One of the best ways to maximize airline miles is to redeem on an airline other than the one you’re accruing miles with, and take advantage of award pricing sweet spots. There are some fantastic arbitrage opportunities out there, whether it’s redeeming Avianca Lifemiles for Lufthansa first class, or redeeming Virgin Atlantic Flying Club points for All Nippon Airways first class.
While some airlines release the same award availability to all partners, there are often discrepancies in availability between airlines. Why does British Airways Club show a Japan Airlines award seat, but American AAdvantage doesn’t? Why does Singapore Airlines KrisFlyer show a Singapore Airlines award seat that partner programs don’t have access to?
I figure it’s worth addressing that question here in a “big picture” way. What causes discrepancies in award availability between airlines, and what can be done about it? Below are some thoughts…
In this post:
Airlines don’t make all award space available to all partners
The single most common cause of award availability discrepancies is simply that not all airlines make all award space available to partner airlines.
There are three major alliances — oneworld, SkyTeam, and Star Alliance — and historically the individual airlines have made the same saver level award space available to members of partner programs as they did to members of their own program. However, that’s increasingly not the case.
In some cases airlines make more award space available to members of their own program, and in some cases airlines make more award space available to some partner programs over others. Just to give some examples:
- EVA Air makes considerably more award space available to members of its own program than to members of partner programs, especially for business class
- Lufthansa makes first class award space available to members of partner programs at most a few days out, while members of Miles & More can access award space in advance
- Singapore Airlines makes most of its first class award space available exclusively to members of its own KrisFlyer program, and the airline releases different amounts of business class award space to different partners
- Qatar Airways makes more business class award space available to those with Avios currencies, whether it’s Qatar Airways Privilege Club or British Airways Club
- Etihad is increasingly restricting premium award space to members of its own Etihad Guest program, and not making it available through partner programs, especially more than one month out
The point is, in some cases airlines just make more space available to their own members than to members of partner programs, which might explain an availability discrepancy when using an airline’s “native” website to search for space. While it’s rarer, in some cases airlines also make more space available to some partners than others, typically due to how close a particular partnership is.
This is a trend that’s becoming increasingly common, as the economics of airline loyalty programs have changed over the years.
Phantom award space can happen
It’s not uncommon for airlines to sometimes show phantom award space in online search tools. This happens with some frequency when you’re using one airline’s website to search another airline’s award availability.
Technology just doesn’t work properly sometimes, and that can impact the award availability that shows online. So if you see award availability with one partner but not another partner, it’s possible that the one partner has phantom space that wouldn’t actually be bookable when you go to ticket an award.
If you have sufficient miles in an account to ticket something, and if a program doesn’t have change or cancelation fees for awards (or at least honors the 24-hour refund policy), you can always try to book and see if it actually tickets. If you get an error message while booking, odds are that it was phantom award availability.
Delays in accessing award space
Delays in accessing award availability can also impact whether a particular airline shows award space. This can come in a couple of different forms.
First of all, not all airlines open their award calendars at the same time. You can only ticket an award through a particular program starting when the program would make its own award seats available.
As an example, American AAdvantage opens its calendar 331 days out, Qantas Frequent Flyer opens its award calendar 353 days out, and British Airways Club opens its award calendar 355 days out. You could only ticket a Qantas award through American AAdvantage 331 days out, while you could ticket the same award through British Airways Club up to 353 days out.
There’s another aspect to this as well. While you’d think airline websites update inventory in real time, that’s not always the case. Some airline websites may only see newly loaded award availability with a delay of several hours, or in some cases even a day or two. In these situations, the award space could generally be booked by phone, but not online.
Sometimes award space is intentionally pulled
Sometimes a loyalty program may intentionally not show partner award space. This could be for a couple of reasons.
For one, sometimes there’s a dispute between airlines when it comes to award availability. This could be related to the volume of award tickets being booked, or it could be over a disagreement regarding reimbursement. This can cause airlines to throttle award availability.
In some other cases, airlines may intentionally take certain award availability offline. This could be due to a system issue whereby an airline isn’t correctly confirming partner award tickets (for example, I know that recently some Star Alliance programs had issues with Ethiopian Airlines actually correctly confirming partner award availability), or in some cases it may be taken offline due to a redemption being particularly popular with fraud from mileage brokers.
Other technical glitches & limitations
Then there are also all kinds of other “random” glitches that can occur. I wouldn’t assume they’re malicious, but rather technology sometimes isn’t perfect. The underlying technology that displays award availability on partner airline websites is complicated, and sometimes a code gets broken, something hasn’t been updated correctly, etc.
Similarly, sometimes there are point of sale restrictions, married segment logic, and much more, that can contribute to space not showing correctly.
Solutions to airline award discrepancies?
In some cases there are workarounds to these airline award availability discrepancies, and in other cases there aren’t. While the workarounds depend on the exact situation, here are a few common solutions:
- Just check back online after waiting several hours or a couple of days, and maybe the award availability you expected will be loaded
- Call the airline, because in some cases there’s more availability for agents by phone than what you see online (due to website limitations); if you get a helpful agent, you can see if they can try to “direct sell” or “manually request” award availability on a flight, which would help for situations where there’s simply a glitch preventing the availability from displaying
- Play around a bit and see if the space is actually there at all, or if it could be phantom; check award availability on several partner airline websites, try to ticket something through a partner airline and see if it confirms, etc.
Bottom line
Airline award availability discrepancies seem to be increasingly common, and in most cases there’s not much that can be done about it.
These discrepancies can happen for a variety of reasons, ranging from technological limitations, to websites simply not displaying all inventory, to space intentionally being blocked. There’s not one consistent solution to this issue, though the above is a rundown of what can cause these problems, and what you can do about them (in some cases).
Unfortunately the most common thing nowadays is that airlines just release different award space to their own members vs. members of partner programs, and there’s nothing that can be done there.
Have you ever dealt with an airline award availability discrepancy? How did you handle it?
Loyalty is over. It's time to become a free agent.
Acutely feeling the lack of TPAC award space. Had to get creative and am basically going around the world in late February/early March in J. Settled for PE on the return HND-JFK but I'm getting the A35K. Have yet to try the Q suites so I'll get that too.
JFK-LHR-CDG (AA/BA), CDG-DOH-KUL-CGK (QR), CGK-KUL-NRT-HND-JFK (MH/JL)
EVA connecting routes don’t ticket via MileagePlus for whatever reason. UA & EVA reps confirmed saver availability for both legs but could only ticket an invalid standby itinerary.
Wow so much catastrophizing. Especially @Andrew M, who makes a series of categorical statements, each in its own paragraph, a sort of poem of doomsday pronouncements. Most untrue or exaggerated.
My friend booked EVA TPE-YYZ in recent months on Aeroplan. I booked and flew JL F BKK-HND-ORD(-YYZ) on one gorgeous AA itinerary this year. My LifeMiles+ subscription is paying off, with cheap cancellable StarAlliance redemptions. I'm finding last minute JL and ANA in Premium cabins.
...Wow so much catastrophizing. Especially @Andrew M, who makes a series of categorical statements, each in its own paragraph, a sort of poem of doomsday pronouncements. Most untrue or exaggerated.
My friend booked EVA TPE-YYZ in recent months on Aeroplan. I booked and flew JL F BKK-HND-ORD(-YYZ) on one gorgeous AA itinerary this year. My LifeMiles+ subscription is paying off, with cheap cancellable StarAlliance redemptions. I'm finding last minute JL and ANA in Premium cabins.
There are 30,000 planes in the air, at any given moment, day and night. Most have a premium cabin and most of those had unsold J seats 7 days before takeoff.
Whenever someone asserts that the sky is falling, I wonder what they're doing different from me. When we discuss it further, it's always the same thing: they want confirmed booking weeks, or months in advance. That November seat you "couldn't find" in August? I'm flying it this weekend.
@DenB, "they want confirmed booking weeks, or months in advance." Well, lucky you, not everybody can plan for time off with a couple of days notice, most working people need to put in their request and plan for it months in advance.
@Ricky: And advanced points travellers know that you can plan your time off, your lodgings, your babysitting catsitting plantsitting, months in advance, then book your outbound flight 5 days before leaving, and your homebound flight 3 days before returning. You can. You really can. Lots of us do it. You, @Ricky, don't. And that's your choice.
Nice try pretending I'm being insensitive.
Re: Airlines releasing more award availability to their own loyalty club members than partner loyalty club members- And certain partner loyalty club members can get more availability than other partner loyalty club members.
Also HEAVY emphasis on "Married Segment Logic" especially with Delta Skymiles which basically ruins almost every single attempt to redeem those points to/from NA and possibly even beyond to a lesser extent.
It's a matter of "learning the computer's algorithm" when redeeming...
Re: Airlines releasing more award availability to their own loyalty club members than partner loyalty club members- And certain partner loyalty club members can get more availability than other partner loyalty club members.
Also HEAVY emphasis on "Married Segment Logic" especially with Delta Skymiles which basically ruins almost every single attempt to redeem those points to/from NA and possibly even beyond to a lesser extent.
It's a matter of "learning the computer's algorithm" when redeeming points and then working with/against it to try and get a suitable itin.
Timing can be important (not that Ben hasn't mentioned that frequently). I booked a LAX-SYD award ticket in F on QF on the QF site, about six weeks out. Nothing available for a flight to LA, so I booked revenue. Fast forward three weeks and F and J were available but too late.
@Greg has a great point about mixed class awards. Thankfully, QF does the opposite. They list the fares by the lowest class...
Timing can be important (not that Ben hasn't mentioned that frequently). I booked a LAX-SYD award ticket in F on QF on the QF site, about six weeks out. Nothing available for a flight to LA, so I booked revenue. Fast forward three weeks and F and J were available but too late.
@Greg has a great point about mixed class awards. Thankfully, QF does the opposite. They list the fares by the lowest class in the booking but you can tell there's a premium sector by the price. I've seen a SYD-LAX Y award on JAL with HND-LAX in F.
My experience SYD-LAX shows that there's at least some TPAC availability. Bizarrely, as if to confirm at least a TPAC shortage, searching CX there was a HKG-LAX flight available in J, but on BA via LHR (nothing non-stop) for the standard CX point-to-point award price. Go figure.
Like everything else it has got to a point where it’s just super difficult to get a decent itinerary to your destination in premium cabin. It’s not the pre-pandemic world and it’ll never be.
Best ways to watch for sales. Recently saw a sail for next summer from US to Europe round-trip in J for $2600. I think that is the best way to book fares nowadays. I want to become a time consuming activity with very little rewards.
@Bbt:
Agreed. I booked JFK-Rome RT in J for $2,600 for April 2026 travel just this weekend past.
I so don't have time for those time consuming searches.
One other discrepancy that I would like to mention is mixed cabin space. For example on Alaska when searching on mobile app shows business class Seattle - Portland - London available. But in actual fact it is Seattle to Portland in business and the long segment Portland to London in coach. Air Canada is also notorious for this too. Very misleading.
On a side note this lack of partner space in J is also why my miles are worth much less than they used to.
Both of those airlines explicitly state when it's a mixed cabin itinerary.
I don't agree with that Stoppy. Yes if you look closely Air Canada states it, but it is not obvious especially for people who don't do this all the time.
Yep. Almost got caught a few weeks ago. I thought the over the water leg was in J. It was only when I looked closer to review all of the details, I realized the longest segment was in Y.
There was no immediately apparent information that this was mixed class travel.
I hate these mixed awards but at least Aeroplan clearly shows percent Business Class (even if it's just 4%). Alaska and AA aren't so transparent until you drill down and check flight by flight on the itinerary. United search is best as it won't show J or PY space unless at least the long(er) segment is available in the higher class.
Aeroplan is the winner in this crap game. I was quoted 700K miles for Business class from DXB-BOS, mentioning it as mixed cabin, out of which Business class was only 5 percent. WOW!!
These discrepancies have become a huge problem for anyone trying to book TPAC award space in premium cabins. There is almost no way to reliably find space using programs that accept transferable currencies. Lifemiles has not had access to ANA premiumm awards in forever, Air Canada seems to only show available ANA space for short/medium haul routes. United has full access to ANA business class awards but charges a lot of miles for the awards....
These discrepancies have become a huge problem for anyone trying to book TPAC award space in premium cabins. There is almost no way to reliably find space using programs that accept transferable currencies. Lifemiles has not had access to ANA premiumm awards in forever, Air Canada seems to only show available ANA space for short/medium haul routes. United has full access to ANA business class awards but charges a lot of miles for the awards. J
EVA only makes premium cabin awards available to its own program, haven't seen any premium cabin availability through partners in years. China Airlines has always been stingy.
AA has married segment logic for AA awards making it hard to book directly to Tokyo.
Haven't seen any availability in premium cabins on Korean carriers in forever.
Cathay has stopped releasing premium cabin awards to partners and anyway almost never shows TPAC availability through their own program.
United, ironically, used to be the last airline that would show decent availability but they have also stopped making award available TPAC.
The miles and points game is basically dead over the Pacific.