Ultimate Guide to Flight Award Release Dates

The world of business and first class flight award availability scheduling is obscure, opaque, and esoteric. Every airline is different, and even for a given airline, how its seats show on different programs/partners can vary. 

We’ve often touted at Frugal Flyer that one of the best ways to secure award seats is to book as far in advance as possible. In this article, I take that to the extreme and answer the question: How far in advance can you book for a given frequent flyer program or airline?

Prerequisite Reading: Best Practices When Booking Award Flights

By booking at the furthest possible release window, you increase your chances of securing the more coveted award seats that tend to get scooped up rapidly.

Award Release Basics: When Can You Book?

Most airlines release award seats sometime between 330 to 360 days before departure, on a regular schedule. Many nuances exist, including additional releases a few weeks or months before departure, and last-minute releases or additional allocations closer to the date. Some airlines even release seats at different times depending on the cabin of service. 

For this article though, we’ll only concern ourselves with that primary release occurring somewhere between 330-360 days (for most airlines). 

As if things weren’t already complicated, there are not just one, but two important schedules to consider when determining when you can book an award seat: 

• Airline’s release window: how far in advance the airline releases award seats out to partner airlines.
• Frequent flyer program’s booking window: how far in advance it is possible to book flights with a given frequent flyer program.

For example, say an airline releases two business class seats 350 days before departure. One frequent flyer program might only allow booking up to 331 days before departure, while another allows all the way up to 355 days before departure. If you only have points with the former program, you’re probably going to miss your chance to book these seats as  people booking with the latter program will have snatched them up before they become available to you.

This further highlights the benefit of acquiring points in multiple loyalty programs and in transferable points currencies if you want to fly aspirational products. On a related note, you can use our Miles & Points Transfer Partner Tool to discover all the different transfer avenues that are possible.

Release Windows Aggregated

By Frequent Flyer Program

In the table below we list the release timeframe and current flight award release date for a selection of frequent flyer programs. This list is not comprehensive. If there is a program you’d like to see added, leave a comment below.

These dates are updated automatically.

By Airline

In the table below we list the release timeframe and current release date for airlines within each of the three main airline alliances: Star Alliance, Oneworld, and SkyTeam, as well as a selection of non-alliance airlines. 

Star Alliance

Oneworld

SkyTeam

Non-alliance Airlines

How to Increase Your Chances of Finding Availability

As you can see, there is a ton of variance with how far out airlines load flights into their own and other program’s systems. And even knowing these schedules, there is never any guarantee that there will be award space. 

The number of seats released can also be an issue that can vary not just by airline but by route. For example, I was recently looking for space on TAP Air Portugal from Lisbon to North America. Some routes reliably released 2 seats at 361 days, whereas others did not release any…

There are a few ways to increase your opportunities to secure award seats. The main one is to be flexible or agnostic to what program you are willing to book with. As mentioned earlier, arbitrage can often exist between different programs, where one program may have earlier access to book award seats on a particular airline than another. Here are some specific examples: 

• Booking Qantas using Qantas Frequent Flyer instead of Alaska Airlines Mileage Plan
• Booking ANA using Avianca LifeMiles instead of United MileagePlus
• Booking Japan Airlines using British Airways Avios instead of American Airlines AAdvantage
• Booking Cathay Pacific using Cathay Pacific Asia Miles instead of Alaska Mileage Plan or American Airlines AAdvantage
• Booking Delta One Suites using Air France/KLM Flying Blue instead of Delta SkyMiles or Virgin Atlantic Flying Club

Secondly, consider setting award alerts via an aggregator tool like Seats.aero to notify you of any award space that may pop up. This works best if you have relatively flexible departure dates in mind.

Finally, you can also go even deeper into the weeds with the maximum booking window by actually figuring out the exact time the next day’s booking window opens for a particular program (use trial and error). 

I even recently found that a given loyalty program window may not apply in certain circumstances. For example, Air Canada is supposed to have a 355-day booking window. I found this was enforced on the mobile app, and with the initial search entry fields on desktop. But after you’ve started a search at 355 days out, you can sometimes keep scrolling to further dates.

Perhaps this is possible with other frequent flyer programs as well…

Conclusion

Knowing when airlines release award availability and when you can book awards on frequent flyer programs can give you an edge when trying to make your next award booking. Consider bookmarking this page as a resource for future trip planning.