Tag Archives for award availability.
A lot of people are grounded right now. Most of us are going to travel again. And we’re sure going to be itching to do so.
No matter what happens with the business of any of the airlines, we’re going to have big airlines to take us where we want to go. They are going to have tons of empty seats for awhile – which means deep discounts, award availability, and aggressive mileage promotions.
One of the best tools in travel years ago was Travelocity Dream Maps. You’d plug in the city you were starting from, and how much you were willing to spend, and it would give you a map of all the places you could go for that amount or less. The tool was decommissioned about a decade ago, but American Airlines has an award map that is similar for miles.
When hotels aren’t making the award space available to members that they should I’ve had good success getting the loyalty program to intervene. I’ve had especially good success with Hilton, such as with the Waldorf Astoria Jerusalem and the Waldorf Astoria Grand Wailea on Maui.
Readers reach out to me all the time with award redemption problems and I do my best to get them solved, week after week.
San Francisco – Singapore non-stop, SQ flights 1 and 2, are on sale for 66,500 miles each way in business class. That’s a 30% discount. You need to book in February for March travel. Premium economy awards are also on sale for several routes.
IdeaWorks made 3600 award searches for premium cabin awards across 18 airlines. They always searched for 2 seats at a time for travel between June and October. For each airline they looked at the 10 routes over 2500 miles with the most seats on offer.
United, Delta, and Scandinavian are the worst airlines at offering premium cabin award space on their own flights, according to Jay Sorenson’s new study. Turkish Airlines, Lufthansa, Singapore, Emirates and Etihad are the best.
Flying between the U.S. and Australia in business and first class is among the toughest frequent flyer awards out there. Frequently it requires connecting in Asia rather than flying non-stop.
Right now though there’s incredible Qantas first class award availability using Qantas Frequent Flyer miles. While you’ll find a handful of dates between now and the end of June where a couple of seats are available, starting in July and through the end of the year things really open up.
The Hyatt Regency San Francisco has been a long-time, repeat scofflaw of Hyatt’s loyalty program. They have played games to avoid offering rooms to program members for points. However they are once again making award nights available.
Back in 2015 their strategy was to only make standard rooms available as part of ‘packages’ (such as with breakfast or parking included) and thus those rooms were not available for points stays. I pushed and got that fixed, but it’s a game of whack-a-mole and they were back to their old tricks.
Alaska Airlines partners with Singapore Airlines. Alaska has access to more award space than other Singapore Airlines partners. Usually partner airlines, like fellow Star Alliance members United and Avianca, cannot book business or first class long haul awards on Singapore Airlines at all.
Alaska not only is able to book premium cabin awards between the U.S. and Asia on Singapore Airlines but Alaska seems to show availability soemtimes when Singapore isn’t offering the space to its own Krisflyer members.
American is discounting premium cabin awards between the U.S. and Hawaii doesn to 28,000 – 30,000 miles per person each way, a discount from the normal 55,000 (saver) and 67,500 (lowest AAnytime) award price. Use the new award search availability calendar to find dates where the lowest prices are available.
As Qantas retires its fleet of Boeing 747s, Boeing 747 – ‘Sydney’ (VH-OEF) will fly its last flight from Sydney to Los Angeles on February 9, 2020.
And notably there are award seats available in economy, premium economy, and business class on this nostalgia flight.
Gary Leff is one of the foremost experts in the field of miles, points, and frequent business travel -- a topic he has covered since 2002.
Co-founder of frequent flyer community InsideFlyer.com, emcee of the Freddie Awards, and named one of the "World's Top Travel Experts" by Conde' Nast Traveler (2010-Present) Gary has been a guest on most major news media, profiled in several top print publications, and published broadly on the topic of consumer loyalty. More About Gary »
