Imagine you set an award alert months ago for a flight you want to book. Your award alert finally pinged, so you searched, saw the award space and transferred rewards to book the award. But when you reach the final stage of the booking process, you get an error message because there actually isn't any available award space for your itinerary. You try again and get the same result.
Unfortunately, you've discovered what is known as phantom award space.
Phantom award space refers to award seats that appear in online searches but aren't actually bookable. This issue usually occurs when the inventory displayed by one loyalty program doesn't match what the operating carrier will actually confirm, often due to stale data or communication issues between reservation systems.
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