and found the search to be very good. At least it gives you the 3 possible scenarios - seats available, seats can be requested or seats not available. Plugging in various dream vacations to Pacific, Asian and Australian destinations for dates 6-8 months out, i was able to find biz/first with a little bit of flexibility, and almost always award availability.

So then I plugged in PHL-CDG for next July 1 to July 10. The ANA tool showed biz available on 7/1 but not 7/10. So I went to the USAirways web site Dividend Mile redemption and plugged in the same cities/dates. Looks like we have a match! There is a 40,000 Envoy award seat available on the 7/1 date that ANA's site showed Star Availability. The return would be 80,000(full unrestricted award), which also matches with what ANA's tool said (* award not available on 7/10).

Just wanted to bump this up and report all the success I've had recently using the ANA site to check *A award availability. I booked IND-ORD-NRT-ORD-IND for a friend, DFW-FRA-VIE-FRA-MLA-FRA-MUC-IAD-DFW for a friend, IAD-FRA-VIE-FRA-MLA-FRA-MUC-IAD for me, HNL-NRT-BKK-HKT-BKK-NRT-ORD-IAD for my dad, and IAD-JFK-BKK-HKT-BKK-NRT-ORD-IAD for me. All of those are business class awards using US miles and were booked within the last few months. All of the flights showed as available on the ANA site and all were available when I called US. Using the ANA site has shown availability that most US agents would not have found, so it really is a great tool. Plus, most of the time the US agent comments that complex award bookings never go that well and then thanks me for doing my homework before calling.

For First and Business, if it only shows 1 award seat at united.com, it won't be available to US Airways.

For some reason the ANA tool works well with LH/NZ and LO award look-ups but it plain sucks when it comes to looking up SQ travel. It lists 2 Biz awards throughout the entire Aug 2007 from EWR-SIN, but when I call US all they have is 4 Y seats. And this is on many SQ pairs such as CDG-SIN, SIN-MLE, LAX-SIN, JFK-FRA. Weird. Also, the AC tool almost never works for me. I remember reading somewhere that the new usairways.com will have a *A award booking tool, but I think that will happen only after all the other partners create something like that on their websites. I just don't see it coming at all right now. Right now, they are busy with more important things.

All of the airlines have to approve the request for award seats. In this case its possible that the seats are not indeed available OR its possible that SQ is denying you the seat. It happens, for reasons that I do not understand.