Reward Seats moving before you can even book them

Planning a family trip to SA LHR-CPT and flying next Dec/Jan. Return flight not yet available, but checking the reward checker for the flight home, it shows 5 days more than you can book for, and despite not being able to book yet, the weekend we want to fly home on keeps changing, and sadly reducing reward seats as it gets closer.

End of last week we had the prospect of 4 UC reward seats on Saturday, now 0, Sunday, was 5, now just 2, Monday is showing 8 now, but imagine that will reduce before booking opens up on Saturday.

Is this normal? What’s peoples experience? Holding out here and need 5 seats so may just try Monday.

Cheers

[Nottingham Nick]

There is no easy answer here. Booking a large number of reward seats is rarely going to be easy on routes with single flights. Especially when you have limited flexibility on dates.

I only book two at a time and I tend to book the outbound as soon as it is available - a couple of things this has lead to tense times when the return doesn’t become available as hoped, but in my case it has always worked out in the end.

If you play it safe and wait until both dates are available, you may miss out.

If you gamble, and the return doesn’t appear -do you have the alternative of coming back from Jo’ burg? I don’t know what availability is like but we have done the internal hop from Cape Town to JNB and it is very easy.

Good luck, whatever you decide.


Nick