Do cancelled WP-requested award seats go back to inventory?

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Kangol

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As per the title.
To be clear, award seats that had to be requested by a WP member, which subsequently get cancelled at a later date.
Not those that were already available to members on the website.

Has anyone had first hand experience with this?
 
Any takers?
I know it is probably a rare shot but thought I'd put it out there...
 
Not always!

Sometimes they do; sometime they don't.

There are posts in the past by bloggers on how many have been able book QF First on BAEC awards at 353 days; cancel them at 330 and immediately rebook using AAdvantage as a cheaper rate. At at 11 months the seats have been seen to be more likely to return to the fare bucket than would be the case at 11 days (or weeks).

I have seen some recent posts on this method failing more often than it used to.

[edit]
Sorry - I did not notice the part regarding requested seats ... on that I have no idea.​
[/edt]
 
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These seats normally are converted from the full fare bucket (eg. F, J, W, Y) and so they reappear there rather than in P, U, Z, X.
 
How many times did you do this out of interest?

Twice per year for 2 pax in J or F. I've had 100% success +/- 3 days of requested date. I don't believe they go back into inventory because I have changed the dates and the seats do not reappear as awards.
 
Thanks, there goes that idea I guess. May be worth using 5k QFF points as an "investment" ;)
 
A data point:
I am 1/1 for this happening.
Had a P released ticket LAX-SYD requested about 5-6 weeks ago. There were no "normal" P releases AFAIK.
Pushed it back 5 days and the request was approved. It was also showing F9 A7 for the new date, too. I also asked about adding on a DEN-LAX (Z) because my plans also changed. I had to pay 3.5k points for the change fee and ended up with a few dollars refund - prob due to lack of LAX fees. Maybe even the change in the exchange rate, I don't know. Total points cost for the base fare was the same. Not bad when the DEN-LAX segment in Z alone is 36k points.
It is showing as available on both QF and EF sites. I checked earlier today and there was no availability for that flight.

So what do we know about yield management? Who knows. I didn't check since I booked it, but my guess is that they wouldn't release P availability after the initial 353 day release. Or if they do, they may be cancelled awards (requested or otherwise) being returned to the pool. If they aren't released at the time and others are - ie. after the UTC clock ticked over to midnight, there was P available for QF8 but not QF12 - they probably won't get released. These are just my thoughts, I could be completely wrong...
 
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