While Alaska Airlines has not officially confirmed whether it was a glitch or a preview of what is to come, bookings on partner carriers were unavailable for several hours today for travel departing within 72 hours, whether booking online or over the phone. If Alaska is considering such a blanket ban, this is a deeply disturbing development.
Alaska Airlines Temporarily Restricted Partner Awards Within 72 Hours Of Travel…Now Bookable Again
As flagged by One Mile At A Time, earlier today if you tried to book a partner award within 72 hours of departure, you either saw no results or if a result did come up, you received the following error message when trying to book:
Too Close to Departure
It is too close to the scheduled departure time to purchase this flight. Please start shopping again.
Indeed, all of my searches turned up no space for departures before Saturday, even though such award space was widely available to other partners:
This space was also not bookable via the Alaska Airlines MileagePlan call center.
There did appear to be an exception for American Airlines.
But whatever was the cause, Alaska appears to have rolled back the restriction because it is once again possible to book last-minute partner awards:
This isn’t the first time Alaska has introduced such a 72-hour advance booking restriction. This was added for intra-Asia awards in 2018. The reason given was to combat fraud.
> Read More: Latest Alaska Devaluation Was Bizarre Overreaction
We’ve discussed fraud in the past and I will only say here that you don’t throw away the baby with the bathwater. As I said in 2018, if fraud was the issue, Alaska could have easily imposed a less draconian solution:
- Redemptions only for the member within 72 hours of travel
- Redemption only for the member or those with the same surname within 72 hours of travel
- Telephone-only redemption within 72 hours of travel
It’s often that final 72 hours before travel when partners finally release award space, so to restrict such travel would represent a massive devaluation to the program.
We will need to mark this situation as developing for now, but I am hopeful that today was a glitch rather than a preview of things to come…
> Read More: Alaska Airlines Violates Our Trust…Again
