Where have all the UC reward seats gone ?

Each day for last 2 weeks been checking UCx2 for LHR-LAX .. and showing min 2 seats every mon,tue,wed.

Today checked and no availability on ANY DAY for 2 seats

I cant believe all those seats were suddenly booked in the space of 24hrs

I was also looking for revenue seats and they were approx. 2500 each way .. today they are all 3300 (approx.) each way and all the delta connections are listed on website.

I do hope that this link-up has not reduced the reward seats available .. it is very strange that 12 flights all vanish in the space of 24hrs for almost a year away !

Why can't you believe it? LHR-LAX is a popular route. Rewards are popular and a lot of people looking for them.

What dates were you looking for?

All it needs is for one of the 2 rewards to be grabbed and your search for 2 will then show a "none available" result. It does not mean they have all disappeared just that there are no longer 2 available.

And the rule of thumb is that once you see rewards for your date(s) is to nab them there and then as there are no guarantees that they will be there when you come back.

Have no idea about prices but it is possible (a) there was a sale / offer which has now ended or (b) the cheaper fare buckets have gone leaving only the more expensive ones

Tonty's right - it doesn't take much for Gs to disappear and prices to go up.

It's been said many times on here and this just proves how true it is - if you see a G or a good fare, don't hang about because it may not be there tomorrow.

Incidentally I'm seeing loads of availability for 2x Gs LHR-LAX in March, April & May 2014. The issue is the return leg - as others have found, US-UK Gs seem to be like gold dust at the moment. I can only assume it's because there's higher demand for UC on the red-eye flights where people who might be ok travelling in PE on a daytime flight want a flat bed on the nighttime return.

So you might want to consider snapping up a G on the outbound now, and settle for PE on the return for now with a view to upgrading if a G becomes available in due course, which it might well.

Why can't you believe it? LHR-LAX is a popular route. Rewards are popular and a lot of people looking for them.

Hmm, I tend to agree with the OP. I've also been looking daily for reward availability US -> UK in UC from a number of cities and until the weekend there had been considerably more than now. Sure, there was a fair bit of churn as you'd expect, but seemingly overnight a lot of availability disappeared -- I too find it hard to believe that so many reward seats seemingly got sold in only a few hours. That simply didn't seem in keeping with the norm. Someone else posted about this recently too. I wonder if the DL changes had affected availability in some way.

Of course, I agree with what seems to be the standard advice that if you see reward availability that suits, book it ASAP!

It might be the DL deal, but this kind of thing happens quite a lot (in my experience), and I have come to the conclusion that it is actually not the seats being taken by other reward passengers. Instead, what I think happens is that for some reason the seats get released for booking, then are made unavailable, then re-released etc.

I am just guessing this and could be completely wrong, but I've watched it happen on particular flights. A further guess would be that some automated revenue management system is conflicting with human decisions to release seats.

But that's just my theory! The simpler explanation is certainly that people are snapping up the seats.

I recently needed to change my return flight from SFO back to UK in September. I was on L --> G reward upgrades (two of us) and of course faced the 'lack of G's' challenge since not only were there never any G's on the new date I wanted to return but there were no G's full stop from any west coast VS exit point throughout my six week search!

I have managed to get what I want though and it hasn't cost me dearly: VS have returned my 50000 miles and charged an extra £712 each to convert the return to a Z which I didn't think was to bad considering we will be miles earning and have the original 50000 miles back in the pot.

So the thing to remember is that, if clinching G's on the USA-UK leg really is an issue, there's always the mix n'match option to pay for the cheapest available UC fare (Z) on the return instead. In this case we are now returning direct from LAS which would have been virtually impossible anyway using miles - for us this means a hassle free journey home as we live a stone's throw from LGW!

Thanks
James

It might be the DL deal, but this kind of thing happens quite a lot (in my experience), and I have come to the conclusion that it is actually not the seats being taken by other reward passengers. Instead, what I think happens is that for some reason the seats get released for booking, then are made unavailable, then re-released etc.

I am just guessing this and could be completely wrong, but I've watched it happen on particular flights. A further guess would be that some automated revenue management system is conflicting with human decisions to release seats.

But that's just my theory! The simpler explanation is certainly that people are snapping up the seats.

The fare bucket explanation is simplistic but there is a slight edge of sophistication to it.

So, if the buckets looked like this:

J5 C5 Z5 G5

And I booked one seat at Z class fare, the availability changes to

J4 C4 Z4 G4

etc.

Alternatively, if I booked at full J fare, VS might just decide that the demand merits money fares only. Whether that is automated I don't know.

J4 C4 Z4 G0

However I am also in agreement with the original poster - entire months of availability appear to have vanished.

Revenue might just be having a rethink and might re-release some in what looks to be changeable times, well may be.