Korean Airlines availability

I love Korean Air's Skypass mileage program, and let me tell you the top 3 reasons why: availability, availability, availability. Sadly, booking award travel with most airlines usually involves major compromises on dates. If you want that Saver reward seat on the cool new plane with the lie-flat seat and the fancy champagne and the amazing lounge, it means you're going to have to cut your trip short by several days, or waste a day and a half of your trip flying a 2-stop itinerary through cities you don't want to stop in. With Korean, there was always at least one flight every single day with open Business or First seats so you never had to compromise like that.

Furthermore, Incheon airport's luggage storage service meant you could intentionally schedule yourself a 10-hour layover and then hop into Seoul for a graze through the Namdaemun market and a stroll through Cheonggyecheon before heading onward to Tokyo or Manila or Taipei.

The food is way better in town!

Cheonggyecheon park

Well then the Sapphire Reserve came out and half of the America got the card. Lots of new users flooded into Korean's Skypass program in search of a sweet-spot in their SkyTeam partner redemption chart: cheap flights to Hawaii on Delta. Sapphire customers traveling to Asia also began familiarizing themselves with Skypass for getting to Asia via Seoul. And of course the churners and schemers exploited their extremely generous award ticket hold policy, to the point where Korean had to end it altogether prior to the termination of the Chase partnership.

 

When I started looking for tickets for our Shiki Shima trip, it had been quite some time since I'd logged in to Skypass to do award hunting. I was dismayed at how picked over the award seat inventory was! All of the yellow dates on the image below have no seats! I'd never seen anything like it.

For fun, I just now poked around the travel dates that have been loaded into Korean's system after the Chase partnership ended a couple months ago, and I'm relieved to again see 3 or 4 options available on every single date that I spot-checked. Let's hope this holds! (Sidenote: I also learned they don't fly the 747-8 to NYC anymore 😢)

Starwood/Marriott is still a transfer partner, but their points can take up to a week to arrive after you initiate the transfer. However, if availability stays this good that becomes much less of a problem. (And who knows, with the Chase hordes gone, maybe they'll re-instate their previous itinerary hold policy...)

The other option is to churn/use a Korean Skypass Visa. I got a 40,000 point targeted signup bonus from them and that helped pay for our big trip to Japan in 2016. We recently got another targeted offer, so it might be the next card to churn after the Amex Rose Gold card.

UPDATE: The very next day after posting this and look what's coming in the mail! So glad to know Korean Air's credit card team are loyal readers! 😜

TIP: USPS Informed Delivery is awesome for long trips abroad!