Dealing With Phantom/Ghost Award Availability
By John Ta - January 22, 2024
Finding and booking award tickets comes with a variety of challenges. Unfortunately, making sure your award tickets are real is another part of the equation.
Navigating the intricacies of frequent flyer programs and credit card transfers is akin to a master class in patience and precision. A robust understanding of the mechanics behind booking award travel is required. Typically, finding that coveted first or business class seat with miles is a meticulous, frustrating affair, requiring planning and an eye for detail.
However, when you stumble upon award availability for your dream flight that you've spent hours hunting for, you might get excited. It's almost like finding the long-lost treasure after an arduous journey. Unfortunately (sometimes), when you open the treasure box, you find that there's actually nothing there. You've transferred your points, only to find that you can't even book the flight you've found. This is what is called phantom (ghost) award space.
In this article, we'll delve deeper into the topic of phantom award space, why it happens, how to detect it, and ways you can deal with it.
What Is Phantom Award Space?
In its simplest terms: phantom award space is when an award flight appears to be bookable, but actually isn't.
Frequent flyers typically follow this methodology to redeem flights using points:
- Search for award availability (using Roame for this works)
- Find award space (get excited!)
- Transfer credit card points to book the award flight
However, if you encounter phantom award space, there's a potential chance you might have just moved a significant number of points to the airline. Even worse, most point transfers are not reversible. Your miles are all now just laying flat in front of you and now you aren't sure what to do next (worst case: the miles are set to expire in the next few years).
How Do I Know If I've Run Into Phantom Award Space?
Typically, there are a few telltale signs that you've run into phantom award space:
- You try booking the flight online, but an error appears that won't allow you to book the flight
- You try to book the flight over the phone, but while the agent can see the flight, the agent cannot book the flight successfully
- You successfully book online, but the confirmation email shows an entirely different itinerary
Phantom space can be extremely annoying. For example, we've heard of countless individuals falling victim to the recent EVA Air/United Airlines phantom availability crisis. EVA released a ton of saver award space to United and many folks transferred thousands of points in hopes of securing this incredible deal. Except, it never actually existed to begin with, so many just ended up with tons of points they couldn't even end up using. Pleas to the United customer support were useless as even supervisors were unsympathetic to the problems at hand.
While this looks bleak, it could have been much worse if the phantom award space was on a partner like Singapore Airlines or Air France, whose miles expire after a set amount of time. At least United miles don't expire...
Ways To Check For Phantom Space
There are several broad techniques that you can use to identify phantom award space:
- Cross-check + double-check with other airline award availability
- Call the airline directly & ask for a hold of your award spot
While none of these are completely perfect solutions, they can certainly help alleviate a lot of your problems and make life easier, especially if you end up finding something is indeed phantom availability.
Cross-check + Double-check With Other Airline Award Availability
The fastest way to check for phantom availability is to cross check against other partner airlines to see if you can find the same availability. What this means is that if you see award availability on one partner website, you should search for the same exact award on other partner websites.
BRAND
Star Alliance
Oneworld
SkyTeam
United Airlines
Aeroplan
British Airways
Qantas
American Airlines
Cathay Pacific
Air France/KLM Flying Blue
Delta Airlines
For instance, you might see an available award flight for ANA (a Star Alliance partner) on Air Canada. Your next immediate instinct should be to cross verify the existence of this flight on United Airlines (because in theory, partner flights that are released to one airline should be released to all other partners). If you don't see this flight on United's website, I would proceed extremely cautiously and opt to call Air Canada directly, as described in the next step.
Call The Airline Directly & Ask To Hold The Award Space
Let's say you having trouble verifying award space online. It's totally possible that online search results are full of issues as well (looking at you Turkish Airlines). Calling the partner airline should help provide another level of helpful insights to ensure your booking goes smoothly.
When calling the airline to verify award availability, have the following information ready at hand:
- Your frequent flyer/loyalty program number
- Your departure date
- The flight number (often seen as XX 1234), which contains the key information to help identify the flight (e.g. departure time, aircraft, codeshare partner, etc.)
- The cost of the flight on your end
This information should allow the agent to easily find the booking you're looking at. Now, you can ask them to help verify the existence of said award space to ensure everything goes smoothly. And if they're able to do so and they're on the line, might as well ask them to hold the award space for you so you have some time to transfer your points. Make sure you also have the following information on hand:
- Your frequent flyer/loyalty program number
- Your legal name, date of birth, and passport information
Agents also have the ability to discuss award discrepancies with the issuing airline. For example, for issues I've had between Japan Airlines and American Airlines, American agents were able to discuss issues directly with Japan Airlines to figure out what was going on.
Conclusion
Dealing with phantom award space can prove immensely frustrating, especially if you've never seen or dealt with it before. It becomes even more annoying when you actually transfer points, only to discover things aren't even bookable and you now have points just sitting there. You can help alleviate some of these pains by cross-checking with partner websites, calling the airline directly, and asking for award holds. However, sometimes, even your best efforts might get you, so just be wary when playing the points game.
