Odds of getting a frequent flyer award ticket

[Carolinian Super Moderator Find all posts View Profile Close Carolinian]

There was an interesting survey done on the odds of scoring a frequent flyer award ticket on vaious major airlines. The chart is in the first post on this thread from Flyer Talk:

Comparsion of FF reward tickets availability - FlyerTalk Forums

[bigfrank Administrator Find all posts View Profile Close bigfrank]

Shocking I have done best with Delta

[Robyn Junior Member Find all posts View Profile Close Robyn]

Very interesting. We were able to get 3 RT tickets from our local airport to Hawaii a few years ago. We've been accruing miles in the hopes of getting "free" flights to Hawaii. We will book early and don't mind splitting our group between a couple of flights, so hopefully it will work out for us.

[T. R. Oglodyte Moderator Find all posts View Profile Close T. R. Oglodyte]

Interesting - I pay closest attention to Alaska Airlines, because that's where I cash in my airline miles. (We have a World Points card which accrues anytime miles which we generally use for locations we can't get to easily with Alaska.)

My experience is that I have had almost no problem getting FF tickets on Alaska Airlines. That being said, the miles required to obtain that ticket will vary greatly with demand. If you want to use FF miles during peak periods, you will pay a premium in miles needed. If you want to fly off-peak, you can make the miles go much farther.

[glypnirsgirl Member Find all posts View Profile Close glypnirsgirl]

We were able to book FF first class tickets on AA 10 months out. It is relatively low season, April, in 2011. Still, I was thrilled.

[grest Senior Member Find all posts View Profile Close grest]

great....my two rewards cards are Delta and USAir!!

[bezerk Moderator Find all posts View Profile Close bezerk]

Funny I have American Airline miles and Delta and I always can get Delta, well almost always. I do not fly a lot but I do get miles for other things and hubby flies a lot, he does best with Delta also. Weird.

[Carolinian Super Moderator Find all posts View Profile Close Carolinian]

Funny I have American Airline miles and Delta and I always can get Delta, well almost always. I do not fly a lot but I do get miles for other things and hubby flies a lot, he does best with Delta also. Weird.

With any airline, there are routes that they have more availibility and others with less. The key is looking at the totality of things, which is what this study does. For DL, Hawai often tends to be decent on availibility, while trans-Atlantic in high season and trans-Pacific is awful. Domestic routes vary, but generally worse than other airlines.

The big problem with DL is its three tier award chart, where you might get a seat but at a gazilion miles. No other US based carrier has imposed that.

Actually, my best airline on finding availibility is BMI, and their redemption rates are low. For direct flights, including with their *A partners, it is either 4500 miles OW or 6K miles OW for intra-Europe, depending on zones, while most US based airlines are 25K RT and most charge the whole 25K on a OW. Unfortunately, BMI's ff program will soon be gobbled up by Lufthansa's ''Miles and Less''. Just got back from a trip to Vienna on 12K BMI miles, RT, booked a bit over a week out and on flights that turned out to be sold out both directions.

[dougp26364 Senior Member Find all posts View Profile Close dougp26364]

Funny I have American Airline miles and Delta and I always can get Delta, well almost always. I do not fly a lot but I do get miles for other things and hubby flies a lot, he does best with Delta also. Weird.

Then you're doing a lot better than we are. I just booked a FF seat on American for 25,000 miles. It took no effort to find a seat at the super saver level.

Conversly I've been looking with Delta for over a year and have yet to find a seat for less than 40,000 miles anywhere we've wanted to go. Right now I'm sitting on 38,000 miles with no addititional Delta flights booked. As it stands, I'll have to find a way to keep these miles active in the next 18 months as almost everything is booked up through Sept. of next year. Maybe in Nov. of 2011 we'll fly Delta again, which would be just under the wire for keeping the miles active.

As soon as I can spend those miles I'll spend them. Until Delta makes changes to it's FF program or, until all the other airlines make their programs as worthless as Delta's, Delta won't be our first choice for flights. In the past couple of years, we've flown Delta almost exclusively for our vaaction needs. This next year I have two flights on American, two on Frontier and I'm actively collecting United FF via the Chase CC with thoughts of booking at least one ticket to Hawaii for 2012. Delta has pretty much dropped off the map unless their prices are so low it's impossible not to book them. Lately, Delta hasn't been that inexpensive.

[d1950m Junior Member Find all posts View Profile Close d1950m]

United

We use ours to fly to Hawaii. We have used both Delta and United. United is less miles. We use 40,000 on United per ticket, but Delta is any where from 52,000 to 65,000 miles for one ticket, from the same airport, same dates, same economy class. We cancelled our American Express card because of that and just use the United card.

[dougp26364 Senior Member Find all posts View Profile Close dougp26364]

There was an interesting survey done on the odds of scoring a frequent flyer award ticket on vaious major airlines. The chart is in the first post on this thread from Flyer Talk:

Comparsion of FF reward tickets availability - FlyerTalk Forums

FWIW, I have 38,000 miles on Delta and 25,000 miles on AA. Guess which airline came through with a FF seat for 25,000 miles? If you guessed AA then you are correct. Spent the 25,000 miles and purchased my wife's ticket.

I'm still trying to find a way to use our Delta FF miles but, have just about given up. I'll have to keep them alive until I can earn another 2,000 miles. Then maybe I'll spend them just to be rid of the Delta miles and be done with it.

[x3skier Senior Member Find all posts View Profile Close x3skier]

Leaving in about a month for Paris in Biz Class on Delta with a low miles award. I originally wanted to get London but this actually saves me some cash by avoiding the UK taxes. It takes some work and more work each year but I have managed every year since 1997 on Useless Air and Delta.

Almost out of Useless Air miles but still have over 600000 in my AMEX account that can be transferred to several airlines plus 250K in Delta and 450K in AA.

Cheers

[falmouth3 Senior Member Find all posts View Profile Close falmouth3]

I haven't seen a 25000 mile ticket available on Delta in I don't know how long. For our trip to Salt Lake City this year, I got lucky. I had 95,000 miles and I needed 2 tickets. 2 coach tickets would have cost me 100,000 miles. For some reason I checked first class - got 2 tickets at 45,000 each. Hmm. I could afford first class, but not coach. Something weird going on there. But I wasn't complaining.

[Carolinian Super Moderator Find all posts View Profile Close Carolinian]

Leaving in about a month for Paris in Biz Class on Delta with a low miles award. I originally wanted to get London but this actually saves me some cash by avoiding the UK taxes. It takes some work and more work each year but I have managed every year since 1997 on Useless Air and Delta.

Almost out of Useless Air miles but still have over 600000 in my AMEX account that can be transferred to several airlines plus 250K in Delta and 450K in AA.

Cheers

Until DL started playing ''hide the availible seats'', I would never have even contemplated burning valuable miles for a shoulder season ticket such as your October ticket. High season was for burning miles and low and shoulder season were for earning miles.

Now trying to find some use for the increasingly useless DL miles, called SkyPesos or the Zimbabwe dollars of the sky over at FlyerTalk, I have also been surrendering and using them in shoulder season. My last two redemptions were shoulder season, and even then it took a lot of effort to find seats, and what we found were bad schedules. The second one involves overnight layovers enroute both directions and has a destination two countries away from the planned destination.

Hint for shoulder season travel: AA reduces the miles required in shoulder and off season for TATL travel. Coach TATL tickets are 40K instead of the 60K in high season.

[camachinist Super Moderator Find all posts View Profile Close camachinist]

One huge perk on UA which may go away with the merger is the special NY award space allocated to 1K/GS elites, as well as exemption from all award related fees. I sometimes have a half dozen award flights going at the same time, for myself and others, and can change or cancel them at will without any charge whatsoever, pulling space from NY for myself and XY for others (for economy tickets). When I need to go somewhere, I just book an award flight and then monitor for a good revenue opportunity and, if no joy, just fly the award. I can't remember the last time I was unsuccessful in getting an award flight.

American has probably been the next best, with Northwest (now gone) behind them. I can't recall ever getting a saver award on Delta, though I have flown some mistake fares on DL that could've been awards