Johnny pointed out just how wide-open American’s new Los Angeles – Sydney flight was last night. I had to have a look for myself.

So about four hours prior to departure I had a look at the inventory for the flight. They were certainly selling plenty of seats.

Gosh, you’d think that on a wide open flight that’s four hours from departure there’s really no chance of selling out. Perhaps they’d make some business class award seats available. It’s pretty much a certainty that any upgrade request would clear.

In fact, I took a look at the seat map. Only 12 seats were even taken on the seatmap . Not a perfect indication of the flight load, but a pretty good one when more than three quarters of the seats are unassigned. This flight is an employee nonrev traveler’s dream.

Blue seats are occupied



White seats are available for assignment

Since they’re never going to sell these seats, it’s a gimme to use points right?

Not even close. Let’s take a look at the award calendar.

The cheapest business class award option is 215,000 points. That’s this flight:

It’s understandable that on a premium route with their best aircraft they’ll want to be a bit conservative releasing award space. At this time there is not a single day during the entire 11 months of the schedule that there’s even one business or first class saver award Los Angeles – Sydney. That’s absurd. But it’s worse than that.

They aren’t just protecting seats hoping to sell them, not knowing yet what seats are going to go unsold. Even when it is 100% obvious that seats are going out empty, they’re still extorting members for more than 200,000 miles for a one way flight . That’s some dirty pool.