Navigating Airline Award Ticket Bookings: Understanding Saver Space

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Learning to book airline tickets with frequent flyer miles is like learning math. Every few years you discover that everything you knew before isn’t true but a simplified version of what’s happening.

The same process happens when learning about booking airline awards. First, you earn points in a program and use those points to get free flights on that airline. Then you will find that there are transferrable points you can send to different programs. With those points, you can take advantage of alliances and partnerships to use the points from one program to book a flight on a different airline.

If you don’t take time to learn to crawl before trying to walk, you’ll eventually end up falling on your face. But enough with the metaphors. I’m trying to say that many people new to booking awards get confused when booking with partner airlines. The post usually goes along, “I found award space on the ‘partner X’ website, but when I go to book with ‘partner Y’ miles, I can’t find the same flight.”

It’s easy to understand why people would be confused when one airline offers an award ticket for the same flight while another doesn’t. The problem is usually that the initial search is done on the airline’s website, but when you look at the partner website, the flight is missing.

This brings us to the “Saver Space” lesson.

You don’t need to understand how airlines classify fares into different categories to realize that an airline will only sell a set number of tickets for the lowest price on each flight. They might sell zero tickets at the lowest fare if they think people will pay a higher price. The same goes for award tickets.

Airlines can set aside a number of low-priced award tickets to get people to use their miles to book certain flights that are in lower demand. In the old days, you’d either be able to book an award ticket on a flight or be out of luck if all the award space was sold out.

The tickets that airlines are willing to sell for the lowest number of miles are called “Saver Space.”

While the system worked for airlines when frequent flyer programs were mainly used to sell seats that might otherwise go out empty, airlines eventually learned an important lesson. Members in their program are willing to pay more miles, sometimes significantly more miles, to fly on the flight they want. Programs started offering fare-buster points redemptions for flights with no more available saver awards.

This eventually led to every airline adopting a dynamic pricing system in which the number of points needed for a flight more closely matched the demand. However, this didn’t mean that “Saver Space” disappeared.

When an airline gives its partners access to awards, they usually only allow them to book saver space tickets. This means an airline might offer award tickets to members of its own program, but you can’t book those same seats when looking to use the miles in a partner program.

Here are some examples of looking for domestic economy award tickets, which are still the easiest ones.

Orlando-San Francisco with United

United flies nonstop between the two cities, and the award ticket will cost between 15K and 40K MileagePlus points.

On the website, United says that the 15K mile price is a “Saver Award.”

Maybe you’re like me and have points with Singapore Airlines, a Star Alliance partner with United. I wasn’t able to find the same flight by searching on Singapore’s website. Only a one-stop itinerary was available, but for fewer points, it would cost to book with United.

However, if I look for a flight using Singapore KrisFlyer miles on the day United sells for 40K miles, I get a message that there are no available flights because those aren’t saver awards.

Orlando-Dallas with American Airlines

Searching for American Airlines’ space is even more confusing than looking for space with United. This is because American offers web-special fares lower than the price for usual saver space but might not be bookable with partners.

AA’s calendar for September shows many days available for 11K miles.

However, the calendar looks quite different if you look at Alaska Airlines MileagePlan, a oneWorld partner.

While AA charges 11.5K miles many days, Alaska charges 7.5K miles plus $19 (because Alaska MileagePlan charges a $12,50 fee to book flights with partner airlines on top of the $5.60 in taxes.)

Whether you’d book with Alaska or American depends on how much you value points in each program. However, you also have the option to book with Avios. This flight in December 2023 used to cost 9K Avios, but due to devaluations, it now costs 16K Avios + $5.60 through British Airways.

Final Thoughts

After reading this post, I hope you better understand why you may be able to find flights when looking through one award program but not with another. The problem usually arises when you’re doing the initial search with the same airline as the flight you are planning to take. If you do the initial search with a partner airline, it will be easier to see which days are available and which are not.

However, programs are now offering award flights to their members that are not available to partners for only a few thousand points more. If you can take a nonstop flight at the time you want, it might be worth paying the extra miles.

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This post first appeared on Your Mileage May Vary