Wall Street Journal Confirms it: You Can’t Redeem Your Miles for the Flight You Want

At least you generally can’t on the major carriers.

Scott McCartney, in his The Middle Seat column What Frequent-Flier Miles Really Get You writes that he recently checked available award seats on two dozen routes for several 2007 travel dates. Bottom line is that Delta and US Air redemptions tended to require more miles than other carriers–if seats were available at all.

This spot check on availability, while far from a comprehensive inventory, does show what consumers are up against when trying to score seats. In recent years, more miles have been chasing fewer seats. A resurgence of fare-paying customers has left fewer seats empty, yet there are more miles in circulation because airlines have found selling miles to credit-card companies can be lucrative.

Craig Bruya of Seattle tried unsuccessfully last week to find two business-class seats on United to Paris for a late April trip at United’s 80,000-mile “saver” price level. Curious, he looked for such seats all the way to the end of November and found none.

If “there isn’t a single open seat, then they really don’t have a ’saver’ program,” says Mr. Bruya, who ended up paying United 360,000 miles for two business-class tickets.

Five of the big six international carriers now have seat-availability calendars posted online that can help users spot cheap seats. Delta, the lone holdout, promises a calendar within a “few weeks.”…Calendars also can make it painfully apparent how little availability there is. For a Seattle-London trip checked on Feb. 22, US Airways had no seats at its lowest mileage level between April 30 and Nov. 23 — almost a seven-month drought.

One handy tip McCarney mentions is to “check for discounted business-class and first-class tickets, which sometimes can be better values and even lower-priced than unrestricted coach tickets.”

As a counter-point, I was able just an hour ago to redeem 2 “saver” seats on Alaska Airlines/Horizon Air to Sun Valley Idaho with less than 3 months notice for a meager 20,000 miles a ticket. Savings: $700.00. Maybe that will explain to UAL why I stopped using their United Visa and switched to an Alaska Charge card 5 years ago. I defected when first-class upgrades became almost impossible on UAL…