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I’m excited that the Points Pals service has only been operational for a little over a week, and I’m already helping folks make their travel dreams come true. This past week while I was away for work and also sick, I got an email from a reader asking how to get to Hawaii using Alaska miles or Chase points. Because I was out of commission for a while, I took a few days to email her back, finally responding that I was really busy would try to look into her trip in a few days. I soon heard back from her that she had already booked the Hawaii trip while waiting to hear back from me. Problem solved!

This kind of stuff just warms my heart. Remember, if you want non-expert and quite possibly ill-informed advice about booking rewards, just use the contact form above and I’ll get right on it!

A while back I wrote about something I called the “Delta Head Start,” which is when you can take advantage of Delta’s 11-month booking window to grab award space on SkyTeam partners. Specifically, since Flying Blue only opens up award booking 10 months in advance, there’s a one month head start where KLM and Air France award seats aren’t available to Flying Blue’s members. I had a couple screenshots as proof, and availability between SFO and CDG was wide open on Air France if booked through Delta.

I wanted to revisit the head start by looking at a closer booking window, so I compared the Delta and Flying Blue award calendars for SFO-AMS for the month of May, and what came back is kind of interesting. This isn’t some big news flash that I expect to get me a bunch of traffic, but now that Flying Blue is a transfer partner of the three main credit card rewards programs, it’s probably good to understand its idiosyncratic award calendar. I’m sure I’m not uncovering every weird quirk here either, so the overarching piece of advice I’d offer is to go as far into the booking process as Flying Blue will let you before transferring points, since phantom availability is a real problem.

One other takeaway: if you happen to need to get between San Francisco and Europe in May, you have options for days. Between the Star Alliance partner availability on SAS and Austrian and now this on Sky Team, this must be some kind of golden age of transatlantic business class availability we’re living in. While the screenshots in this post are only for one seat, bumping the search up to 3 seats still shows quite a bit of open space.

Okay, now on to the Delta calendar to see what’s become of the head start.

All of the 70k awards are on Delta, so any of that partner availability that you would have been able to find during the head start window has long since evaporated. There’s still pretty decent availability on Delta, though, and given that the vast majority of Air France and KLM availability are on planes without all-aisle-access business class seats, it may not bum you out too much to be stuck with Delta. But, if you’re trying to use Skymiles to book partner award seats, this would suggest that you’re better off booking early rather than waiting.

Now let’s look at the same timeframe over at Flying Blue. From the fuel surcharges, you can generally decode what the calendar is showing you with a little legwork. I’ve gone ahead and added a logo for each day where there’s saver availability so you can see whose metal you’re actually flying on (Delta is usually via MSP or SEA, and Air France is of course via CDG).

Personally this is a tad disappointing to me, since I’m weirdly obsessed with flying KLM’s new business class, and even though this search is for SFO-AMS, there’s precious little space on KLM’s direct flight. A couple other interesting things – with the exception of May 8th and 9th, the Delta availability on this calendar matches Delta’s calendar above. However, all the days of Air France and KLM availability come up without any level-1 availability over at Delta. Again this lends credence to my head start theory, since it looks like Flying Blue releases a bunch of partner space to Delta in a block way in advance and then holds additional seats for its own members. Most of the Air France days actually have space for up to four people, so that’s a lot of seats that they’re hoarding for their own members.

What about May 8th and 9th? On the 8th, we have the dreaded phantom availability, since the fuel surcharge would indicate availability on Delta. However, clicking through to choose your flight shows only availability on Air France. On the 9th, there actually is availability on Delta, making this one of the rare days where Delta saver space is available to Flying Blue members but not to Skymiles folks.

As a disclaimer, I’ll acknowledge that you can’t really learn any universal truth from looking at a one-month booking window between only two cities, but this exercise did demonstrate to me how it’s possible to look a little closer into Flying Blue’s award results to see what they’re actually showing you. It’s also useful to compare Flying Blue and Delta over a particular date range, since Delta’s calendar can identify potential phantom availability hot spots on the Flying Blue side.

I should also admit that I have a bunch of Flying Blue miles due to an ill-advised points transfer from Citibank, since I thought I would be booking an award to Amsterdam before finding out that the space wasn’t actually available. The fact that I have a 5-figure balance now has made me especially interested in figuring out how best to leverage those points, since I don’t really have a choice. What has your experience with Flying Blue been like? Any horror stores? The one time I actually used them to book a flight, it went fine – it was short hop from AMS to CDG, and I was surprised that the very reasonable cost in miles even included advance seat assignment and a checked bag, which improved the value-per-point over booking with cash.

I was on the road this past week, which was really fucking convenient, given that this blog blew up like never before, and I was too busy all day to do anything about it. I was even getting mentioned on Twitter, which was exciting (I’ve been on Twitter for almost a decade and I don’t know if I’ve ever been mentioned before). But I was stuck in a trade show booth shilling travel accessories, so I couldn’t really get involved. To make matters worse, I was as sick as I’ve been in years, which started to make me wonder if the whole thing was one sustained fever dream. I do have some observations from my week on the road that you might be interested in, though:

• What a good week for me and IHG. I booked three rooms at the prestigious Candlewood Suites SLC Airport, and I LOVE that IHG gives me the points for all the rooms, even if two were for my coworkers. I wish airlines would do this with multiple flights. Even though extended stay hotels only award half the points, I’ll still do pretty well across three rooms, especially when you include welcome amenities for each room. Then, I missed my flight last night due to the trade show operations contractor fucking me, so I booked a last-minute room at the new Holiday Inn Express in downtown SLC, which also got me to five nights in the 2017 Accelerate promotion. (Just out of curiosity, have any of you ever worked with a company called “Freeman” in your line of work? I suppose they aren’t any better or worse than any gigantic logistics/operations company, but I still shudder whenever I know I’ll have to deal with them.) Anyway, in one week, I hit four of six Accelerate targets (book once and stay once, book once in January, stay 5 nights, and pay for a stay with the IHG card).
• I’ll spare you the rote hotel reviews, but both of these places were pretty nice if you’re in SLC on a budget. I had extremely low expectations of the Candlewood, but it was perfectly serviceable, and the bed was surprisingly comfortable. The Holiday Inn Express was nice too – it has adopted the recent trend of low/mid-range hotels swapping out bland hotel fixture generica with cheap but clean-looking “modern” setups. It wouldn’t be my top choice in downtown SLC, since there is a Hilton and a Marriott both within a stone’s throw and a Sheraton a few blocks away, and all three of those are objectively nicer. I had to shoehorn an extra room night into my budget for this trade show, though, so price was a factor, and the Holiday Inn was at least 25% less than the other hotels. Plus, and this is a HUGE plus, Papa John’s delivers here until midnight. Here’s a picture of a room from IHG’s website:

• I expected to pay a change fee and fare difference to change my flight with Delta, but I didn’t have to. I’m still not sure why, and I was in too much of a fog last night to figure it out. I called around 30 minutes before my flight to say that I would miss it, and that I wanted to be on the first flight the next day. The fare difference between what I paid and the next day’s flight was around $60, and the normal change fee is $150, so I had my Amex platty ready to cover what I assumed would run me $210. Then the phone rep informed me that it was a straight-across swap, so I didn’t owe anything more. The only thing I can think of is that my original flight had been moved 12 minutes later at some point, so maybe they waived the change fee because of that? Feel free to weigh in here, since it would be nice to know what was actually happening here, in case something like this happens again.
• If I had to choose between United and Delta first class on an A320, I’d pick United in a heartbeat (assuming the latest products of course). I think Delta’s looks snazzier with the quilted leather and everything, but the seats are pretty hard, and they’re surprisingly close together. Especially in the bulkhead, Delta gives you around three inches between your nose and the wall, whereas United has room for days. I also like the storage compartment on the side of the United seats – this is small but really useful in practice. Delta’s non-refreshed A320’s are fine – I actually find the seats more comfortable than the new ones, but again, the pitch is pretty tight.
• I had an experience on the flight out that I had never seen before. The inbound flight arrived, passengers deplaned, and while everyone was standing around waiting to board, one of the flight attendants walked up to the desk and announced that it was insanely turbulent over California and Nevada and that if anyone wanted something to eat or drink in-flight, they would have to buy it from the terminal. They did try to serve people on the flight, but it seemed pretty dicey, since most of the time they ended up returning to a jump seat while bracing themselves against the overhead bins.
• I got to peer into the new Escape Lounge in Oakland, but I couldn’t go in, since the lounge isn’t part of Priority Pass yet. I hope it will be soon, because Oakland airport isn’t shitty enough for me to pay $45 to sit in a lounge whose only view is onto a bunch of Southwest planes.
• I spent a lot of time in the Delta Skyclub in SLC today, and GOD DAMMIT DELTA JUST GET SOME NORMAL FUCKING COOKIES ALREADY. Every damn time, they have some fancy mishmash of nuts and toffee and shit, and I wonder why they can’t just put out a chocolate chip cookie and be done with it. However, I do credit the lounge for playing CNN rather than Fox News, so that was nice. The lounge was pretty crowded, although not excessively so, and as the only option in SLC, it’s pretty nice. I was going to take a picture, but then I got distracted by something and I forgot. Oops.

Okay, that’s my week. Oh yeah, there’s one last thing – the restaurant where the Amex concierge made me a reservation denied seating to a bunch of people before seating my coworkers and I, so I felt like a major big shot.

Thanks to all the new readers too! Hopefully this meandering post doesn’t have you reconsidering your decision to follow the blog. I’ll try to think of something more useful to post while I’m recuperating this weekend.

Raise your hand if you saw “AF” in the title and thought I meant “annual fee.” Anyway, I was poking around and found really great availability on SAS to Europe right now. The below screenshots for February and March are for four passengers in non-stop business class to Copenhagen. I think this is a bigger deal than the Austrian seats mentioned last week, because SAS has no fuel surcharges through Aeroplan.

We’re not quite in every-day availability territory yet, but I’m seeing at least two days a week for four people through the end of March (and in most cases into the first week in April). The best is from Chicago, although between SFO, ORD, and IAH, you should be within a few hours of a departure point. It looks like SAS released all this space as a block, since most of it dries up after the first week in April.

(Also, not for nothing, but Star Alliance space in general is wide open right now. I specifically searched for direct flights when putting this post together, but every city I searched had decent transatlantic availability between SAS, Swiss, Lufthansa, and Austrian even if direct flights weren’t available.)

One list thing – BOS-CPH has some availability as well. It’s not great, but there are four seats available every day for the first week in April and scattered availability before that. I mention it specifically, because this is one of the flights that intrigues me the most. It’s on a 737 operated by PrivatAir, and for a while it was a business-class only plane that went from IAH to Stavanger, Norway – basically a private flight for fat Texan oil executives. According to ExpertFlyer, they’ve added an economy cabin, although I couldn’t actually book economy seats through SAS’s website for some reason. Even though the seats aren’t the most modern business class space pods, there’s something neat about taking one of the longest 737 flights in the world.

 

 

I’ve been thinking a lot about the Merrill+ Visa card (issued by Bank of America), due partially to the perk they offer whereby you get a free Delta Skyclub membership after spending $50,000 on the card. (The membership is one of the perks of what they call “Plus” status, although I’m not sure what else you get for achieving Plus status. If Plus status offers amazing benefits, then most of the calculations I’m about to do into won’t mean much, since they don’t take into account said amazing benefits.) Skyclub membership is actually something I’ve considered buying for myself, since I’d get a lot of use out of the SFO and SEA Skyclubs, though I don’t often fly Delta from either airport. Having access when flying Delta (via my Amex Platinum) is great, but being based out of SFO means I’ll rarely maximize any perk contingent on flying Delta. (As an aside, I really wish the Delta Reserve from Amex offered Skyclub membership like the United Club and American Airlines Executive cards, rather than just access when flying Delta.)

Anyway, given my interest in Skyclub membership, my ears perked up when I read about a credit card that offered it after hitting a particular spending target. Then I read this post over at Miles Per Day about how to maximize the value you get from Merril+ rewards points, basically locking in 2 cents per point when redeemed for airfare on Alaska or JetBlue (as long as you have elite status with either airline). Obviously, this would be the ideal circumstance and not directly applicable to me, but let’s assume the best case and peg the value of the points at $0.02. That means that spending $50,000 on the Merril+ would get you points worth $1000 on airfare plus a Skyclub membership, which you would otherwise buy outright for $500, bringing the total return on spend up to 3%. Is it worth trying to hit the spending target on this card to get that kind of return?

Here are a few other scenarios to consider:

• $50,000 on the Chase Freedom Unlimited = 75,000 points, which, when transferred to the Sapphire Reserve, become worth $1125 toward travel. This is significantly more flexible than the Merrill points, which only yield 2x when applied to airfare on Alaska or JetBlue or when used in 25,000 increments on tickets that cost exactly $500 from any airline (if you’re confused about this, go read the Miles Per Day post and then come back here). Would you rather have $1125 to spend on airfare/hotel/rental car or a fairly restrictive $1000 plus a Skyclub membership?
• $50,000 on the Amex Blue for Business = 100,000 Membership Rewards points. You can buy a Skyclub membership by transferring 47,000 points to Delta, leaving you 53,000 MR points. If you happen to have a Business Platinum card, those 53,000 points could be used for airfare up to $1060. Or, you could spend a couple thousand more dollars and transfer 55,000 points to Aeroplan, which is enough for a business class ticket to Europe. In this scenario, you get a Skyclub membership either way, so you’re basically choosing between 50,000 Merrill+ points or 53,000 MR points. That’s a no-brainer to me.
• Factoring in the current sign-up bonus of 50,000 Merrill+ points, you’ll have 100,000 points after completing the $50,000 spend. If you instead sign up for the Amex Business Platinum card and put your spending there, you’ll earn 150,000 points, or 103,000 after you transfer over the points to buy the Skyclub membership. Again, I’d rather have 103,000 Amex points than 100,000 Merrill+ points.

Of course, this isn’t apples to apples, since a proficient manufactured spender would max out the $50,000 limit on the 2x-on-all-points bonus on the Blue for Business, the $15,000 spend requirement on the Business Platinum, and the $50,000 spend requirement on the Merrill+. If you can run up that much spending, good for you. Honestly, you deserve a Skyclub membership at that point. But if you’re more limited in what you can or are willing to spend across all your cards for a year, the Merrill+ seems like a waste of spending. Even looking at bonus opportunities that aren’t capped, if you spent $50,000 on an Everyday Preferred, you’d end up with a minimum of 75,000 MR points, or 27,000 after you buy the Skyclub membership. I’m not sure I’d rather have 50,000 Merrill+ points than 27,000 Amex points, to be honest. I’d have to work pretty hard to get almost 4 cents per point out of them (which would make them equivalent in value to the Merrill+ points), although their flexibility vs the inflexibility of the Merrill+ points is worth something as well.

One final consideration is where you want to manufacture your spend. Amex has gotten a lot tighter about it (I’m to understand, since I don’t manufacture spend personally), and I’m pretty wrapped up with them, so I wouldn’t really want to bend their rules. However, I’m not really in bed with BofA at all, so if they banned me, I wouldn’t mind (except that I’d miss my Alaska cards). Just in terms of the numbers, though, the more I think about it, the less of a great deal the Skyclub perk seems.

Does anyone even have this card? Articles are bubbling up around it, but it still seems pretty esoteric. If you know more about the secret “Plus” perks, let me know in the comments.

When I started getting into premium credit cards, the one perk I was always least excited about was the concierge service. I had had Visa Signature cards for a couple years and never used their concierge, so I didn’t really think much of it when I got a Citi Prestige card and then an Amex Platinum (and a CNB Crystal, and a Sapphire Reserve, and so on). While I don’t factor these services in at all when considering the overall value-to-fee ratio of the cards, I have to admit that there are times the concierge services (specifically, the Amex Platinum concierge) have been particularly helpful. Here are a few examples:

• My mom was coming into town and asked if we could have lunch at Slanted Door, one of the most popular restaurants in San Francisco. I couldn’t book a table through the restaurant, so this seemed like a good opportunity to pit competing services against each other in a bitter battle. The Citi Prestige concierge called me back after a couple hours and said they couldn’t find anything but then suggested some other restaurants. Then Amex emailed me a reservation confirmation on my first choice date and time, which impressed me, since Citi came up empty. Not only that, but they had managed to reserve a booth overlooking the bay for us – way better than the fairly tight table seating.
• I was planning some dinners in Las Vegas and wanted to know if a particular restaurant could offer vegetarian/vegan food for me. I hate picking up the phone if I don’t have to, so it was really convenient to send an email to Amex asking them to do it for me (and then to book a reservation). I mentioned to Amex that it was a dinner for my wife and my anniversary, and the restaurant ended up offering us a free dessert in celebration. I was impressed with the service both from Amex and from the restaurant. (BTW, this restaurant was the Joël Robuchon Atelier at the MGM grand and it was – no joke – the best meal I have ever had.)
• I’m planning a trade show for work this week, and my boss asked me to make a reservation for a staff dinner during the show. Given that this trade show totally takes over Salt Lake City, restaurant reservations can be a real pain in the ass. Plus, I’m really busy prepping for a big product launch at the show, so I really didn’t want to deal with this. I emailed Amex and asked for a list of recommended restaurants, and they sent me something back about 12 hours later. After a quick return email to pick one, my restaurant problem was solved.

I could definitely get used to this. I’m not going to put some arbitrary dollar figure on it, but I’ve had really good luck with the Amex concierge and would have to weigh not having access anymore if I considered canceling my platty-plat. (I haven’t used the Citi one after they whiffed on Slanted Door, and I’ve also never bothered to try the Sapphire Reserve one since Amex always does so well.)

In fairness, it hasn’t always been smooth sailing with them, and I’ve realized that for stuff other than restaurant reservations/recommendations, I’m better off dealing with it myself. One particular example: last year, we were traveling to Las Vegas for my wife’s birthday, and I emailed Amex to see if they could use my platinum card to buy a particular gift I had picked out, have it shipped to our hotel, and have the hotel put it in the room as a surprise. Maybe this was a big ask, but I had only had the card for a couple months and really wanted to try it out! Technically, they did everything I asked, but it was SUCH AN ORDEAL. First I had to call back and wait on hold for a half hour so I could give the concierge the code on the front of my card. Then I had to confirm the shipping address. Then I had to confirm that they ordered the right product. Then I had to contact the hotel separately to confirm to them that Amex was acting on my instruction. This went on and on. (And, the hotel still messed up and didn’t have the gift in the room, although the hotel concierge felt really bad and sent up a huge arrangement of flowers. Again, I was really impressed with the service, since I didn’t ask for anything, realizing that the entire request was a favor I was asking of them in the first place.) Okay okay, clearly this was not a typical request, but it illustrates that the whole claim the concierge makes about doing anything and everything may be overselling the service a little bit. (Before anyone calls me out for FIRST WORLD PROBLEMS – first, this entire blog is about first world problems so shut your trolling trap, and second, my point here isn’t that Amex wronged me in any way, it’s that the whole point of a concierge is to save you time, and this ended up taking more time than if I had just done it myself. Lesson learned. Oh and third, I bet you’re just a joy to be around at parties.)

Bottom line, I like a good concierge service, and I have gotten value out of it a few times, especially when it comes to restaurants. On its own, it doesn’t justify the annual fee, but I would miss it if I didn’t have it anymore. Anyone got any good concierge stories to tell? Good and bad, let’s get some “data points” (ugh).

Today was like Christmas part two for me… or even Christmas part one, because I don’t really celebrate Christmas normally. What was I so excited about? Well, Doctor of Credit (one of my 5 favorite blogs of 2016, you might remember) had a post at the beginning of 2016 asking people with fledgling blogs to post in the comments in a bid to get them some more attention and readership (what a mensch!). I almost posted about Windbag Miles back then, but I felt like my blog wasn’t quite ready for the additional eyes at that point. Most of my posts back then were full of really obvious newbie stuff – which was by design, since I’ve always intended for the blog to reflect my growing knowledge of the points/miles word. However, I thought it best to wait until I had more content, more understanding, and a better sense of my blog’s own identity before I started trying to get more readers.

I sat patiently and waited, hoping that DoC would post a similar entry in 2017. Much to my excitement, he posted about it this morning, and I even saw it quickly enough to be the first commenter on the article. The resulting flood of views (around 1200 at this writing) constitutes the second best day I’ve ever had, behind the Hyatt mistake rate day (which was around 1400 views). I was emboldened enough after that Hyatt thing (and the incoming link from View from the Wing) that I decided to post more regularly, and I saw my traffic go from around 0-5 views a week (seriously, it was that low) up to around 40. That’s still small potatoes – or not even really the potatoes themselves, but maybe the skins of those small potatoes that you throw away while you’re cooking the small potatoes. Any time I get linked on a bigger blog, the traffic spikes, but it mostly dies down after a few days. However, in the past couple weeks, I’ve been seeing around 30-40 hits per day, and most of the traffic seems organic, since WordPress isn’t showing me any incoming referrals.

Then, today, I got a massive response from the DoC post (which only goes to show how many views that blog must get in a day), and I felt like it was time to make some minor changes. My goals from the blog are really modest, but I did want to class up the joint a tad. To that end, I upgraded my WordPress plan to get rid of the ads and also to give me my own domain: http://www.windbagmiles.com. All the old links will still come here, but now they redirect to the primary domain, which is kind of exciting (it’s the small victories, you know?).

Here’s what I’m hoping for in 2017 from this blog… First, I’d like to make 125 posts this year. That’s a few per week, and hopefully I can stick to that. I have around 60 posts so far, going back to August of 2015, but I’ve been trying to post more regularly the past couple weeks, and so far I haven’t run out of things to say. I’m terrible about dropping my hobby projects for long stretches of time, but with a concrete goal, maybe I can keep at it. Second, since regular readers aren’t going to stick with a blogger who only posts every couple weeks, as long as I can keep the first goal, I’m hoping to average 50 hits per day by the end of the year. If I can hit both of those benchmarks, it will be time to consider ways to build from there with an end goal of monetizing the blog in a year or two. That being said, earning money from this was never my goal – I just thought it would be fun to write about points and miles and hopefully interact with some readers in a forum that was more personal than on FlyerTalk or Reddit.

That’s where I’m at for now, and whether you’re a brand new reader or one of the select “Windbag Platinum Plus” members who’ve been reading for a long time, I’m grateful that you took a few minutes out of your day to see what I’m up to over here. Hopefully I’m putting something unique out into the world rather than just rehashing the travel hacking news of the day, or at least something more profane.

I kept seeing people on Facebook post that “Me at the beginning of 2016/Me at the end of 2016” meme thing, and I thought of this. Happy new year!

Prologue: from the title, you could probably guess that this is a long, rambling post about some award availability quirks that I found while researching award availability back to the US from Europe. Before we get started, though, I have to point out that availability from Copenhagen to the USA is outstanding right now. If you happen to be in Europe after taking advantage of the great availability on Austrian, consider taking SAS back home. It’s a great product, and there are no fuel surcharges when booking SAS on Aeroplan. 

Here’s availability to SFO, EWR, and ORD for three people:

Caveats: first, not all of this availability is direct, although much of it is. Second, however, is the somewhat weird way that United overclaims (in my opinion, at least) how good availability is and why that calendar can be misleading. If you’re thinking of jumping on this availability, make sure you look at the actual itinerary closely before transferring miles! Now on to our regularly scheduled programming…

A couple blogs today posted about great business class award availability on Austrian, and I wanted to see what return availability looked like and, you know, maybe write a blog post about it. Then I came across something really strange…

I started by looking at Swiss fares out of ZRH and noticed fairly good availability on the nonstop ZRH-SFO route. However, none of the availability was on Swiss’s non-stop flight – mostly it was mixed cabin awards or long-haul business class on other airlines, including SAS. So, I thought, maybe all this ZRH availability is showing only insofar as ZRH is feeding SAS’s nonstop CPH-SFO flight. I then looked up availability from CPH-SFO, and one of the options that showed up reliably on multiple dates is a one-stop itinerary via ZRH. In other words, you can’t book a seat on the ZRH-SFO flight unless you’re connecting on from another city.

Here’s proof (and I was able to find this quirk on multiple days). Bear with me, since I’ve got screenshots for days. First, the top level availability from ZRH-SFO:

Now, here’s the result for the direct flight from ZRH to SFO on February 6th:

However, let’s switch to CPH-SFO and look for availability on the same date:

There it is, plain as day! LX38, the same flight that you couldn’t book if you were originating in Zurich! Or is it? You’ll notice that the connection extends overnight, so United is actually ticketing you on February 7th, not the 6th, which is what we originally searched. So naturally, if we look for LX38 on Feb. 7, we’ll see availability, right?

Nope! Looks like there are still some issues going on with origin cities.

This problem isn’t unique to Swiss, by the way. Reversing the city pairs yields the same thing. Here’s the result for CPH-SFO on March 27th:

And, just as you’ve probably guessed by now, here’s how that flight looks if you’re originating in Zurich:

However, this time, the overnight connection pushes you over to 2/28, on which there is availability direct from CPH to SFO (no screenshot, just take my word for it). So, at least in this one case, United is elongating itineraries, which inflates the actual availability. You can’t actually get to the US from Zurich on 3/27, but United says that you can, because it’s counting availability on later days. It’s a relatively semantic difference, since flights and time zone changes are going to cause days to overlap. It does provide a reason to look deeper than the availability calendar image at the top of the screen in order to assess availability, though.

Still, that doesn’t explain the LX38 issue, which was still bugging me. I started wondering if this was a United thing or a Star Alliance thing, so I looked at these same itineraries in Aeroplan. Of course, the plot thickened, since Aeroplan shows that Feb. 6 CPH-ZRH-SFO itinerary as a mixed cabin award with the LX38 leg in economy… although, here Aeroplan is showing LX38 on February 6, not February 7th.

If you adjust the date to Feb. 7, you see the same availability on LX38 that United shows.

The difference, of course, is that Aeroplan isn’t as willing to string days together in order to give you an itinerary, so they give you a mixed cabin award as well.

And what about if you want to book a direct flight from ZRH to SFO on Feb. 7 through Aeroplan? Again, you’re out of luck, same as United. So clearly there’s an issue with how Swiss is releasing award space to Star Alliance partners, given that neither United nor Aeroplan will let you book LX38 on Feb. 7 unless you’re connecting from another city. Finally, I looked at ExpertFlyer, and they show exactly the same thing – no direct availability, but space opens up if you connect in from another city.

So, what did I learn today?

• United’s award calendar image at the top of the search page can be misleading, since they stretch itineraries across multiple days and count availability on each of those days. If there isn’t availability from CPH-SFO on a given day, there should also be no availability from ZRH-CPH-SFO on that day. It’s misleading to say yes to ZRH-CPH-SFO only because the connection gives United the opportunity to add 14 hours to the itinerary, opening up flights on subsequent days.
• Aeroplan won’t do this, but they’ll give you laughably stupid mixed cabin awards instead. Some people might actually prefer United for this reason.
• Some space on Swiss is only available to connecting passengers for some reason.

Is this a well-known thing? I’d love to be able to go back in time to see if United’s old website did this, or if it’s unique to the new site they rolled out fairly recently (or even if it’s a result of the new routing rules they’ve instituted). Same deal with the LX38/origin city issue – was I the only one who didn’t realize how fluid availability actually is? And how does that even work? I always thought that a fare bucket is a fare bucket is a fare bucket, but both ExpertFlyer searches were for “I” fares. Man, this shit is so complicated! Someone should start up a service where an expert does all this for you in exchange for a nominal fee.

Part of this blog is me documenting the process of learning the ins and outs of the points and miles world, which means that I have to admit that I don’t know things that are probably already common knowledge to the experts out there. Some of my old posts seem pretty embarrassing in retrospect, like the one about how I fucked up just about everything you can fuck up with Hyatt’s Gold Passport program. Still, in case you didn’t know about this issue with AAdvantage either, I’ll throw it out there – maybe it helps, or maybe it just cements in your mind that I’m a know-nothing who has no business advertising a somewhat tongue-in-cheek award booking service.

Anyway, while doing some award booking research for Points Pals, I came across this little AAdvantage availability quirk, which I find really annoying. I was looking for awards from Germany to the US, and I remembered a while back that bloggers seemed to be pretty hot on Air Berlin, since they’re a Oneworld airline with a better business class product than British Airways. On principle, I will never book a BA award in business class, given that I find the fuel surcharges and subpar cabin to be personally insulting. For a while that led me away from AAdvantage altogether, since a majority of my award focus is on transatlantic awards and Oneworld isn’t great for those (at least compared to SkyTeam and Star Alliance). But, with 40,000 soon-to-arrive AAdvantage miles, I figured I should start learning more.

So here’s the issue I found: Air Berlin doesn’t release all of its award space to AAdvantage, which definitely reduces AAdvantage’s overall value proposition vis à vis transatlantic awards. Want proof? Here you go:

First, this is my ExpertFlyer search result for the Berlin – Chicago flight on Air Berlin in business class. Note that there are Business saver awards available on all the direct flights in this date range (most days have 2 seats, in fact).

And here’s AAdvantages calendar for that same route in March:

Note the mismatch: on some days when ExpertFlyer finds “U” award space, AAdvantage shows only economy availability. And on the days when they do show saver awards (like March 20th), the actual flights available are just a slop trough of British Airways crap.

I’ve noticed in the comments on other blogs that some people take issue when bloggers rag on British Airways business class, calling them elitist or whatever. I guess I don’t understand that, since BA’s hard product is objectively terrible – I honestly would rather fly premium economy than their weird rat maze of walls, partitions, and toilet-seat looking foot rests they call business class. And for the same price as another airline (more, if you count fuel surcharges), I don’t think it’s a particularly bold stance to refuse to spend miles flying them instead of someone with a normal business class cabin. I mean, Air Berlin isn’t going to win any awards or anything, but come on.

What I don’t know is whether you can call AAdvantage and have them book the award over the phone. If you can, that’s great, but they should fix their shit-ass website so that the space is bookable online rather than making you waste time on the phone. And if it’s a question of AAdvantage not having access to the space, that’s a pretty big knock against that program, at least where transatlantic awards are concerned.

Now the caveats: I only searched this one route and in a fairly limited date range, so maybe it’s not that widespread of a problem. Still, it seems weird that Air Berlin would have availability on every flight in a six day period and AAdvantage would come up empty. Do you know something I don’t? I mean, I’m sure you know lots of things I don’t, but on this particular issue, if I’m missing something, please take the time to educate me in the comments. Future Points Pals customers will appreciate it.