clevelandbrown

I follow Continental regularly and there appears to be a strange pattern to their award availability. Seats seem to become available about 330 days out, but disappear shortly, only to reappear just before the date of the flight.

I suspect they make only a small number of seats available at first, and savvy flyers grab them. Then, just before the date of the flight, they realize they have some seats unsold, and make them available. I once looked for tickets on, as I recall, a wednesday, and none were available five or six months out (nor 10) but they had seats for both Friday and Saturday! That is no way to plan a trip.

As far as which midnight to use, I think its the midnight where the headquarters or operations center of the airline is situated. In the case of Continental, I think its the central time zone.

Continental has made international upgrades very expensive. Depending on the class of economy ticket you buy, they have a steep sliding scale of charges, with no real assurance that an upgrade will be available, so you could end up in an economy seat you paid too much for (if you bought a higher fare class so your upgrade cost would be less).

My experience in flying a lot on Continental is that they are one of the better domestic airlines. Any airline can experience equipment failure or personnel problems, and often passengers placed in a stressful situation such as that become demanding, even combative, and present a report that is, shall we say, heavily influenced by emotion?

rkkwan

What clevelandbrown says about CO's upgrade policy is also true for several other airlines. Not all, but more are following. Just in this thread, CarolA is saying the same about DL. And AA implemented something similar a few months ago.

And the limited number of available award seats is true in the whole industry. [Southwest has a different system, so please don't compare them.] At least CO's website has a calendar to show what dates are seat available.

But it's true that CO is one of the stingiest, if not the stingiest, of the majors in terms of award flights and upgrade. One really need to be flexible to use the miles, especially if you're not an elite member.

feltoni

Here's a different slant on FF usage...Join the Navy Federal Credit Union! OK, easy to do you say if you are IN the navy or Marines, but actually easy also if you have a relative who is in now, or was & joined NFCU & stayed a member. NFCU lets family, sig-others, etc. join.

The great thing about their FF mileage plan is that all dollars spent on their travel Visa card are counted as points that can then be redeemed for seats, as real paid seats, not limited to the few FF seats usally allowed per flight. Thus booking close in to departure is much, much easier to do. Also, NFCU allows redemption of points into actual $$$ point-to-penny! So, for us, last month's Italian escape was booked only about 10 wks before our departure, and with an extra 40K points redeemed into $400 we paid for all our ground costs andthen some! I still have UA miles to use, but have found the NFCU plan to be just the best. Just network to find who's in the service now, or still a member...

Linda431

You can now check for and book DL award seats online for most international travel. You still can't book milage upgrades online though.

Patrick

feltoni, "best" is a relative term. We are getting ready to each cash in 90,000 miles for business class tickets to Europe with two stopovers. Those tickets would cost a minimum of $7000 -- actually more than that. So I guess with the card you're saying is "best", it would take us 700,000 points, not just the 90,000 we need with American's FF program?

Patty

DL online award booking is primarily limited to DL operated flights with very few codeshares. It's a good resource to check DL availability but you'll still need to call for partner airline availability.