I was able to call Air France and put awards on hold for two weeks before initiating the transfer from Citi. Many report being able to get 48 hour hold, so it appears to be standard practice. It’s a pain in a butt to spend time on calling, but will eliminate the danger of fantom availability.

You got to be careful. See my comment above, there are quite a bit phantom availability and you can never know before you transfer your point.

I did mean phantom space. Citi TYP and Amex MR can finish transferring pretty much in real time nowadays. I can still see exactly the same availability map, but sometimes when I clicked into certain date, it went to system error, never allowing me to really book the ticket. Sometimes, it shows 25k for round trip in the availability map, as soon as I click in, it suddenly becomes 50k for no reason.

I haven’t had that experience. However, I think it’s important to distinguish between phantom space and changing availability. Your question doesn’t make it clear which problem you encountered. Phantom space is when the website says it’s there and at the same time you can’t book it.

But when days or hours pass, it’s quite possible for an award ticket to disappear. That’s a risk you take when you keep points in a different program (such as SPG or Membership Rewards) instead of the airline itself. Tradeoff between flexibility to move to other programs and the chance that the award could disappear before you can book.

Much easier to be constrained by a chart vs. calculator… can easily adjust the calculator without notice.

There is an “Africa” category for Promo Awards, but as you pointed out all of those are for travel to/from Europe.

Yeah, it would be nice if they had an actual chart to look at but the calculator is good, too.