Unfortunately no, it’s definitely more difficult now. I recommend trying a service like Award Nexus.

https://awardnexus.com/

Yes, most airlines will send you an email when they have a sale, but you do need to sign up and indicate that you want marketing communications.

Another option is to go to individual sites and find out where they publish sales. For example, this is a page for sales on Alaska Airlines:

https://www.alaskaair.com/content/deals/flights

You can then use another service like Visual Ping (https://visualping.io/) to send you an email when there is a change on the page.

Finally, you could follow a site like theflightdeal.com and they will share information on cheap flights.

I suggest signing up for the AAdvantage program and checking the box to ask them send you marketing emails about sales and promotions.

Got it thanks ! Do all the ‘airlines’ have that ? Sure glad your enjoying Alex, safe travels, RC

You can learn more about taxes and fees another (I also have a link at the top of this page):

https://travelcodex.com/fees-taxes-and-surcharges-on-american-aadvantage-awards/

Near the bottom of the post it shows how to look for a comparable paid itinerary, and you can extract the fees and taxes from the fare breakdown. Most taxes need to be paid, although some are based on the fare (which will be zero if using miles). The YR/YQ surcharge is collected by some programs and not by others. American will collect the surcharge for flights operated by British Airways.

If there are unsold seats available, yes, Airberlin does. Iberia tends not to. I don’t know about Finnair.

If a reduced mileage award is no longer available, then there’s no way to look up the price if you attempt to re-ticket.

Reduced mileage awards have certain dates when they’re available for travel and when they must be booked. If you re-ticket within those dates then I assume you won’t have a problem.

Thank you very much. Another question I have is about RMA flights. Once those flights are booked are they changeable? Unnderstanding the RMA is no longer available to that city, I am wondering how they can re-ticket those flights. I understand if it is not RMA then you can change dates and times right up until departure as long as you leave origination and destination alone, but what about a flight booked using RMAs.?

For a close-in award like that, I don’t think any particular time of day is much better than another. It just depends on how many seats are left unsold and if the airline thinks it will be able to sell those seats before departure.

If I had to guess at some times:

(1) Around the same time (but on an earlier day) than the scheduled departure. Some reservations systems are automated and tend to update themselves at regular intervals, like upgrades.

(2) During the day, when revenue management teams are at work and could manually release more award space.

(3) During the night, when fewer people are looking for award space.

But you can see that these possibilities together cover just about every time on every day.

AB7249 has award space on April 4 from JFK to TXL in economy for 30K miles. I haven’t found a flight on Iberia yet, but I’ve only spent a couple minutes looking.

Just because there is no availability on the dates you want to travel doesn’t mean that you can’t book them using the website when they are available.

You wrote, “There’s no way to make award space appear that doesn’t exist.”
That is very right. However, I challenge you to find any 2016 dates in the AA website to use AAwards on IB and AB to Europe. And especially using MileSAAver awards.

Thanks Scott for your indepth answers and posts as always! I am going to keep checking every week to see if anything opens up.. (fingers crossed)

You have the option to eliminate ALL partner flights from the advanced search page. But this limits some valid alternatives to BA.