When do reward flights appear?

Ok, so I'm looking to book a reward flight next November. The outbound is available, but I have to wait a few days for the inbound. Does the booking engine update at midnight or does it all depend when someone comes into the office and presses a button?

TIA! [:D]

[honey lamb]

Interestingly I'm looking for a reward flight from JNB in March. There had been nothing - zilch! Then interestingly availability showed up exactly 2 weeks ahead of my date. On Sunday it disappeared and at 7am on Monday morning a reward flight showed up for exactly 1 week ahead of my date. I suspect it was loaded just after midnight.

Guess who's staying up late on Sunday night to see if the upgrade gods will look kindly on me [:D]

Let me know how it goes. I guess I'll be staying up late too then, so nobody had better nab my outbound flight!

[honey lamb]

And as if to negate my theory, within the last hour rewards flights have shown up for both one and two weeks before the dates I want.

I should point out I'm looking for Gs

I think it's usually 330 days when the first few seats get released, and additional seats are manually released a few days later on the routes like Shanghai and SFO where there are often several reward seats per flight.

How many reward seats are there per flight? And by reward seats, do you mean upgrade seats?

[Nottingham Nick]

quote:Originally posted by aspence7
How many reward seats are there per flight?

This varies tremendously depending on route and time of year. There used to be seats on every flight, but on some routes the number is VERY small, especially on bucket and spade routes during school holidays.

When I booked our reward seats LHR-HKG and SYD-LHR in UC I had the whole month to choose from with multiple seats on every day, but that is for February flights and I booked as soon as the returns became available.

Nick

[Neil]

quote:Originally posted by aspence7
How many reward seats are there per flight? And by reward seats, do you mean upgrade seats?


it varies flight by flight, and there is no set system to it. Many flights don't have any available on them, it is all down to revenue management who look at many factors when deciding if/how many to release.

Reward seats do include upgrades with miles.

Is there a difference between 'Reward' seats and 'upgradable' seats then?

I'm hoping to either buy an Ecconomy or PE seat and upgrade to UC just using the miles as I have over 120k

[Neil]

Reward seats is the term used to cover flights either bought fully with miles or upgraded from lower class with miles. They both get booked in to the same reward class.

Compared to last year it seems as if Reward seats have got fewer or is it just me. In April last year I used my miles to go to NYC and back from SFO in August. I just got the last two seats to go SFO and back from LAX in late august... hecky thump!