Tag Archives for award.
There are certain “go-to” routes for award availability, when your favorite, most convenient or most ideal options aren’t open. One of those routes is Seattle – Tokyo on Japan Airlines.
Here’s a search for awards in July, which isn’t the month with the best availability. What I wanted to do was illustrate when awards are toughest to get what availability looks like.
A roundup of the most important stories of the day. I keep you up to date on the most interesting writings I find on other sites – the latest news and tips.
A little over a year ago American Airlines started offering more coach award space, and they did it in an interesting way. They started opening up award space on a married-segment basis — availability wasn’t for a specific flight but for an entire itinerary.
Agents are now being reprimanded for helping customers to work around these restrictions. And married segments make it very difficult to make changes to an award later, a real blow to Executive Platinums and ConciergeKey members who have free changes as a program benefit.
Qatar’s old 777s don’t have QSuites – the world’s best business class – but offer fully flat 2-2-2 business class (which is still good especially for couples, with great food and service). Availability is especially good on flights that offer one of Qatar’s older products.
What you’ll find right now is outstanding availability for specific months of the year on several routes.
Marriott has finally released hotel category assignments, letting us know the redemption pricing of hotels starting sometime in August. Hotels only received what category they’d be assigned to two weeks ago.
They’re highlighting that “Nearly 70 percent of all participating hotels can be redeemed for the same or fewer points.” That doesn’t actually sound good to me, though they point out 52% of hotels go down in price while 31% go up which is a little better.
American’s award availability has been quite poor over the last couple of years, so when space opens up I’ve frequently made note of it. One area that’s been especially bad are the transcon domestic flights between New York JFK and Los Angeles and San Francisco operated by a specially configured three-cabin A321 aircraft.
Right now though award availability is much-improved.
ANA first class availability, booked far in advance, is outstanding right now. And it’s accessible using miles from a variety of programs — in the Star Alliance and through other airline partnerships as well. They offer one of the best and most consistent first class products in the world. It’s not as flashy as Emirates or Etihad, but the service and food are fantastic.
Delta will no longer allow Skymiles members (at least those members in the U.S.) to hold awards over the phone. If you book by phone, you have to ticket immediately. And booking over the phone just became more limited, as non-elites can only make telephone award reservations between 8am and 10pm Eastern. Holding awards for 48 hours is still possible online. Awards on Delta as well as parter airlines Hawaiian, Alaska, Continental, and Northwest are bookable online.. sort of, sometimes, when the website works and prices out awards correctly. Of course, that means that awards on other partners like Air France, Aeroflot, and Korean cannot be held at all. This is a really annoying change. Finding awards can be challenging at times. Sometimes it takes humans because the online technology is lacking. You find flights…
USAirways seems to have updated their award chart with no notice whatsoever. The first item I’ve noticed is that flights between North America and “South and Central Asia” now run 80,000 miles for coach/120,000 for business/160,000 for first class — up from 60/90/120 thousand respectively.This really is a disappointment. I know that USAirways has had a much maligned program, and things have generally changed for the worse since America West took over things. But I was just starting to collect USAirways miles again over the past few months, racking up about 90,000. And now that doesn’t buy my favorite award any longer. Update: This was discussed briefly earlier in the week on Flyertalk. It surprises me that there’s less attention being paid to it than I would have expected. One summary of the changes to…
This is probably too inside baseball and technical for most frequent flyer program members, but Delta has implemented some nasty changes in the way they allow (or don’t allow!) you to book awards. There’s a current discussion of this on Flyertalk, naturally. As of this month, awards can only have two stops each way domestically and three internationally. If you live in, say, Montana and want to get somewhere on the East Coast you already have to make two stops (in Salt Lake City and Atlanta) most of the time. No extra stops in order to find an available award, and no extra stops to utilize your allowable stopover in a non-hub city.You can also only use ‘published routings’ when constructing your award itinerary. I have a United award flying DC-New York-San Francisco-Osaka-Bangkok-Phuket (with stops…
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 »
