The difficulty of award travel increases with the number of travelers in your party, particularly if you’d like to travel in premium cabins. Conventional wisdom in award travel circles is that booking as soon as the schedule opens is one sound strategy for finding multiple award seats. On last month’s Ask Us Anything live, an attendee asked about which airlines offer reliable premium cabin availability near schedule open. In response, a listener/reader wrote to us with some good tips for those looking to book award travel for four or more passengers at schedule open.
You’ll sometimes find more availability at schedule open
Flights can typically be booked up to about a year in advance. The exact timeframe varies by airline, but you can generally book flights a maximum of 330-365 days in advance, with that window advancing forward every day. In other words, today is March 7, 2025 and perhaps I can book a flight on my chosen airline for travel through March 7, 2026. Tomorrow, that window will extend to March 8, 2026. The day after, it’ll push out to March 9, 2026 (and so on).
Anecdotally, many people find that at least some airlines tend to release award availability right away when the booking calendar opens, and in fact some airlines commit to releasing a minimum number of seats that way. If you can narrow down what time of day new inventory gets loaded, you can give yourself a pretty good shot at finding award seats.
All that (and the rest of this post) said, don’t think that your only shot to book is at schedule open. Award availability can come in spurts and not all airlines release it on a predictable schedule. And because award availability itself is so dynamic, it can come and go at any time.
Personally, I find flexibility to be the biggest factor in finding business class awards for multiple passengers. In the past, I’ve written about finding ways to be flexible — whether that’s time flexibility, destination flexibility, etc. See this post for more on that. I think it is a mistake to think that you’ll only find business class award availability for multiple passengers at the moment when the schedule launches. Don’t only rely on the tips in this post but rather try out award search tools, set award alerts, and keep searching. Award travel can be challenging, but my own travel with a family of four is proof that it isn’t impossible.
Still, a reader shared several great tips with us that could be really useful, particularly for those scouting out seats for popular routes at peak travel times.
British Airways guarantees 4 business class seats at schedule open
One of the easier airlines with which to find premium cabin award availability is British Airways. That is at least partly because British Airways guarantees to make at least 4 seats available in business class on flights to and from London Heathrow or London Gatwick airports. At schedule open, you know you can find 4 seats on a British Airways flight.
The trouble of course is that British Airways is known for high surcharges on its own awards. There are a couple of things that can help mitigate that.
First, there’s the fact that British Airways now allows you to pay more Avios for an award in order to pay less in surcharges. For instance, a business class award from New York to London at the end of schedule right now could be purchased for 80,000 Avios and $375 per passenger.
Even at the reduced rate of $375 per passenger in taxes & fees, that still comes to $1,500 for a family of four. Our reader points out another way to mitigate that fee: The British Airways Visa Signature card offers up to $600 per year in statement credits for taxes and fees paid for award flights when redeeming Avios for travel on British Airways. That benefit is limited to providing up to $200 in statement credits per booking on up to 3 bookings per year. However, if you’re willing to book the family under separate reservations, it would be possible to get the full $600 in statement credits, which would reduce the out of pocket cost of the surcharges to $900. That’s still not insignificant, but it is comparable to the surcharges you would pay for a family of four with a program like Air France / KLM Flying Blue.
LATAM to South America: 6 seats for cheap
The Frequent Miler team flew LATAM from Los Angeles to Santiago, Chile during our Party of 5 challenge and everyone was pleasantly surprised with the experience.
We had booked our flight through Alaska Mileage Plan before their award chart changes. Booking a route like Los Angeles or Miami to Santiago remains a solid deal with Alaska Mileage Plan since business class costs just 50,000 miles one way, but it can sometimes be tough to find enough seats for the family. Here’s a look for business class from Los Angeles (LAX) to Santiago, Chile (SCL) for the last day of the booking calendar with Alaska (currently February 1).
As you can see, there is only 1 seat left in business class from Los Angeles. I saw 3 from Miami for the last day on the schedule.
However, our reader tells us that LATAM consistently has at least 6 business class seats available at schedule open on their once-weekly (on Sundays) Cancun-to-Santiago flight, and since that flight falls just below a shorter mileage band, it costs just 35,000 miles per passenger in business class. Sure enough, I see 6 seats available in business class on February 1st.
For those based a reasonable distance from Cancun, that could make for a great bargain. For instance, I see availability to fly from Miami to Cancun the day before for just 4,500 miles in economy class or 9,000 miles in business class.
The same reader points out that there are other LATAM routes with reliable availability as well, such as Atlanta to Lima and Miami to Santiago. Miami to Santiago might require splitting the family over two flights, but LATAM operates two flights out of Miami that depart and arrive within an hour of each other, so if you’re willing to put a couple of family members on each flight, that might work.
Notice the connecting itinerary at the top of that screen shot goes through Punta Cana, Dominican Republic. That’s another once-weekly route with consistent business class availability. I even found 4 seats available for the Saturday after Christmas and 6 seats available the following Saturday, which is notable both because that’s a peak school holiday week (in the middle of summer in the southern hemisphere!) and Punta Cana also prices at 35K miles one-way in lie-flat business class.
I’m personally eyeing some of this LATAM business class availability as those are great deals with surprisingly good availability at peak times.
Iberia to Europe: 2 business and 2 Premium Economy
I find Iberia business class to be a nice way to get to and from Europe — if you can find availability.
Iberia is known to release 2 seats in business class and 2 seats in premium economy on each flight at schedule open, but I’ve often found it tough to get these even around schedule open. Apparently, you might be able to increase your odds of finding those seats by changing the time zone on your laptop. Apparently, the Iberia website uses your computer’s clock to determine the end of the booking window based on your local calendar. Since Madrid is six hours ahead of the east coast or nine ahead of the west coast, folks in Europe (or with laptops that think they are in Europe) get first crack at those seats when released. I’ll note that I’ve also accidentally run into this with other airlines, where keeping my computer time zone set to the east coast of the US has prevented me from seeing seats that were actually available to be booked. For instance, during our Flying by the Seat of our Points challenge, I was in Los Angeles searching for award tickets after 9pm local time. Since my computer was set to eastern time, I couldn’t search for flights leaving that night since the airline website I was using pulled the date from my laptop — which, being on eastern time, had already advanced to the next calendar day.
Japan Airlines business class for two via Asia Miles
While not necessarily helpful for a family of four or more, the same reader also shares that it is possible to consistently find 2 business class seats on Japan Airlines via Cathay Pacific Asia Miles when booking at schedule open (360 days in advance). Indeed, I found 2 seats available in business class on most days during the last week of the schedule when looking at Chicago (ORD) to Tokyo (HND).
Japan Airlines also releases a couple of premium economy seats on each flight (and I’ve sometimes found 4 or more), though I think your best bet for booking those will be via British Airways Avios. Note that if you’ll be traveling with a lap infant, British Airways is a particularly good option for booking those premium economy flights since they charge 10% of the Avios for a lap infant, which is pretty reasonable (particularly from the west coast to Japan).
Bottom line
This isn’t meant to be an exhaustive list of options for booking business class with a family when the booking schedule opens, but rather a reader shared most of these routes with us and the tips seemed like they could be really valuable for others struggling with getting seats at schedule open, particularly for popular school break periods. If you’ve found other routes that consistently open a useful number of business class award seats at schedule open, let us know about them in the comments.
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