American award availability is awful. There’s just no other way to say it! An airline frequent flyer program has 3 components.
- How easy is it to get the miles (whether that’s through credit card signup bonuses, shopping portals, or actually (gasp!) flying
- What’s the award chart. How many miles does it take you to get to where you want to go? That is… if your airline actually PUBLISHES an award chart!
- What’s the award availability like? How easy is it to find a flight to use your miles
There’s a reason that Capital One has all those commercials with Jennifer Garner talking about “disappearing” award seats!
Disappearing award seats?!?!?
It used to be that the only time you really had to worry about award availability was if you were trying to find premium travel (first or business class seats) or if you had zero flexibility on your destination or timing. And then, if worst came to worse, sometimes you just gotta suck it up and book a “Standard” award
Historically, I haven’t had much of a problem finding economy seats for domestic travel, but lately I’ve noticed a disturbing trend especially on American Airlines of having zero award availability for huge stretches of time. View from the Wing also posted recently on this, though he was focusing mostly on premium cabin travel.
Investigating American award availability
I first ran into this disappearing American award availability when trying to book a ticket for a friend of mine, to pay her back for watching our kids for a weekend. She wanted to go to Portland on a particular weekend for a friend’s wedding. Date flexibility was non-existent, but she was willing to fly from Cincinnati or any nearby airport (Columbus, Dayton, Indy, Louisville). Searching for Thursday and Friday, there was literally ONE flight with award availability out of any of those airports.
On the return trip, there was NOTHING to ANY of those airports! Here’s an example of what I was seeing
Now I do understand that Thursday-Sunday are the prime “business traveler” times, but I wouldn’t think Portland – Cincinnati would be a prime business traveler route, though I could be wrong!
Not only are there no SAAver awards, there aren’t any AAnytime Level 1 (20K) awards – all the way up to the Level 2 (30K awards). Amusingly, you can actually fly business class for less 🙂
Compare the awful American award availability to much-maligned Delta, where I was able to find EIGHT seats on a flight from Seattle to Cincinnati (and multiple different options on the same day!)
One other interesting note was that the bottom flight (the red eye to Dallas leaving at 12:30 a.m.) was selling for only $117 cash!
So rather than redeem those miles at a 0.39 cents per mile valuation (ugh!), in the end, I used ~8000 ThankYou points to book the cash flight home.
Am I alone here? Have you noticed disturbing (negative) trends with American award availability? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments
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AA is/was the gamer / churner airline and this is the result.
Greg – you could be right. Certainly it seems like there’s a glut of American miles out there and/or people that got 5,6,10 or more of those 100K Citi Executive cards last year!
I’ve seen the same, which makes Avios redemptions much more difficult. Even on random weekdays to hub cities which should have tons of flights available.
Right! I mean fine, if you want to restrict availability on “premium” routes because the cost per mile is ridiculous, fine. But this is getting pretty ridiculous
why not send them a tweet asking for an explanation?
Complete agree. American used to be very good but maybe US Air is running FF now?
No, it is not the influence of US on this one. Prior to the merger of their systems, there was a lot of availability on US flights, both domestic and international. The cutover in systems made pretty much all of it disappear.
I can’t help but wonder if it’s related to the upcoming AA award devaluation. The idea being that awards are going to cost much more post-March, so American doesn’t want to release much availability until then. I know that doesn’t explain lack of availability on economy domestic US routes (since those prices aren’t changing), but that’s all I can think of.
Or maybe it’s a marketing ploy that they’ll release all the space back in March and tout that as one of the “advantages” of the “new” AAdavantage 🙂
I agree. It has made Avios awards very hard on domestic simple routes as well. On Business awards and TATL it seems very bad as well. I think part of this is from people trying to burn miles before the upcoming devaluation as well. 11 months from March 2016 will be really bad I think.
When going for our Feb 2016 SE Asia trip, I was all in on AA miles. But since then, I’ve come to realize that going forward, Star Alliance is a much better match for us and where we want to go (more coverage to more destinations). So I’m focusing on Chase UR and United miles, and possibly Singapore miles (for my Citi TY pts) . People slam United, but at least there aren’t the ridiculous fuel surcharges, you get a stopover on a RT and I’m able to redeem them.
I currently have a 6 figure AA balance, and not sure when I’ll be able to use those miles. Frankly, Avios might be more useful at this point.
Yeah – it stinks. Personally I haven’t found United to be much better (spoiler: tomorrow’s post) but at least with Chase UR you’ve got more options!
What do you expect? With fewer airlines since the AA-US and UA-CO and DL-NW mergers, not to mention WN-America West/ATA, there are fewer flights on any route…and less incentive to provide as many award seats. There is even less incentive for airlines to have more than 1 or 2 saver award seats–only enough to justify their advertising of that saver award level.
Saver awards are soon going the way of the do-do…just like a mileage run. That new normal hasn’t yet registered for everyone because everyone is so used to being able to find saver awards or read about finding them on blogs like these. For those who don’t have to stick to a schedule or who can schedule far in advance, there are greater chances for finding award flights; for those who must stick to certain dates or wait too long, however, this is the new normal. Not just for AA but for all airlines.
First of all, you’re searching a time which is Spring Break for many schools.
For AA (and UA) I’m usually able to find a Saver seat but it will require a back haul routing. Case in point, UA had one flight available from SJC-NRT (via DEN!). AA typically has SJC or SFO – NRT via DFW.
I believe that on a CNBC documentary on AA a few years ago, they mentioned that AA (and I’m sure other airlines) would rather keep that last minute AUS-LHR seat open for revenue than give it away for an award, since they’ll presumably make more money on it. This is no different.
As someone who travels on award tickets between LGA/JFK-ORD, both American hubs at least every 6 weeks, I’ve had mixed results. There are times when there is nothing, like a few months ago, and then there are times where there is a plethora of awards–like after New Years between both location.
Could be a lot of factors–the glut of AA miles circulating now that the programs have merged, the Citi AA cards, etc. I think, however, most of us are using our AA miles for partner award/long-haul destinations, so I dont think it has to do with the amount of miles we have. If anything, it has to do with AA revenue mgmt. that, like today, are super inconsistent.
That’s why I won’t buy any AA miles. The award availability has been truly awful for the last year or two. It’s just not worth it.
I totally agree. I tweet them about the horrible award availability practically everyday. I can never find any award space that works for our us anymore. Even if you find a one-way, there are no return tickets available at all.
I think Bill nailed it. From what I’ve seen, this has more to do with aa trying to make $$ and not caring about ff flyers. Many flights have NO award availability the day the flight is online (11ish months out), which should be a violation of the terms of the ff program terms.
Even more disturbing are recent stories of aa flying planes with seats EMPTY and still not offering them as award seats. That is really hostile to loyal customers!
I became EP this past year via the US Airways challenge in January. I have been disappointed in my “investment” because of little AAward availability. In fact, I have flown more UA this past year on awards because AA had zero availability. It’s really shocking. And, going to Europe has been a complete joke with AA because of zero availability – forcing us to use BA and the lovely LHR fees. I’m switching back to UA despite having over a quarter million AA miles to burn.
the devaluation plus the influx of a TON of new elites via the challenge… :\ (including me, so it’s a double edged sword. the challenge wasn’t cheap, and now i can’t spend my miles)
Been trying to book DTW to LGA with Avios for November 2016 and there was no direct flights available even though they fly it 3-4 times a day. I finally found one return flight with 2 saver seats but still no out going. This is a Tuesday to Thursday trip too…I am astonished how poor it has been.
Also no saver awards on this flight Fri to Sun pretty much the entire calender….I think I am going to start focusing on Thank You points and use them like cash for domestic travel when not flying southwest (who I love and hate at the same time!).
In Dallas/Fort Worth, Texas, there is little UA and DL and other service and you have to change to go almost anywhere. For nonstop flights, it is pretty much only AA and WN. And AA availability is a joke.
I was watching AA award availability fairly closely for a couple months building up to a big family trip in November. We booked the trip clear back in Feb and were barely able to secure 4 saver economy seats at less than ideal routing and flight times. As the months passed few additional seats opened, quickly disappearing until we entered the 30 day window where they charge the $75 close-in booking fee. Suddenly tons of seats magically opened up. It actually worked out great for us as we were able to change our flights to better flight times without paying the fees but I defiantly think AA has been playing this game with Award availability trying to force people to pay the close-in booking fee in order to redeem their miles. My advice is to grab any flight available on the date you are looking to travel and then to check again for better flight times or routes that may open up close in. My dad was able to use this trick to switch to a shorter layover on his trip to Chile in December even right up to the day of travel.
That sounds about underhanded enough to be AA’s plan! 🙂
I used the same trick to get myself a much better routing on our trip back home from Rome – How I got us 16 extra hours in Rome… for FREE!
Good luck getting saver level to anywhere at anytime from CVG…